Under a Gibbous Moon

This in from  Schneier on Security. Apparently a company called ATSC is selling thousands of bogus divining rod type detectors to the Iraqi government. Despite no working parts or even batteries it well apparently detect just about anything that the operator wishes to find: guns, drugs, explosives or even dead bodies all by changing a piece of plastic coated cardboard on the unit. According to the manufacturer it works thusly:

Ignores All Known Concealment Methods. By programming the detection cards to specifically target a particular substance, (through the proprietary process of electro-static matching of the ionic charge and structure of the substance), the ADE651® will “by-pass” all known attempts to conceal the target substance. It has been shown to penetrate Lead, other metals, concrete, and other matter (including hiding in the body) used in attempts to block the attraction.

No Consumables nor Maintenance Contracts Required. Unlike Trace Detectors that require the supply of sample traps, the ADE651® does not utilize any consumables (exceptions include: cotton-gloves and cleanser) thereby reducing the operational costs of the equipment. The equipment is Operator maintained and requires no ongoing maintenance service contracts. It comes with a hardware three year warranty. Since the equipment is powered electro statically, there are no batteries or conventional power supplies to change or maintain.

At a cost of $16,500 to $60,000 depending on model, snake oil is expensive these day.

Red 3 making his attack run. CERN; Bird via Foxypar4/Flickr

The Large Hadron Collider, according to an article in Popular Science, has suffered yet a another setback. This time, a piece of bred dropped by a passing bird caused significant overheating within the accelerator.

The upside to this is, that even though the LHC is not fully functional yet, it has already began to make astounding discoveries. Apparently afraid of having their existence discovered, Bird Alliance has sent one of their best flyers to strike a small target with a piece of bread, thereby destroying the menace and returning peace to the skies. Or something like that.

Coming from the Discovery.com, comes an article detailing 5 scary (but true) space facts. While some of the entries are not particularly scary (space sex was funny with the line “Then you can fasten the whole two-person sex pod to a stable object — like Captain Pike or a Guild Navigator.”) The first entry was definitely high on the creep factor:

Space exploration research has claimed a number of animal lives, and while the idea of sacrificing monkeys and dogs on the altar of science is rather disheartening, the notion that there are dead simian and canine space explorers in orbit RIGHT NOW just adds to the creepiness.

Several early space missions involved re-entry procedures, but not every spacecraft was recovered. This leads many to theorize that perhaps dozens of mummified animals are still making the orbital rounds up there. Think about that the next time you wish upon a star.

Just something to keep in mind when you look up to the skies this Halloween.

WARNING – THE FOLLOWING POST CONTAINS MATH AND BIG NUMBERS – YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.

Recently, upon reading several articles dealing with the upcoming release of a variety of electric vehicles (EVs) onto the market I noticed that nobody was discussing a critical point: Where was all this electricity going to come from. Electrical power is, after all, a finite resource. With all the gasoline that is used in the United States, I wondered if there was enough production capacity to meet the demand of a large scale deployment of EVs.

I had no idea of the answer to this when I first started. Indeed, I initially assumed that the reason I saw no discussion on this is that there wasn’t a problem to begin with, but I wanted to see the numbers for myself. So, without further ado, here is what I found. All statistical data is based upon currently available figures (2007).

First, I needed to find out how much energy is consumed by gasoline powered vehicles in the United States. I found that approximately 390 million gallons per day¹. Gasoline has 34.8 megajoules (10⁶) (MJ) per liter or about 131.7 MJ per gallon. So with this, 390 million gallons of gasoline has about 51,363,000,000 MJ or 51.363 petajoules (10¹⁵) (PJ) of energy. To put that into terms of power production, I found that 3.6 MJ is equal to one Kilowatt-hour (KWh) of energy². Therefore, 51.363 PJ equals 14,267,500,000 KWh or 14.268 Terawatt-Hours (10¹²)(TWh).

The next step is to compensate for lost energy due to idling. It is estimated that 3.8 million gallons of gasoline is wasted in the United States by an idle engine⁵. This is approximately 1% of daily gasoline usage. Taking 1% from 14.268 TWh leaves us with 14.125 TWh.

Also, gasoline engines do not convert 100% of the available energy into useful work, they are about 30% efficient in converting energy into work³. Therfore, out of 14.125 TWh we actually will use 4.234 TWh.

Now, for the United States electrical generating capacity. The United States generated 4,157,000,000 MWh in 2007⁴. For comparison purposes, I shall move the decimal point so it reads 4,157 TWh. Dividing that by 365, I came to a daily average of 11.389 TWh.

That puts the replacement energy needs at approximately 35% over the current energy output. From 2006 – 2007, United states electrical output increased by 2.3%⁴. In the highly unlikely circumstance of no other growth in demand for electrical energy, it would take over 15 years to completely replace our gasoline fleet with and EV one and most likely it would take decades longer than this.

This leaves us with an undesirable time table for either removing dependence on foreign oil or reducing greenhouse emissions (assuming the ability for a rapid migration to renewable electrical production).

With this data, the conclusion that I have come to is that EVs are not a viable large scale alternative to gasoline powered vehicles. Due to limitations in electrical production they will only be able to fill a niche role for many more decades.

References

1. Petroleum Basic Statistics http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html

2. Kilowatt Hour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt-hour

3. Engine Efficiency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency

4. Electric Power Annual http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa_sum.html

5. Anti-Idling Primer http://www.thehcf.org/antiidlingprimer.html