Why aren’t we driving hydrogen powered cars yet? There’s a reason EVs won.

https://www.popsci.com/science/hydrogen-cars/

Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles aren’t just fodder for science fiction or far-out R&D experiments. Cars fueled by hydrogen, like the Toyota Mirai and Hyundai Nexo, are already here, and fuel-cell technology is actively evolving and benefiting from billions of dollars in federal research and infrastructure funding. So then, why are hydrogen cars virtually non-existent on U.S. roads today? What happened?

“The answer is very simple: economics,” Sergey Paltsev, a senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative told Popular Science. Politicians and automakers once held up the fuel cell, which turns the chemical energy of hydrogen into electricity to drive an electric motor, as the future of passenger automobiles, but the falling cost of batteries and the upsides of a preexisting fueling infrastructure (see: the electrical grid) have propelled battery-electric cars well into the lead.

[ Related: How some automakers are still pushing ahead for a hydrogen-powered future ]

“It’s not just the cost of the car,” explained Paltsev, who is also deputy director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy. This is an important point, because in California, low-milage hydrogen cars sell at a steep discount

What makes hydrogen passenger cars altogether costlier than their battery-electric counterparts is the lack of fueling infrastructure, energy-conversion inefficiencies, and the price of the fuel at the pump

A big switch to hydrogen cars would require enormous infrastructure development; the Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center shows 55 public hydrogen fueling station locations in the U.S. today, almost exclusively in California, next to more than 68,000 active public electric vehicle charging stations across the country. (Even in California, refueling passenger hydrogen cars can apparently be such a trial that it sparked a July class action suit against Toyota.)

In a separate call with Popular Science, Gregory Keoleian, the co-director of Sustainable Systems and MI Hydrogen at the University of Michigan, paused to double check if automakers are still releasing new hydrogen passenger cars in California. While Honda discontinued its two hydrogen passenger cars available in California in 2021, Toyota and Hyundai continue to produce new hydrogen passenger cars for sale in the state. Along with a desire for precision on professor Keoleian’s part, his pause highlights how attention on hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles has shifted from passenger cars in favor of more advantageous applications, including medium- and heavy-duty trucks and aviation

“Battery-electric vehicles can be problematic when you have problems with range or fueling time,” or heavy loads, Keoleian said. “That’s where hydrogen can play a role with, for example, long-haul trucks.” 

When it comes to things like rail and commercial trucks, “your fueling stations are more dispersed. You don’t need the concentration of fueling facilities. You don’t need them on every corner. There’s really an opportunity to decarbonize with hydrogen for those applications,” he explained.

‘Brighter pathways’ for hydrogen passenger cars

“Nothing is going to change next year, or probably not in the next five years, but there are brighter pathways for hydrogen cars,” said Paltsev. For one, if hydrogen turns out to be a “much bigger source of our energy needs in other parts of the economy, like in heavy-duty transportation and industry,” then the fueling and infrastructure challenges are “going to be easier to resolve,” providing “positive spillovers and synergies for hydrogen cars.” 

Paltsev noted that the economics of hydrogen cars are already more attractive in some parts of the world than in others—citing, for example, Japan, where electricity costs are high. Several automakers are also still invested in hydrogen fuel-cell passenger cars, as evidenced by a recently announced collaboration between BMW and Toyota; the two say a BMW hydrogen production car will arrive in 2028.

The current impracticalities of hydrogen passenger vehicles in places like the U.S. are additionally not a reason to “just give up” on this particular application of fuel-cell tech, cautioned Paltsev. “We may need it for many other reasons in the future,” he added, citing geopolitical issues as a factor that could disrupt access to raw materials for batteries and make hydrogen cars suddenly more economically viable.

This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post Why aren’t we driving hydrogen powered cars yet? There’s a reason EVs won. appeared first on Popular Science.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com

October 30, 2024 at 08:02AM

Princeton 3D-Printed a Nuclear Fusion Reactor

https://gizmodo.com/princeton-3d-printed-a-nuclear-fusion-reactor-2000518328

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has constructed a fusion reactor from parts it 3D-printed and bought off the shelf. It fits on a kitchen table. It’s a simple-sounding machine—a glass tube coated in magnets—that contains the secret of the stars and it might just pave the way towards an abundant clean-energy future.

IEEE Spectrum published the story of the miraculous reactor, which PPPL built last year. Plasma-based nuclear fusion reactors have been around for a while, but they’ve long been unwieldy. PPPL’s reactor is a glass vacuum tube coated in a 3D-printed nylon shell. The hell holds in place 9,920 rare-earth magnets. The shell-like structure is called a stellarator and it’s meant to contain superheated plasma. Within the vacuum tube, directed by the magnets, atoms without electrons collide with each other. When their nuclei fuse it releases massive amounts of energy.

One of the things that’s so impressive about this reactor is its cost. One of the things that stops the construction of new nuclear power plants is the enormous time and monetary investment it takes to get them running. A comparable reactor in Germany cost $1.1 billion and took 20 years to build. Princeton’s machine cost $640,000 and was built in under a year.

The future of energy is a huge deal. Decades of industrialized society have created a world where carbon gas is spewed into the air at an alarming rate. It’s contributed to the heating of the planet and making it miserable for all of us.

And just as the world is sounding the alarm over global warming and the consequences of it are felt, billionaires are rushing headlong into an AI-powered future that will require enormous amounts of energy. The lords of Silicon Valley know they can’t power LLMs with coal plants. Sustainable sources of energy like wind and solar are wonderful but they aren’t mature enough yet to give them the brain-melting amounts of energy needed to power advanced AI systems.

So big tech has turned to nuclear energy. Microsoft is reviving Three Mile Island, Amazon is investing $500 million in small modular nuclear reactors with hopes of powering its data centers, and Google has plans to do the same. Small modular reactors are a new technology and though they’re supposed to be safer and smaller than the original gigantic cooling tower nightmares we’re familiar with, they’re still going to generate toxic waste. They’re still operating through fission.

What PPPL is pursuing is based on a fusion reaction. If they’re able to scale it up and commercialize it, it could lead to a world of clean, nearly limitless energy. Fusion reactions don’t create toxic waste. If there’s an accident then there’s no nuclear meltdown. The components required to power it can’t be repurposed into a nuclear weapon.

The world’s tech billionaires have their eyes on fusion reactors. It’s not a mature technology, but it’s one that people like Bill Gates are investing in. The Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy fund has invested cash into Type One Energy, a private startup focused on constructing stellarator-style fusion reactors.

What PPPL has done is impressive, but a fusion-based future is a long way off. The U.S. Government is partnering with a company called Type One to build a stellarator-style plant in Tennessee. It’ll be the first of its kind. It also won’t be ready until 2029 at the earliest and it won’t produce power for commercial use.

“Instead, it will allow us to retire any remaining risks and sign off on key features of the fusion pilot plant we are currently designing. Once the design validations are complete, we will begin the construction of our pilot plant to put fusion electrons on the grid,” Type One CEO Chris Mowry told IEEE Spectrum.

If all goes well we may soon live in a world where a 3D-printed nuclear fusion reactor helped save the future. For now, we dream and live with the consequences of fission.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com/

October 30, 2024 at 09:39AM

Reddit Finally Profits After 20 Years: Turns Out Memes Do Pay Bills!

https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2024/10/30/reddit-finally-profits-after-20-years-turns-out-memes-do-pay-bills/

Snoo Dancing in Money

After almost two decades of growth and adaptation, Reddit has finally turned a profit! According to its third-quarter report, the company posted a $29.9 million profit, driven by a revenue growth of 68% year-over-year to $348.4 million. This milestone marks a major turnaround, especially since Reddit went public earlier this year. Initially, they’ve reported losses of $575 million, but with aggressive cost-cutting and revenue-boosting measures, they’re now in the green, with $10 million in losses in the previous quarter.

A big part of Reddit’s success comes from a sharp increase in daily users, up 47% from last year, reaching a regular daily user base of 97.2 million—surpassing 100 million on some days. Along with this surge, their ad revenue hit a whopping $315.1 million! And where does that money come from? That’s Reddit selling data to OpenAI and Google to teach AIs what real internet arguments look like.

CEO Steve Huffman credits some of this success to AI-powered translations. Now, users from more countries can jump in on Reddit’s best discussions and debates, as posts are translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and more. And by 2025, Reddit’s aiming to have translated arguments in 30 countries worldwide—because who doesn’t want to read about pineapple pizza in five languages?

Between deals with sports leagues, spruced-up AMAs, and clamping down on bots scraping their content, Reddit’s finally making moves that seem to pay off. After all, who knew that years of memes, debates, and endless trolling would end up being… profitable?

Please note that I’ve generated the picture above using Meta AI and the generative fill feature of Photoshop. Quite fitting with the subject of the article, don’t you think?

Click This Link for the Full Post > Reddit Finally Profits After 20 Years: Turns Out Memes Do Pay Bills!

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October 30, 2024 at 12:16PM