To address a few points made here... this isn't about frontline mobile bases or airplanes or ships. This is about "what if... we have a main base located somewhere with poor supply lines?" In other words, something like Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, shipping fuel in was extremely expensive resulting in costs of $400/gallon (~$100/liter) at the destination[1]. At that level of shipping costs, electrical generation is so expensive that it makes sense to investigate small-scale reactors to see if they could make economic sense.
For several years the US Government spent more on fuel to air condition tents in the desert than it did on NASA.
I'm not talking about the tents themselves, or the soldiers living in them, their supplies or assistance after the war. All of that cost more. I'm just talking about fuel for air conditioners.
> Defense Department spokesman Dave Lapan says that in fiscal year 2010, the Pentagon spent approximately $15 billion on energy for all military operations around the world. The Pentagon says when it comes to Afghanistan, it spent $1.5 billion from October 2010 to May 2011 on fuel. That fuel was used for heating and air conditioning systems, but also for aircraft, unmanned aerial systems, combat vehicles, computers and electricity inside military structures.
On Anderson (at the time):
> Anderson advocates for increased energy efficiency for military structures in order to cut down on the need for long, dangerous fuel-transport missions. […] Anderson says experiments with polyurethane foam insulation for tents in Iraq cut energy use by 92 percent and took 11,000 fuel trucks off the road. […]
> In February 2011 Gen. Anderson has joined the Relyant corporation as Senior Vice President, in charge for the company’s presence in Washington, D.C., managing the organization’s strategic planning and military business development. Relyant is a global provider of construction and insulation projects, life support, demining, logistics/procurement, security, and IT communications. It should be noted though that these additional costs are spent regardless of the volume of supplies sent over supply lines, as the convoys do not carry only fuel, but also food, ammunition, batteries, spare parts, building supplies etc. nevertheless, a green approach could significantly reduce volume, and costs and risk of such operations.
That's incredible, cost of war aside, you'd think solar and batteries would be used if only for the: 1) ability to redeploy 2) one-time shipping event for setup 3) ability to self sustain on supply issues.
So if we assume the sun was shining whenever the AC needs to draw 7kW, that would mean roughly 30m^2 of solar panels per 7kW AC.
So roughly one (american) football field of solar panels for every 180 or so 7kW AC units. (Rounding generously since this is just a thought experiment to look at some lower bounds.You'd probably need a lot more solar panels than that (3x?), plus battery infrastructure, plus some way of cleaning the panels etc. for this to be practical)
If you actually wanted to solar power the military, you'd design stuff the be energy efficient from the start. That would probably consist of all buildings having 3 inches of insulation on all sides so that you need far less cooling. Then you have the solar cells built into the roof, and the batteries built in too, so the whole unit is "dump this anywhere in the world and it makes habitable space".
Grid connection optional - and if provided can be used to automatically balance electrical load between buildings.
This probably weighs less than a tent plus generator plus fuel.
Even just putting two tents on top of each other already improves the insulation a lot, because of the air layer. This was used already during the second world war over here.
In reality in general it's hard to do things that make sense as a whole - large organizations can only optimize invididual parts.
It's not practical to build insulated buildings at forward operating bases. They don't have the time, materials, or equipment. Everything has to be flown in by helicopter, or transported in truck convoys over terrible roads under constant threat of roadside bombs. Tents are light and can be erected in minutes.
"The Army has a $95 million contract to foam up to nine million square feet of building space in Iraq, of which about 60 percent has been completed. The Army also let a $29 million contract to foam structures in Afghanistan. So far, 150,000 square feet have been foamed. It takes a mere 26 days to recoup the costs of the foaming through the fuel savings."
https://www.army.mil/article/20777/army_saves_fuel_and_lives...
Also exactly what was happening to the fuel convoys heading across Afghanistan.
I think better having people target your equipment in a base where its easier to have defence and a perimeter, than over a regular and long supply line.
There's that crazy idea called batteries. For "bigger" stuff one could produce hydrogen during the day (for fuel-cells or straight up burning in combustion engines).
But yeah i would too, not use solar-panels in a warzone.
Why would you want to introduce complex, hard to move storage technology that produces and consumes enormous amounts of explosive gas, and has much, much higher energy loss than both thermal and electrical storage?
Whenever hydrogen turns up in discussions about energy storage people tend to forget physics and the infrastructure reality of dealing with electrolysis, compression and liquefaction and powercells ... which ultimately charge batteries so you can buffer energy to deal with varying consumption.
Storing energy as hydrogen involves a lot more than just a tank. Again, you obviously didn't bother reading up on this and you are guessing how hydrogen based energy systems work. You clearly don't.
>>For example, the tanks on the Ariane launcher, designed and manufactured by Air Liquide, contain the 28 tons of liquid hydrogen that will provide fuel to the central engine. These tanks are a genuine example of technological prowess: they weigh only 5.5 tons empty and their casing is not more than 1.3 mm thick.
There is nothing "secret" about the challenges of turning energy into hydrogen and then back into heat or electricity. The challenges of each step along the energy chain are pretty well understood.
You make the naive assumption that you temporarily storing hydrogen in a tank with 1.3mm thick walls that needs to last for, at most, a couple of days, has any relevance for permanent energy installations.
If you are going to argue for an energy storage technology you have to consider what it would actually look like in practice. And since you only want to consider one part of the chain: I suggest you look into what it takes to safely store hydrogen in a vehicle and how this compares to your naive belief that hydrogen behaves like liquids that you have an intuitive understanding of. (Spoiler: you'd have a hard time convincing authorities to let you drive around traffic with a 1.3mm thick tank in the back of your car).
Then again, I don't think you want to actually know anything about this. I think you only want to argue and you are annoyed that someone called you out.
>Storing energy as hydrogen involves a lot more than just a tank.
The 1.3mm example was to prove that it's technological possible to isolate liquid hydrogen with such a tank. In a car you don't use liq nitrogen[1]. You just shift the usage-surrounding to make your point, it's like saying "but using kerosene in a rocket needs some additional measures too", true. Exactly like using a toilet in space needs some additional measures too.
You suggested that a tank used for ultra short-term storage of hydrogen was relevant in this context. I didn't. When you realized that your assumptions about hydrogen didn't hold you became unpleasant and childish.
FYI, this is the "space laser" part of the "jewish space lasers" of Marjorie Taylor Greene that left everyone laughing about how (wrongly) absurd space lasers are and forgot about the anti-semitism.
She basically said that a system like you've mentioned was tested, misfired and started wildfires. It was then covered up by some Jewish guy on the board.
That wasn't because fuel (or shipping) is inherently expensive. Some contractors just made a ton of money. Fuel in Iraq close by is like 50 cents a five gallon bucket.
Wait till you see how much it costs to deliver a reactor there, and especially remove it from there (not something you can leave to the Taliban, like helicopters and Humvees).
Why, though? Concerns about the quality of the locally available fuel? Concerns about the supply of the locally available fuel? Or just some monetarily aligned motivations?
> According to a Pentagon analysis, 40% of the $108 billion that the Defense Department paid to contractors in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2012 ended up in the hands of either the Taliban, the violent Islamist Haqqani terror network, organized crime rings, transnational drug traffickers or corrupt Afghan officials.
I have to assume security issues with shipping large quantities of fuel to bases by ground had something to do with it, though presumably the adopted solution was an extravagantly wasteful one driven by a culture of budgetary excess.
Yeah, overly expensive contractors must have been part of the story for a price like that. That said, I'd much rather military money be spent on new/interesting technologies like mobile nuclear reactors than on old stuff that isn't going anywhere.
Besides costs, having forward operating bases with nuclear power plants also makes battery-powered fighting vehicles (or plug-in hybrids) feasible. I can see a whole lot of advatages for those.
It’s so handy how there’s always a national-level partisan angle to prevent us from ever having to discuss certain global issues. I get so many upboats in my favorite racially-segregated-Tweet-screenshots subreddit when I incredulously wonder how Those People can even exist with such broken brains. We should really Do Something about them or they might become violent next time I remind them that their perception of reality is wrong.
No, it isn't. Equipment that the US military was managing was evacuated securely and on schedule. Equipment that it had handed off to other parties (mostly the ANA) was not. Nuclear reactors are not likely to fall into the second category.
The Taliban got equipment that the US gave to the Afghan government military. The US didn’t leave them with sensitive or specialized equipment. Anything left behind that was sensitive was permanently disabled.
In Afghanistan, shipping fuel in was extremely expensive resulting in costs of $400/gallon (~$100/liter) at the destination[1]. At that level of shipping costs, electrical generation is so expensive that it makes sense to investigate small-scale reactors to see if they could make economic sense.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/63407-400gallon-...