Hyperloop Bankrupt and Busted.

[BachChain]

Another decade, another gadgetbahn that did nothing but steal money and attention. I wonder what Elon's next tactic for disrupting public transit discussions will be. Will he go back to underground single-lane highways that still manage to have traffic jams, or will he jump right over that shark and gun straight for flying teslas?

[Sauron]

37 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

Most of the other issues are a matter of safety systems. The two biggest problems are a catastrophic structural failure of the tube whilst the carriage is passing through that section, and a fire.

 

The first is equivalent of a severe derailment in a traditional train as the consequences in basic terms are the same.

To prevent a severe derailment on a normal railway you only need to maintain two steel beams. The risk is orders of magnitude lower.

41 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

And the difficulties of making it survivable are the same as with a high speed train, only further amplified by the higher speed.

A train can derail without necessarily slamming into anything or toppling. This would be surrounded by thick steel on all sides. Once again there could also be no safety exits to reach in case something like that happened, whereas even in an underground metro system there are safety exits along the tunnels.

44 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

A fire again has a bunch of issues in common with train and car tunnel fires, and the risks, problems, and mitigations are similar once you factor in the safety factors to deal with the lesser problems, (i'll touch on those below). It's a pain and a huge danger, but it's well understood problem, which doesn't mean it's not a big problem, much like the catastrophic derailment cenario it's one of the most likely, (in both a hyperloop and the equiveillances with cars and trains i mentioned), to lead to mass casualties because fires in tunnels are inherently highly lethal and avoiding them via intensive risk mitigation is vital. 

Just because we understand what a fire is doesn't mean it can be addressed in all scenarios. It's no coincidence that the worst train fires happened in tunnels. By necessity a hyperloop would make it almost impossible to douse a fire or for the people in the shuttle to escape.

47 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

As i already noted we actually have seafloor gas pipelines and AFAIK in some places they have to be able to survive a complete loss of pressure and not implode, and those run for 100's of km at depths where the pressure can reach >10 atmospheres. if it was super expensive to build we wouldn;t have them.

Well, let's find out...

 

Nord Stream 2 is 1200 Km long, 1.2m in diameter (way too small for a shuttle and of course does not contain a magnetic railway, also it does not have a vacuum pump) and it cost 9.5 billion dollars.

 

The upper bound cost for 1 km of brand new, double track high speed rail is $1,650,000 (source), meaning laying 1200 Km would cost you about 2 billion total. Roughly half as much for single track (with a hyperloop each track would need its own tunnel/pipe unless you want to increase the diameter, which would make it even more expensive and difficult). One of the very few maglev systems that were actually built cost about 100 million per Km, I'll let you do the math on that one.

 

Not to mention the extreme difference in maintenance expenses of both the tracks and the trains.

 

So yes, compared to normal rail it's prohibitively expensive. Pipelines like that are built because the economy of scale makes it worth the investment. Not so with passenger rail, which even if it were twice as fast would never justify such ludicrous costs.

1 hour ago, CarlBar said:

Almost every other problem has a simple solution. Rigorous detection and monitoring plus valve work, and braking systems so you can safely repressurise the tunnel and halt the carriage in a timely fashion. You can actually do so fairly quickly with good designs of both, (in fact a hyperloop carriage might be able to stop faster than a slower train carriage, depending on what deceleration limit you apply).

In theory you could make almost anything safe enough, but you're ignoring the costs. This would already be much more expensive than normal rail and every safety system you'd need to add that is not just regular old brakes and safety exists would add to that difference... and for what? A train that isn't even that much faster than regular maglev, which I remind you was a huge flop due to extreme costs.

1 hour ago, CarlBar said:

As for the Sub comparison, Sub have to handle much higher pressures, the claimed maximum diving depth of a Los Angeles Attack Sub equates to a pressure differential of approximately 20 atmospheres and it's pressure hull is far larger in diameter than a Hyperloop could ever need to be. I used Subs as an example of something that is over an order of magnitude more capable than would be required to emphasise how easy of a problem it is to solve engineering wise. We routinely build structures that exceed it by a wide margin.

One (1) modern US submarine costs around $2 billion. Are we done with this comparison yet?

1 hour ago, CarlBar said:

As i already noted we actually have seafloor gas pipelines and AFAIK in some places they have to be able to survive a complete loss of pressure and not implode

I've seen no evidence of this for the larger pipelines like Nord Stream 2. In fact it was full of pressured gas despite not being into service when it was sabotaged.

[Mark Kaine]

20 minutes ago, Sauron said:

To prevent a severe derailment on a normal railway you only need to maintain two steel beams. The risk is orders of magnitude lower.

A train can derail without necessarily slamming into anything or toppling. This would be surrounded by thick steel on all sides. Once again there could also be no safety exits to reach in case something like that happened, whereas even in an underground metro system there are safety exits along the tunnels.

Just because we understand what a fire is doesn't mean it can be addressed in all scenarios. It's no coincidence that the worst train fires happened in tunnels. By necessity a hyperloop would make it almost impossible to douse a fire or for the people in the shuttle to escape.

Well, let's find out...

 

Nord Stream 2 is 1200 Km long, 1.2m in diameter (way too small for a shuttle and of course does not contain a magnetic railway, also it does not have a vacuum pump) and it cost 9.5 billion dollars.

 

The upper bound cost for 1 km of brand new, double track high speed rail is $1,650,000 (source), meaning laying 1200 Km would cost you about 2 billion total. Roughly half as much for single track (with a hyperloop each track would need its own tunnel/pipe unless you want to increase the diameter, which would make it even more expensive and difficult). One of the very few maglev systems that were actually built cost about 100 million per Km, I'll let you do the math on that one.

 

Not to mention the extreme difference in maintenance expenses of both the tracks and the trains.

 

So yes, compared to normal rail it's prohibitively expensive. Pipelines like that are built because the economy of scale makes it worth the investment. Not so with passenger rail, which even if it were twice as fast would never justify such ludicrous costs.

In theory you could make almost anything safe enough, but you're ignoring the costs. This would already be much more expensive than normal rail and every safety system you'd need to add that is not just regular old brakes and safety exists would add to that difference... and for what? A train that isn't even that much faster than regular maglev, which I remind you was a huge flop due to extreme costs.

One (1) modern US submarine costs around $2 billion. Are we done with this comparison yet?

I've seen no evidence of this for the larger pipelines like Nord Stream 2. In fact it was full of pressured gas despite not being into service when it was sabotaged.

yea, even Germany had a working "magnetic high speed bahn" ... its not too difficult, and costs are sensible... it just unfortunately crashed and Germany got wet feet, as it always does ... 

 

ps: what im trying to say its a proven concept, and not exactly rocket surgery.   afaik, there are a few such trains in service in other countries.

 

that's besides conventional high speed trains which are frankly fast enough...

[Uttamattamakin]

2 hours ago, CarlBar said:

 

And when you scale up the area you just build it stronger, why is this hard to understand? 

 

The material that will do what you want at the scale of something like a hyperloop does not exist.  Not if you want a near total vaccum which would be necessary for this to work at all, even if buried.  

 

Subs are at most 100 or 200 meters long at most.  PLUS not all of the sub is a watertight vessel.    That pressure hull is much more restricted. 

 

Pipes or tanks that hold pressure in do so due to the tensile strength of metals. Much like a balloon.  

Scaling these things up in radius or length leads to the total pressure that must be resisted growing as the square of that increase since pressure is force divided by area. 

 

But then what do I know about anything?   I've only been wrong about Hyperloop for all these years.  

Wait....

 

@CarlBar Let me make something clear.  It is good to have dreamers.  Not everyone is a dreamer.  I am a person of real physics, realpolitik, and realism in games.  Yet at the same time I'll buy spell casting as Cyberpunk hacking because I can connect with how it works.  

Hyperloop is more like spell casting than science.    You know where it would work really well.  

 

On he surface of the Moon or perhaps almost even Mars.  Anywhere without a lot of atmosphere due to it being space or almost space. 

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

To prevent a severe derailment on a normal railway you only need to maintain two steel beams. The risk is orders of magnitude lower.

A train can derail without necessarily slamming into anything or toppling. This would be surrounded by thick steel on all sides. Once again there could also be no safety exits to reach in case something like that happened, whereas even in an underground metro system there are safety exits along the tunnels.

Just because we understand what a fire is doesn't mean it can be addressed in all scenarios. It's no coincidence that the worst train fires happened in tunnels. By necessity a hyperloop would make it almost impossible to douse a fire or for the people in the shuttle to escape.

Well, let's find out...

 

Nord Stream 2 is 1200 Km long, 1.2m in diameter (way too small for a shuttle and of course does not contain a magnetic railway, also it does not have a vacuum pump) and it cost 9.5 billion dollars.

 

The upper bound cost for 1 km of brand new, double track high speed rail is $1,650,000 (source), meaning laying 1200 Km would cost you about 2 billion total. Roughly half as much for single track (with a hyperloop each track would need its own tunnel/pipe unless you want to increase the diameter, which would make it even more expensive and difficult). One of the very few maglev systems that were actually built cost about 100 million per Km, I'll let you do the math on that one.

 

Not to mention the extreme difference in maintenance expenses of both the tracks and the trains.

 

So yes, compared to normal rail it's prohibitively expensive. Pipelines like that are built because the economy of scale makes it worth the investment. Not so with passenger rail, which even if it were twice as fast would never justify such ludicrous costs.

In theory you could make almost anything safe enough, but you're ignoring the costs. This would already be much more expensive than normal rail and every safety system you'd need to add that is not just regular old brakes and safety exists would add to that difference... and for what? A train that isn't even that much faster than regular maglev, which I remind you was a huge flop due to extreme costs.

One (1) modern US submarine costs around $2 billion. Are we done with this comparison yet?

I've seen no evidence of this for the larger pipelines like Nord Stream 2. In fact it was full of pressured gas despite not being into service when it was sabotaged.

 

1. I have REPETEDLY over and over and over stated that this would be vastly more expensive than any high speed rail system. I've stated that the economics are questionable. I'm not remotely trying to say it makes economic sense. I'm trying to say the engineering is workable. The cost to build stuff i am discussing is mostly to address the point that its not required to be so insanely engineered. 

 

I mentioned earlier but Hyperloop One as a company if it wanted to develop a 1300km long Hyperloop including all the R&D, design work, tooling, e.t.c. would have needed funding equivalent to several times that of a traditional high speed rail project.

 

2. If your going to use the costs of Nordstream 2 as a whole project at least use the costs for entire high speed rail projects. HS2 has cost several tens of billions of USD for a track aof under a couple of hundred km, and the California High Speed Rail project is projecting >100 billion USD for a 13000km run.

 

Incidentally the raw cost per km for natrual gas piplines froma  quick google is about 1 million dollors per KM. https://docs2.cer-rec.gc.ca/ll-eng/llisapi.dll/fetch/2000/90464/90550/338535/338661/343073/343079/432848/IORVL-171E_--_A0W2U5_-_Attachment_U-31-1.pdf?nodeid=432855&vernum=-2#:~:text=The average estimated cost for,considerations%2C such as HDD crossings.

 

There's more to the costs of infrastructure than the raw costs.

 

3. If you think something like the hyperloop is going to be built without emergency exists in the real world i have some bottom land i'd like to sell you, just don;t ask what it's on the bottom of.

 

Discussing safety as if basic safety precautions, or hell in a 1st world nation, very complex safety precautions, are not going to be taken is just flat out rank stupidity verging on deliberate dishonesty.

 

Will those safety precautions on a theoretical 1st gen system be as complete as you or i could envisage? Probably not assuming one gets built, but thats a regulatory rather than an engineering challenge.

 

1 hour ago, Uttamattamakin said:

The material that will do what you want at the scale of something like a hyperloop does not exist.  Not if you want a near total vaccum which would be necessary for this to work at all, even if buried.  

 

Subs are at most 100 or 200 meters long at most.  PLUS not all of the sub is a watertight vessel.    That pressure hull is much more restricted. 

 

Pipes or tanks that hold pressure in do so due to the tensile strength of metals. Much like a balloon.  

Scaling these things up in radius or length leads to the total pressure that must be resisted growing as the square of that increase since pressure is force divided by area. 

 

But then what do I know about anything?   I've only been wrong about Hyperloop for all these years.  

Wait....

 

Oh god. Now i understand where your coming from and your so wrong on so many levels. I just sort of assumed you knew something about the basics of materials science. I had a collage course on it myself.

 

Yes the stress grows as the length does. But stress values for materials are determined on a cross sectional area basis, not a volume basis, so the capability of the pipe to endure stress grows with the length as well.

 

There are some caveats for anything not supported fully along its entire length, (say a tub suspended from regular supports), you have to factor in the added stress from the mass of the 3d object contained between each pair of support points into the calculation of the stress it experience's.

 

 

Whilst it varies with the grade of steel, carbon steel typically has a yield strength in tension of 600-700 million newtons per square meter of cross section. Though advanced steels like those used in sub construction go far higher, (i'll let you explain why high tensile strength is valued there). A modern natural Gas pipeline operates typically around 1400Psi or 9.5 million Newtons per Square meter, and have an internal area (for a 60 inch diameter pipe), of approximately 1.54 square meters per meter of length. I'll let you work out how many meters of pipe you could have before it failed if stress bearing capacity didn't increase with the length.

[Uttamattamakin]

36 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

Oh god. Now i understand where your coming from and your so wrong on so many levels. I just sort of assumed you knew something about the basics of materials science. I had a collage course on it myself.

 

Surface area of a sphere is 4 Pi Rsquared.  

 

Volume is 4 Pi Rcubed.  

 

Since I quoted the correct formula for you and used it  you know what I mean.   

 

Think about this.  SURFACE AREA OF THE PRESSURE VESSEL. Cross sectional area is not the area you need to be concerned with here. 

 

If you increase the surface area of the pressure vessel. Then you increase the total force that vessel has to withstand.  So that we can make a ... tiny tube that can withstand deep sea pressure does not mean we can scale that up 2x or 10 x  without finding some new material and get the same result.    Multiple people have explained this to you now.  

I refer you to Thunderf00t's excellent video.   I have to ready my Physics class that I will teach this semester. 

 

[CarlBar]

6 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Surface area of a sphere is 4 Pi Rsquared.  

 

Volume is 4 Pi Rcubed.  

 

Since I quoted the correct formula for you and used it  you know what I mean.   

 

Think about this.  SURFACE AREA OF THE PRESSURE VESSEL. Cross sectional area is not the area you need to be concerned with here. 

 

If you increase the surface area of the pressure vessel. Then you increase the total force that vessel has to withstand.  So that we can make a ... tiny tube that can withstand deep sea pressure does not mean we can scale that up 2x or 10 x  without finding some new material and get the same result.    Multiple people have explained this to you now.  

I refer you to Thunderf00t's excellent video.   I have to ready my Physics class that I will teach this semester. 

 

 

I know how it works because i took classes explaining how it works in detail and excelled at them. You on the other hand literally do not know what your talking about. You like to tout your physicist background, well i'm telling you as someone trained in calculating this that you are wrong.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, CarlBar said:

Will those safety precautions on a theoretical 1st gen system be as complete as you or i could envisage? Probably not assuming one gets built, but thats a regulatory rather than an engineering challenge.

I would presume they would have to do failure and crash testing to get authorization for public transportation usage or even private usage. Not many things are actually allowed full and complete risk of life waivers, general transportation is far as I know not one of those. Even skydiving has safety compliance and liability and there is also a fundamental understanding of those partaking that you are throwing yourself out of a plane and that has a risk far greater than getting in to a car, train or plane etc. This understanding and inherent acceptance of that risk does matter.

 

Anyone actually wanting to operate such a system I would presume would have to do depressurization tests, rupture tests etc.

 

Maybe I'm being overly naïve but I just don't see many countries, not even the US, just allow people to ride in a new and unproven mode of transport with no good understanding of the risk. Just allowing it is a legal risk to any state, surely.

 

2 hours ago, CarlBar said:

I've stated that the economics are questionable. I'm not remotely trying to say it makes economic sense. I'm trying to say the engineering is workable. The cost to build stuff i am discussing is mostly to address the point that its not required to be so insanely engineered. 

What I don't understand is the point at all. It makes sense as an amusement ride, not so much as a public transportation method. Put everything aside other than passengers per hour, I don't see how it could compete with even low speed rail. If you want to pay for an inordinately expensive method of transport to get you somewhere very fast charter a helicopter or plane, because that's probably in the realm of per seat cost we are talking about.

[Taf the Ghost]

Anything that goes negative against atmospheric pressure was always never going to be worth the trouble as a large scale project.

 

But the fact people were even trying was just a sign of the massive amount of money being thrown at new technology in that period. Near 0% interest rates does stupid things to investment ideas.

[CarlBar]

17 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I would presume they would have to do failure and crash testing to get authorization for public transportation usage or even private usage. Not many things are actually allow full and complete risk of life waivers, general transportation is far as I know not one of those. Even skydiving has safety compliance and liability and there is also a fundamental understand of those partaking that you are throwing yourself out of a plane and that has a risk far greater than getting in to a car, train or plane etc. This understanding and inherent acceptance of that risk does matter.

 

Anyone actually wanting to operate such a system I would presume would have to do depressurization tests, rupture tests etc.

 

Maybe I'm being overly naïve but I just don't see many countries, not even the US, just allow people to ride in a new and unproven mode of transport with no good understanding of the risk. Just allowing it is a legal risk to any state, surely.

 

I agree, but one of the things you'll see a lot with anything new and novel is that the regulatory authorities often overfocus on one aspect and underfocus on another. They'd miss things, it's just the way these things work, then when a real world accident happens things will adjust and over time a robust safety system will develop that's properly balanced. 

 

20 minutes ago, leadeater said:

What I don't understand is the point at all. It makes sense as an amusement ride, not so much as a public transportation method. Put everything aside other than passengers per hour, I don't see how it could compete with even low speed rail. If you want to pay for an inordinately expensive method of transport to get you somewhere very fast charter a helicopter or plane, because that's probably in the realm of per seat cost we are talking about.

 

Speed and oddly long-term cost. It' a system that by it's nature has very cheap operating costs as the energy investment to maintain speed is so much lower. The costs of building it out and getting it down to operating pressure are high, (and some investment on maintaining that pressure would be required). But once it's operational and ready to go the cost is quite cheap. Also very environmentally friendly for the same reason.

 

Speed wise over runs upto around a 1000km it's faster than an aircraft as the aircraft over short hauls waste a lot of time on takeoff and landing.

 

It still wouldn't have worked for passengers IMO.

 

Now Cargo, thats a different matter. There's a lot of cargo that would like higher speeds than regular rail but either can't justify air-freight, can;t work as air-freight, (too much needs to be shipped each day), or doesn't really need that much speed but has nothing else fast enough. And Cargo is a much higher volume product so you can distribute the initial costs over a larger number of items which reduces the cost margin it adds. Air freight can't do that because most of the cost is in consumables, (mainly fuel).

[Uttamattamakin]

2 hours ago, CarlBar said:

 

I know how it works because i took classes explaining how it works in detail and excelled at them. You on the other hand literally do not know what your talking about. You like to tout your physicist background, well i'm telling you as someone trained in calculating this that you are wrong.

Notice that I never insulted you but I could go on but here is the math again.  I am not really saying anything.  I clearly don't know as much as you but here is the math.   You know more than me so you should know it better.  Just remember the area refered to here is the surface area of the pipe vessel being discussed.

Here it is again

As you increase the size of the vessel,  You increase the area.   Depends on the shape but basically the area increases not linearly but as the square.  (Not volume AREA  Volume increases as the cube)

 

Thus increasing the total force that the vessel must hold up.  Pressure is Force divided by area.  Therefore Force is pressure times area.

 

This is why when making things that must resist a large difference between internal and external pressure  we make smaller vessels.  That these things work at small scale does not imply that they'll work at the larger scale.   In fact they demonstrate why they don't work when scaled up.   This is because area times pressure equals force.  

 

@CarlBar here is a great video by someone who really knows physics well unlike me how clearly cannot explain it at all.  I am afterall a total idiot who knows nothing about anything. 

 

1 hour ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Anything that goes negative against atmospheric pressure was always never going to be worth the trouble as a large scale project.

 

But the fact people were even trying was just a sign of the massive amount of money being thrown at new technology in that period. Near 0% interest rates does stupid things to investment ideas.

Basically.  To try and resist the pressure of the atmosphere on a large scale is to work against the force of gravity itself just transmitted to you via a column of air as tall as the atmosphere itself.   Think about it.  

1 Newton of force is 1 kg times one meter per second squared.    

1 Pascal is 1 Newton per meter squared. 

101.3 thousand Newtons pressing down on every square meter.  (14.7 lbs pushing down on every square inch. )

~10 thousand kiilogram weights in Earth gravity pressing down on every square meter of anything.  The only reason we don't implode is that we are also filled with and exist at that same pressure.    So the pressure is balanced.  Unbalance that pressure and we create a bomb.  

 

We are evolved for it and used to it so we don't think about it.  No more than a fish thinks about the water it lives in.  

 

Hyperloop would always be nothing but a very very long massively destructive device waiting for disaster. 

It would basically have been this if it failed when tried at human scale.  This is a simulation of the Oceangate implosion that some may find disturbing.  Hence the spoiler box.  

 

Spoiler

 

Like the Ocean Gate sub one could rig up a "hyperloop" that would work at some scale for a while.  Then the materials its' made of fail in a very similar way.  It's like sure you can make a submarine out of that but it's not a smart time and eventually the forces of nature and laws of nature win.  It becomes the operation of Darwin's theory if one goes against those forces of nature VS harnessing them to our advantage. 

 

 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, CarlBar said:

Speed and oddly long-term cost. It' a system that by it's nature has very cheap operating costs as the energy investment to maintain speed is so much lower. The costs of building it out and getting it down to operating pressure are high, (and some investment on maintaining that pressure would be required). But once it's operational and ready to go the cost is quite cheap. Also very environmentally friendly for the same reason.

Sure I agree operating cost is low but that's not what the seat prices are only factored on, you actually have to get a return on investment so TCO matters.

 

Say you can do argument sake 12 people at a time and you can reasonably do 1 trip per hour for 12 hours a day. So 144 passengers per day per "track". The build cost lets say is 100 billion and you want a return on investment in 20 years.

 

That would be a seat cost of $19,025.88  per ride just to pay back only the build cost, soo..... how many will actually pay $20k per ride? So if you aren't filling up every seat the ticket price increases above $20k.

 

And in 20 years you've still only moved 1 million people roughly, best case. Even if I'm off by 2x that's still $10k seat cost and 2 million passengers over 20 years.

 

So it doesn't matter how low the operating costs are if you can't recoup the cost to build and get enough passengers using it. Just charter air transport.

 

No such thing as a free ride, not even at $0 operating cost.

[LAwLz]

21 hours ago, Sauron said:

It WAS always a stupid idea, and Musk knew it. He has admitted it was just a way to delay and sabotage california high speed rail.

That's a very... Creative way of interpreting what he said. 

 

He said believed the California bullet train plans were not good because it was costy, far slower than bullet trains in other coutries, would take a long time to build, and still would be far worse than flying so there wasn't really much point to it. 

Elon saw it as a waste of money. That's why he wanted it canceled. Instead, he hoped a different solution would be built. Whether or not that solution would be a hyperloop or something else (which he never said wouldn't work) wasn't something he wanted to say at the time. 

 

 

It feels like the person writing all those tweets is on a mission to interpret everything Elon has said in bad light. I would be very weary of letting Marx interpret anything for you. It's important to read the paragraphs for yourself, preferably before the text Marx has written because it could color how you perceive things. 

In Swedish we have the expression "fultolka". The word-for-word translation would be "ugly interpretation" or "mean interpretation". 

It's when you take a statement that could be seen as somewhat ambiguous, and then decide to interpret it in the wrong way, usually in a way that confirms some preconceived belief or view.

I feel like Marx is doing that, a lot, in that tweet thread. That's why he throws in words like "happy to confirm", because that was his preconceived belief. He is looking for things that confirm his belief rather than investigating what the truth is. With all that being said, it is entirely possible that his beliefs are the truth, but I don't think that is a good person to have interpret things for you. 

[RejZoR]

11 hours ago, leadeater said:

A tiny section of one state in Australia is enough to power most of the entire South East Asia, even though Sun Cable project failed for numerous reasons the surveys and assessments around land area usage were not wrong and you can go look them up. There are a lot of places on this planet with no significant land use potential for people or food which makes them suited to solar or wind (depending on local climates etc).

 

It's more about spending money wisely and making good choices than solar and wind being a bad idea. My town as been 100% wind and hydro powered for I think 20 years now, 80% wind last time I checked from memory.

 

Transporting turbine blades is damn difficult though.

Wind and solar is meant for heavily localized power demands aka a village, a small town, single home. It's not powerful enough or practical to be a replacement for a hydro dam or nuclear power plant. And like I said, Germany has a huge problem with waste wind turbine blades, there is apparently issue with birds too with wind turbines and solar panels have very low efficiency at their peak but lose quickly if it's cloudy or if panels are dusty, don't operate during night and apparently aren't as easy to recycle as everyone was hyping them to be.

 

Hydro dams, while they can fuck up river ecosystems pretty badly, they don't have any of the other issues and nuclear plants, outside of rare accidents and final storage of waste nuclear material, don't really have any issues or produce anything particularly bad to the environment. Both produce huge amounts of reliable power regardless of day, night, cloudy, wind or no wind. In my country, most of power we make comes from hydro and nuclear. There was this solar craze that's heavily localized and we have some wind turbines. We have a coal thermo plant, but it's being used less and less as it just doesn't make sense and it's terrible for environment. We pretty much already have our rivers fully used by hydro and I don't think we can build much more. And for nuclear plant, we should be building a new reactor block at least 10 years ago if we'd like to meet the demands of all the EV's they are promising for the near future and will be mandatory as everyone wants to get rid of ICE cars.

 

In an ideal world of everything ideal and plenty, every home would have a dedicated super high speed charging station that can juice up car at max power at any time without any issues. And for long distance, we'd have few charging stations that can fully charge any car in 10 minutes. That ideal world would operate similarly to current one with petrol stations and ICE cars. Reality is, that's just a theoretical ideal world. In reality, most people could only charge at 16A 230V (America with it's 110V is even worse), and those few rare charging stations that actually work and aren't broken don't charge at those speeds which means we don't even remotely have them enough for so many EV's sitting there for 1-2 hours for another 400 kilometers of ideal range which is more like 200-250 during winter. Guess what, we have winters over here. It's just so many problems with EV's that NO ONE is solving. Everyone is just "whoa yeah lets all have EV's". It just doesn't work that way and harsh reality will hit us all in 2030 or whatever EU set to allow EV's only. Everything will be terrible at that point and it'll just get worse as more and more ICE cars will leave the roads. There will simply have to remain an alternative with ICE cars and we'll have to use synthetic biofuels instead of fossil fuels. These would be somewhat carbon neutral and wouldn't be such a problem as fossil ones from CO2 emissions standpoint. Brazil kinda solved that by going full on ethanol, but since we have winters over here, that's not an option either as ethanol hates cold in ICE. It's never a single solution to all the problems and it seems like no one is working on any of it. Everyone just wants to just sell EV's like crazy and make huge profits. Like usual...

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Wind and solar is meant for heavily localized power demands aka a village, a small town, single home. It's not powerful enough or practical to be a replacement for a hydro dam

Solar can be used for anything, it doesn't have to be localized at all, again see Australia and China etc all with mega size solar that by country land area is actually tiny.

 

Wind sure it's actually not nearly as good as solar oddly enough and even though offshore can help with that, it's not about focusing on one type it's about doing what makes sense and creating a diverse electricity grid that is protected from single source issues.

 

Like for example you cannot do 100% nuclear and also be protected from outages since if you are anywhere at all with seismic activity then the entire country will lose power and also be in full grid stop if there is movement above safety threshold as they all, or a good number, go in to automatic emergency shutdown.

 

Hydro is actually incredibly worse than solar for effected land, massively. With solar you put in giant farms on non-productive lands while hydro you destroy entire ecosystems and often farm land for only small amount of electricity production relative to the entire country demand.

 

3 hours ago, RejZoR said:

there is apparently issue with birds too with wind turbines

But's just BS spread by those with an anti agenda towards renewable energy. Have a look at New Zealand and our birdlife and how we treat it as a country and how unique birdlife here is. If Wind turbines were actually a legitimate issue we wouldn't have wind turbines, we have a lot of wind turbines.

 

3 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Germany has a huge problem with waste wind turbine blades

It really doesn't, again just agenda based reporting. The bigger issue by far is getting the things down when they need to be replaced/decommissioned as it requires specialized heavy machinery so there are long delays in doing this.

 

But also turbine blades have a minimum 20 year rated lifespan in Germany, this is a regulatory requirement . They can also be used for longer. Older fibre glass blades can be broken down and used in concrete and new carbon fire blades can be reprocessed in to new blades or other carbon fibre usages.

 

3 hours ago, RejZoR said:

solar panels have very low efficiency at their peak but lose quickly if it's cloudy or if panels are dusty

The effect of that is much less than made out, particular on very large solar farms compared to on roof residential installations. Again there is no reason not to do it so long as it make sense.

 

I don't disagree that nuclear must be part of long term electricity plans but all the common counter tropes against wind and solar are so often just not true. People take the smallest amount of truthism and then blow it out vastly past reality or ignore comparing it against other electricity sources and their problems and wastes.

[CarlBar]

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

Sure I agree operating cost is low but that's not what the seat prices are only factored on, you actually have to get a return on investment so TCO matters.

 

Say you can do argument sake 12 people at a time and you can reasonably do 1 trip per hour for 12 hours a day. So 144 passengers per day per "track". The build cost lets say is 100 billion and you want a return on investment in 20 years.

 

That would be a seat cost of $19,025.88  per ride just to pay back only the build cost, soo..... how many will actually pay $20k per ride? So if you aren't filling up every seat the ticket price increases above $20k.

 

And in 20 years you've still only moved 1 million people roughly, best case. Even if I'm off by 2x that's still $10k seat cost and 2 million passengers over 20 years.

 

So it doesn't matter how low the operating costs are if you can't recoup the cost to build and get enough passengers using it. Just charter air transport.

 

No such thing as a free ride, not even at $0 operating cost.

 

The number of people is hugely dependent on the carriage design and station design. There's no actual need to design stations so only one carriage can be in motion and/or being loaded/unloaded at once, whilst the vehicles can't really turn at full speed, they need to slow down to stop in the station anyway so they can turn there, (there are other ways to get the same effect without requiring the vehicles to turn too).

 

The gap between carriages is basically your safety factor time, (representing a worst case reaction time from automatic systems and operators), plus the deceleration time. For a normal train this would be a nice slow stop, for a Hyperloop since it is a unidirectional track with much more constrained parameters than a regular train you might be able to use the emergency stop value when determining the carriage interval. But thats a liability consideration rather than an engineering one.

 

For a target speed of 150 m/s and using Plane takeoff accelerations as a normal acceleration/deceleration limit your talking between 75 and 150 seconds, (a normal train would need about 300 seconds at a minimum if it could reach the same speed for reference). I don't know exactly what safety margin would be needed, automatic systems should operate more or less instantly, so it's more a matter of how much time you need to give a human operator to react if the computer misses somthing. It's primarily a liability and human factors problem, not an engineering one. I'm going to say 60 seconds for our example but take it with a good amount of salt.

 

That means 135 to 210 seconds between carriages, or 26 to 17 carriages an hour, thats between $1100 and $700 a seat instead of near 19k.

 

If your willing to use emergency stop values, the spacing gets down to 75 seconds, (assuming upper end of a hard car braking deceleration value), and that raises the carriages to 48 per hour and the seat price drops to just over $400. And you don;t have to limit yourself to 12 seats, it has complications yes, but also potentially dramatically raises the throughput. 

 

Obviously once you include operating costs and inevitable empty seats and the fact that 100 billion is probably a lowball, it gets highly questionable. I never said it didn't.

 

Cargo is a different matter, you can accept tighter timings and higher decelleration values and you can pack more typical small volume air-freight type cargo items into the space of a single passenger. Still not cheap but likely to actually be cheaper than air-freight.

[leadeater]

11 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

That means 135 to 210 seconds between carriages, or 26 to 17 carriages an hour, thats between $1100 and $700 a seat instead of near 19k.

 

11 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

Hyperloop since it is a unidirectional track with much more constrained parameters

May I ask where all these carriages go? You can line them all up and send them down one after another and then?

 

Have dual track and try and get carriages between directional lengths? aka a loop, kinda in the name I know. But damn that's expensive compare to single track back and forward.

 

There ain't no way you can do much as you are suggest, just wouldn't be practical. Like I said I could be well off but even at 2x and 4x my numbers it's still woefully bad. 

 

Trains are by relative terms very long and "slow" for a reason. A hyperloop is still in the same basic situation as "trains"

[leadeater]

@CarlBar

 

Quote

Musk (2013) states that the checking-in process will impact the overall travel less than flights due to the higher frequency between pods' departures. The hyperloop will, ideally, run for 19 h and use 5 h for maintenance (Pérez, 2019). A single pod can hold up to 28 passengers and meet the demand of 840 passengers (off-peak) and 3,360 passengers during peak hours. Walker (2018) criticizes this and argues that this means the pods would have a headway of 30 s during peak hours (or 120 departures per hour), which is questionable due to safety reasons at such high speed. He argues that there should be a minimum gap of 80 s between the pods, allowing 45 departures per hour or 1,260 passengers per hour (only 37.5% of the theoretical capacity).

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsc.2022.842245/full

 

1260 per hour is probably more reasonable to estimate off. I still doubt that'll be achievable for a good amount of time due to both learning how to actually operate and actual passenger demand.

[Sauron]

9 hours ago, CarlBar said:

2. If your going to use the costs of Nordstream 2 as a whole project at least use the costs for entire high speed rail projects. HS2 has cost several tens of billions of USD for a track aof under a couple of hundred km, and the California High Speed Rail project is projecting >100 billion USD for a 13000km run.

Nord stream 2 is a pipe with a pump. The vast majority of the cost comes from manufacturing and laying the pipe itself. Don't you think factoring in the cost of the trains, train stations etc. would be dishonest in a comparison?

9 hours ago, CarlBar said:

1. I have REPETEDLY over and over and over stated that this would be vastly more expensive than any high speed rail system. I've stated that the economics are questionable. I'm not remotely trying to say it makes economic sense. I'm trying to say the engineering is workable.

I've never argued that it's completely impossible. If you make the walls thick enough you can probably make an arbitrarily large vacuum chamber. That doesn't mean it's feasible in practical terms, and in engineering the cost of a solution is part of the parameters. My point is that it's impossible to make it a viable solution and that much was obvious from the start.

9 hours ago, CarlBar said:

3. If you think something like the hyperloop is going to be built without emergency exists in the real world i have some bottom land i'd like to sell you, just don;t ask what it's on the bottom of.

How do you propose emergency exits would work in a vacuum tube? If you exit the train, you die - even assuming there would be enough space around the train for you to reach the nearest exit. You'd have to repressurize the tunnel before anyone could exit the train, which could likely not be done quickly enough. Oh, and you'd have to be able to act and stop the following train within a few seconds to avoid a catastrophic crash, if the numbers you gave were real.

[Sauron]

9 hours ago, CarlBar said:

Incidentally the raw cost per km for natrual gas piplines froma  quick google is about 1 million dollors per KM. https://docs2.cer-rec.gc.ca/ll-eng/llisapi.dll/fetch/2000/90464/90550/338535/338661/343073/343079/432848/IORVL-171E_--_A0W2U5_-_Attachment_U-31-1.pdf?nodeid=432855&vernum=-2#:~:text=The average estimated cost for,considerations%2C such as HDD crossings.

Your link is talking about "small diameter, low pressure pipelines", maybe double check before linking?

Quote

The community gas pipeline evaluation indicated that the cost to install small diameter low-
pressure pipelines to the various communities along the Mackenzie Valley ranges from $1 to
98 million per community. The aggregate cost would be about $204 million. The average cost of
these pipelines would be about $1 million/km or $300,000 per diameter inch per kilometre
($/dia. in./km)

I doubt these are even underwater.

[Sauron]

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

He said believed the California bullet train plans were not good because it was costy, far slower than bullet trains in other coutries, would take a long time to build, and still would be far worse than flying so there wasn't really much point to it. 

Elon saw it as a waste of money. That's why he wanted it canceled. Instead, he hoped a different solution would be built. Whether or not that solution would be a hyperloop or something else (which he never said wouldn't work) wasn't something he wanted to say at the time.

I'm sorry but how does that contradict what I said? He wanted it canceled so he pushed and lobbied for a competing project he knew was bullshit, or at the very least wasn't well thought out. Insisting that it would cost less than $10 billion is either an intentional lie or evidence he had no idea of even the ballpark cost of something like this (again, existing maglevs without the vacuum tube have costs in the tens of millions per Km, never mind the fact that the original "idea" was an even dumber concept with people driving their teslas into the tubes which would have been completely impractical). You can either believe him on his given reasons for doing this or suspect that he did it to avoid a viable public transport alternative to buying electric cars, but either way the fact remains that sabotaging california's high speed rail project was his stated goal. This is just from reading the text in the image, not the poster's interpretation.

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, Sauron said:

You can either believe him on his given reasons for doing this or suspect that he did it to avoid a viable public transport alternative to buying electric cars, but either way the fact remains that sabotaging california's high speed rail project was his stated goal. This is just from reading the text in the image, not the poster's interpretation.

Elon have an agenda and a self interest in benefiting himself and his businesses? That doesn't sound realistic 

 

I don't know if he thought he would have enough influence to kill off a project like that or if he actually did, but him creating negative rhetoric around something that could or would impact his business is absolutely something he would do. He's been more than willing to run his mouth off over less.

 

Or the shortest path to supporting this point, Twitter lol.

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

 

May I ask where all these carriages go? You can line them all up and send them down one after another and then?

 

Have dual track and try and get carriages between directional lengths? aka a loop, kinda in the name I know. But damn that's expensive compare to single track back and forward.

 

There ain't no way you can do much as you are suggest, just wouldn't be practical. Like I said I could be well off but even at 2x and 4x my numbers it's still woefully bad. 

 

Trains are by relative terms very long and "slow" for a reason. A hyperloop is still in the same basic situation as "trains"

 

Depends greatly how you set things up. The simplest where they run on some kind of internal track is to have it fork into multipule stations.

 

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

@CarlBar

 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsc.2022.842245/full

 

1260 per hour is probably more reasonable to estimate off. I still doubt that'll be achievable for a good amount of time due to both learning how to actually operate and actual passenger demand.

 

You do realise an 80 second gap with 45 trains per hour is only 5 seconds longer and 3 trains per hour less than my best case estimate, and because i was using your 12 passengers per hour and not the 28 passengers per hour you used 1260 passengers per hour is over double my best case estimate above, and over a thousand times more than yours, it drops the cost per ticket down to near $200

 

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

Nord stream 2 is a pipe with a pump. The vast majority of the cost comes from manufacturing and laying the pipe itself. Don't you think factoring in the cost of the trains, train stations etc. would be dishonest in a comparison?

 

Yes, it would be dishonest, but thats part of why actual high speed rail lines cost so much more than Nordstream does.

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

I've never argued that it's completely impossible. If you make the walls thick enough you can probably make an arbitrarily large vacuum chamber. That doesn't mean it's feasible in practical terms, and in engineering the cost of a solution is part of the parameters. My point is that it's impossible to make it a viable solution and that much was obvious from the start.

 

Your confusing practical engineering with theoretical engineering. I'm talking about the raw engineering theory of weather it's possible to build somthing like this. Practical engineering concerns itself with cost efficiency, theoretical engineering does not.

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

How do you propose emergency exits would work in a vacuum tube? If you exit the train, you die - even assuming there would be enough space around the train for you to reach the nearest exit. You'd have to repressurize the tunnel before anyone could exit the train, which could likely not be done quickly enough. Oh, and you'd have to be able to act and stop the following train within a few seconds to avoid a catastrophic crash, if the numbers you gave were real.

 

I gave you the deceleration times, they're included in the gaps and a train transport expert actually came up with a value that was similar, (per @leadeater post). Thats not an issue. 15 second emergency brake in case you missed it from 350mph. Equivalent to a hard stop in a car for 15 seconds, rough but fully survivable.

 

And no rapidly repressurising isn't as difficult as you think. it's not a trivial system to engineer, and i've never claimed it was, but it's well within our abilities to devise as it's mainly a gas flow and distribution problem. Remember an airliner that suffers  a window blowout at high altitude will take around 4 minutes to descend to breathable air. 

 

There is one big difference, a hyperloop repressurisation system needs to get the pressure up high enough the pressure alone won't be damaging fairly quickly. How fast is a medical question, it's somwhere in the tens of seconds at the most but i'm not knowable enough to know the specifics here, but bringing the pressure up that far, (based on 40,000ft being safe from the phenomenon 0.2 atmospheres is enough), is also a lot faster than bringing it upto 1 atmosphere. The pressure differential makes it quicker.

 

I don't have the fluid dynamics background to calculate any of it in exact detail, i can do very basic ideal gasflow into a perfect vacuum, (as Thunderf00t did in one of his videos), bu that produces a highly sped up result for a variety of reasons, and isn't very useful except as a theoretical lower bound, (and said lower bound can be virtually as low as you'd like depending on the size and spacing you choose for your safety valves).

 

 

As a quick, (but again not very useful), example of the  perfect gasflow into perfect vacuum math a 1ft diameter valve opening into an 8ft diameter pipe, (a bit small tbh), theoretical maximum flow through the valve is approximately 900 cubic feet per second at 1 atmosphere inlet pressure and a perfect vacuum inside. An 8ft diameter pipe has a cross section approximately 50 square feet meaning a 1ft length has a volume of 50 cubic feet. That means the valve can fill around 18 feet per second of pipe length, however the pipe is bi directional so it will proceed both up and down the pipe at the same time so the pressure wave will travel down the pipe at 9feet per second in each direction. Thats 6.4mph for reference.

 

The problem is in the real world you won't get a nice slow moving 1 atmosphere pressure wave, you will get a very fast but very low pressure wave with the pressure behind that steadily increasing over time. And i don;t know the necessary physics and engineering formulae to calculate all of this in detail for you.

 

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

Your link is talking about "small diameter, low pressure pipelines", maybe double check before linking?

I doubt these are even underwater.

 

Completely fair, i added it very last minute to the post. I i shoved in a basic google search, got a bunch of results with similar values, (and 60 inch diameter pipe is 5 feet so not normal low pressure gas mains), and just assumed it was what iw as looking for, sorry.

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

You do realise an 80 second gap with 45 trains per hour is only 5 seconds longer and 3 trains per hour less than my best case estimate,

Yea, I was just looking around for some passenger per hour estimates rather than my out of my ass numbers just to see what some kind of cost would be like. I didn't really expect my numbers to be all that accurate, in any case I'm highly dubious on the order of 1000 per hour could be achieved, certainly not in the first few years of operation.

 

A lot of these projects put on rose tinted glasses to justify them and get funding, they never turn out all that close to the claims.

 

I just can't see any better than many minutes per "train", people just won't be that orderly getting on and off. It's like people talking about how they can herd cats, technically you can but... good luck.

 

10 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

and over a thousand times more than yours, it drops the cost per ticket down to near $200

In that same article they gave an estimate around the same price as a plane ticket or likely a little more. So it's probably not going to be unreasonable but that's only if they can actually get people to use the damn thing.

[Sauron]

3 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

Yes, it would be dishonest, but thats part of why actual high speed rail lines cost so much more than Nordstream does.

But a hyperloop would also have these costs (most likely much higher) on top of the base infrastructure so that's irrelevant to the conversation. I took nord stream 2 as an indicator of what it might cost just to lay the tubes, compared to complete high speed rail tracks a train could already run on. All the control infrastricture would also be present, and likely be much more expensive, on a hyperloop system.

6 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

Your confusing practical engineering with theoretical engineering. I'm talking about the raw engineering theory of weather it's possible to build somthing like this. Practical engineering concerns itself with cost efficiency, theoretical engineering does not.

Yes, you got me, I care about things being feasible in real life.

7 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

I gave you the deceleration times, they're included in the gaps and a train transport expert actually came up with a value that was similar, (per @leadeater post). Thats not an issue. 15 second emergency brake in case you missed it from 350mph. Equivalent to a hard stop in a car for 15 seconds, rough but fully survivable.

This assumes seatbelts and you facing forward. Normal train carts don't do that because it would cost them capacity and passenger comfort. Also again this assumes a system reaction time of a handful of seconds, which is no guarantee in case of partial system failure, which is the hypothesis here. You have to immediately detect that the train has stopped or is slowing down significantly and send the emergency brake signal to all following trains. Again a case of something that may not be completely impossible but definitely complex and extremely expensive.

 

Also bear in mind the required system-wide power surge to brake multiple trains at the fastest speed a human can tolerate.

 

Not that I actually believe a system like this could operate with such low time tolerances, you can't expect dozens of people to reliably exit and board a train in less than a minute. You'd get extreme congestions following even the slightest delays.

12 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

And no rapidly repressurising isn't as difficult as you think. it's not a trivial system to engineer, and i've never claimed it was, but it's well within our abilities to devise as it's mainly a gas flow and distribution problem. Remember an airliner that suffers  a window blowout at high altitude will take around 4 minutes to descend to breathable air. 

An airliner is not flying in a vacuum. It also only needs to descend to reach a breathable atmosphere. The hyperloop would need to pump air in the tube at a sufficient rate to fill it quickly but not fast enough to risk damaging the integrity of the tube itself or the train.

22 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

There is one big difference, a hyperloop repressurisation system needs to get the pressure up high enough the pressure alone won't be damaging fairly quickly. How fast is a medical question, it's somwhere in the tens of seconds at the most but i'm not knowable enough to know the specifics here, but bringing the pressure up that far, (based on 40,000ft being safe from the phenomenon 0.2 atmospheres is enough), is also a lot faster than bringing it upto 1 atmosphere. The pressure differential makes it quicker.

In case of sudden, total loss of cabin pressure in a vacuum you're looking at a really bad embolism in seconds. IF your lungs don't burst.