FPK1
Line Up and Wait
Gotta love Paul...
Why Electric Airplanes Face Such A Tough Haul: Joby Edition
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Crashnburn
Pattern Altitude
Interesting video. The electricity has to come from somewhere. Solar and wind are too fickle to depend on. Hydroelectric would work, except other greenies want to get rid of all dams. Nuclear has too many issues. That leaves coal, gas, and oil (all hydrocarbons). Every step of the way, from generating the electricity, transporting it via power lines, charging the batteries, discharging the batteries, and driving the motors that turn the props has losses and inefficiencies. So, the plane won't necessarily be green.
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SoonerAviator
Nuclear has too many issues? If modern nuclear power plants were built, it would likely be the best solution for baseload power. Solar/wind/etc could be used to supplement. The only real problem with nuclear is people with irrational fears of Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island, which are almost pointless to compare to molten salt reactors and modern nuclear tech. Sure, there's disoosal/storage of nuclear waste, but that's not exactly a mind-bending problem to solve.
None of that has anything to do with battery powered aircraft, but if people were being honest about clean power generation, nuclear energy would be at the top of the list, 2nd only to Hydro.
FormerHangie
En-Route
Those of us in Georgia Power's service area have been paying on the Plant Vogtle nuclear expansion for years, and it's likely to be at least a couple more before we get electricity from it. Feel free to research this debacle and tell me if you'd like your power company to undertake a similar project.
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Doug Reid
Cleared for Takeoff
Element 115...it's what the ufo's run on. 
Crashnburn
Pattern Altitude
As far as nuclear goes, perception is reality. Perception is Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island.
Waste storage has its own issues. The biggest one is NIMBY. The waste is corrosive, with a multi-thousand-year half-life. The best storage is in a salt mine or cavern, but the last I heard, locals near the best storage locations are saying "Not in My Back Yard!"
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SoonerAviator
Make no mistake, nuclear is just about the most expensive to build, so the payback versus a natural gas or coal power plant is quite a bit longer. However, in general, the cost of fuel and operational costs are less for nuclear. So over the long term, nuclear ends up being cheaper. Sure, it's a tough sell for break even on investment in terms of over a decade, but these plants will run for over half a century without needing major upgrades and are far less susceptible to commodity price swings or winter weather events.
I don't know what expansion that Georgia Power was undertaking, but it's slightly different I'm sure than building a modern MSR from the ground up.
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SoonerAviator
Absolutely. NIMBY is rampant with everything, and people are well within their rights to be anxious about it. With the modern nuclear reactors, many of them can use waste fuel from existing nuclear plants which helps reduce the total amount of storage needed. Maybe we'll one day get to the point where we can safely get the nuclear material out into space and shoot it into the sun or something lol.
It's not like I'm saying nuclear energy is some perfect solution with no downside. It's just really good at producing a lot of base power for low cost and relatively low risk. People just need to be educated about what has changed since the 1950s.
MrAnderson
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MrAnderson
I can see the headline now “space x rocket explodes shortly after takeoff dumping nuclear waste over neighborhood”
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SoonerAviator
Lol exactly. Maaaaybe we wait until we have a less risky way of getting a payload out of the atmosphere.
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Mahneuvers
I haven't read much about "space elevators" recently but it would be pretty cool if that became a reality.
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SoonerAviator
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I still don't know how it could ever work without snapping in half when a storm rolls through or the jet stream shifts and subjects it to 100+mph winds. Neat to think about though.
Maybe we just build vehicles that can enter LEO without needing explosive rocket fuel instead, lol. Get it to the moon and then launch it into the sun from there.
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Mahneuvers
Agreed. I think carbon nanotubes gave many hopes the next materials advancement might provide enough strength.
edo2000
Pre-takeoff checklist
I agree. Nuclear energy should be a major component of our energy production infrastructure. You didn't even mention the biggest nuclear advantage: no carbon emissions. As you mention, breeder reactors can be very effective at reducing the amount of total nuclear waste, while producing power themselves. Security is an issue with those, since they produce plutonium which can be used for weapons.
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Bob Noel
"perception is reality" is a cop-out. I prefer facts and actual reality.
and NIMBY is an issue with EVERY type of power generation or anything else. Neighbors complain about airports, compressor stations, new coal plants, new gas plants, EVERYTHING.
Tantalum
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San_Diego_Pilot
..it really doesn't though. It's expensive to build, yes, but part of that is driven by the whole perception issue, everyone is playing CYA just in case type of thing. Objectively speaking nuclear is one of the safest out there, see the graph below, sourced from journals, from 'ourworldindata' - I would love to pull out the potential political bias from the '..air pollution' bit but it's a fair data point as 'pollution' is the biggest perceptual concern with nuclear. The data below includes nuclear related accidents from Chernobyl, and from mining. Being an objective person, I'd happily live next to a nuclear power plant
YES!
but I do believe part of that is driven by perception. It also must be safe, there's no question about that.. so the costs will be higher. But a tiny piece of metal will happily sit their for decades powering homes with virtually no waste other than itself
Shepherd
Final Approach
I do enjoy Paul's work.
JimNtexas
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Jim - In Texas!
Large traditional rnuclear plants are expensive.
Imagine if you will, smaller self contained reactors that were made manufactured in a factory, producing only a tiny amount of waste, and that can’t melt down because they are essentially already melted. Our hypothetical reactor is small enough to transport over a road, be set up at a coal plant and plugged into the existing steam generation plant.
There is no water in this reactor, they run at atmospheric pressure and thus cannot explode.
These are called Molten Salt Reactors.
If grid power fails, as happened in Japan, there is no need to rush to the parking lot to rip out car batteries. An MSR just turns off because simple physics.
Oak ridge made a Molten Salt reactor in 1965 and ran it safely for five years and thousands of hours.
There are several reactors following this general design pattern well into development, and I believe construction should start on two of them within the next year or so but don’t quote me on that.
added, an excellent introduction to MSRs:
https://www.thmsr.com/en/the-thorium-molten-salt-reactor/
Imagine if you will, smaller self contained reactors that were made manufactured in a factory, producing only a tiny amount of waste, and that can’t melt down because they are essentially already melted. Our hypothetical reactor is small enough to transport over a road, be set up at a coal plant and plugged into the existing steam generation plant.
There is no water in this reactor, they run at atmospheric pressure and thus cannot explode.
These are called Molten Salt Reactors.
If grid power fails, as happened in Japan, there is no need to rush to the parking lot to rip out car batteries. An MSR just turns off because simple physics.
Oak ridge made a Molten Salt reactor in 1965 and ran it safely for five years and thousands of hours.
There are several reactors following this general design pattern well into development, and I believe construction should start on two of them within the next year or so but don’t quote me on that.
added, an excellent introduction to MSRs:
https://www.thmsr.com/en/the-thorium-molten-salt-reactor/
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wheaties
Pre-takeoff checklist
Paul is awesome. We've really got to wait until battery technology catches up or at least becomes comparable to 80-90% power/weight ratio of fossil fuel. Swapping batteries only goes so far.
Regarding Nuclear, everyone touts the safety, carbon footprint, and long term cost to run vs the short term capital outlay to build. However, no one figures in the cost for long term storage of the waste. Given how adept corporate interests are in passing the buck to our governments and how easily politicians can be swayed, I know exactly who's going to pay for it... me, my kids, my grandkids, and every generation beyond. F%!$ that.
Regarding Nuclear, everyone touts the safety, carbon footprint, and long term cost to run vs the short term capital outlay to build. However, no one figures in the cost for long term storage of the waste. Given how adept corporate interests are in passing the buck to our governments and how easily politicians can be swayed, I know exactly who's going to pay for it... me, my kids, my grandkids, and every generation beyond. F%!$ that.
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SoonerAviator
Your kids, grandkids, etc. are going to pay for the remediation of abandoned oil well sites and spill cleanup, they are going to pay for the solar array toxic waste, battery cell toxic waste, and turbine blades that aren't able to be recycled/biodegradable. I would much rather have the government in charge of a couple of nuclear waste sites since they are well-trained to deal with it (having been in the nuclear/radioactivity business for near a century now). Since many of the breeder reactors use spent fuel that's already in existence, it wouldn't create any new waste for a long time, it would simply reuse the waste that is already in existence. The MSR that @JimNtexas was mentioning don't generate anywhere near the volume of waste that a typical nuclear facility does. There is no free lunch, but it's hard to rationally argue against modern nuclear power plants if the primary downside is simply storage of waste.
The other option, although it's much harder to scale, is Geothermal. There are a few GT power plants in existence though, and a few test projects. However, then you're back to the whole drilling into the ground issue that makes environmentalists squawk.
Dan Thomas
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Environmentalists need to spend a few months without all the neat stuff we have. Light, heat, plastics, transportation, medicines and medical equipment, communications devices, synthetic clothing fabrics, crops and meats and more. All stuff that relies on energy in various forms. Then maybe they'd stop squawking. Or they'd be dead. One way or another, it would get a lot easier to get necessary stuff done.
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Bob Noel
kind of like the ending of Tom Clancy's novel "Rainbow Six"?
Ghery
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Ghery Pettit
One way to reduce (but not eliminate) the squawking about nuclear waste would be to reduce what is considered nuclear waste. I remember back in the mid 1970s when I graduated from college and worked at Mare Island Naval Shipyard overhauling and refueling nuclear submarines that excess water from the power plants in the subs went through a purification process that resulted in water that was much purer than the water flowing by the shipyard in the Napa River. We still had to mix it with concrete and ship it off to Nevada for long term storage as nuclear waste. Even though dumping it in the river would have improved the purity of the water in the river. Insanity.
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Velocity173
It is a debacle but the increase in what we pay has been insignificant. Per KWH went up like what, 1 cent I believe.
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Mantis Toboggan, MD
What's going on now is development. If you stop developing a capability until all of the of technology required to make it viable is mature you'll be years behind if there is even enough 'pull' to drive that maturation.
Nauga,
from where TRL was not an MTV show