NaibofTabr

The biggest difference (from a fire perspective) is that firefighters can’t just throw water on an electric car in an emergency. Fires are less common for electric cars, but dealing with them when they are on fire is a lot more difficult (metal fires are nasty). There are some specialty suppressants that can be used, but they aren’t widely available - they’re expensive compared to water, you can’t just get them out of a city water hookup, and it’s difficult for a firetruck to carry them in high volume. Common practice is to just let an electric car fire burn itself out.

This battery design sounds like it won’t self-ignite from overheating, which is good. But… crashes would be a concern. If the car were overheating or on fire (upholstery, gasoline splash from an ICE vehicle, lubricant oil, etc) it would be difficult to deal with safely. Sodium and water is… kind of spectacular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4aVueFmOHo

Your first concern should be your boundary firewall. You should have all ports closed except the ones that you are definitely using for external services. You should know which ports you have open and why, and what traffic, how much and how often you expect to see on those ports (8080 will have regular Internet use traffic, but your reverse proxy port should only have traffic when you’re away from home and actively using it), and you should monitor that traffic at the firewall every so often, and especially when you make changes to your network. Closed ports should be configured to drop packets rather than respond that the port is closed (stealth mode). On a home network, preventing unwanted incoming connections will protect you from the majority of malicious activity. It’s the most effective single thing you can focus on.

The next thing would be to separate untrusted devices onto dedicated VLANs. This would be for IoT devices, gaming consoles, “smart” appliances, anything that connects to the Internet whose software you don’t have control over. They get isolated on a VLAN that only connects to the Internet and doesn’t allow local connections to devices on other VLANs, so the rest of your network doesn’t exist as far as they’re concerned. This should cut down on things like “smart” appliances taking inventory of your home network and reporting it back to the manufacturer’s servers.

If you do these two things, and you’ve got your reverse proxy configured properly so that other people can’t break into it, you should minimize unwanted connections to your network and your server/containers should be fine with default internal firewall policies. The only reason you would need to do more is if you expect a direct/intentional attack by a motivated hacker, but in that case there’s not much you can do unless you’re an expert.

If you want to go further, try implementing the community version of runZero:

https://www.runzero.com/platform/community-edition/

https://help.runzero.com/docs/self-hosting/

https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/services/runzero-community-edition

This is a network visibility tool that will discover and identify devices. To get a really complete look, you would run it from inside your network and deal with anything that you don’t think should be accessible, then run it again from outside your network to see what a potential attacker would see.

Good catch. Someone is trying to use your site as a proxy for malicious software. You should report the repository.

will only capture carbon which represents a fraction of the externalities of shipping it around.

This sort of outcome definitely concerns me. Logistics costs are so often overlooked until after they become relevant.

The best outcome for a project like this would be some machine that could pull CO₂ from the air and pump it directly into the fuel synthesizer, but I’m no chemistry expert, that could be impossible or too energy intensive to be worthwhile.

My impression is that it is usually a very different group of people saying carbon capture is an impractical solution to the people saying wind turbines or solar are a pipedream

Today, yes. In the 90s, not really. Solar and wind have benefited massively from government subsidies to develop out of the prototype stage and into proven effective technologies.

I’m not saying carbon capture is definitely effective, I’m saying there hasn’t been enough investment in the field yet to determine if it is or isn’t.

Without some means of effective carbon capture, this synthetic fuel project has no environmental benefit.

“In general terms you can reduce your emission, based on which source you take, theoretically up to 100%,” she says. “More realistically, it will be around 90–95%.”

The “based on which source you take” part is referring to where the CO₂ comes from. The emission reduction number she’s giving is for the whole cycle, not for the output of an engine burning the synthetic fuel.

Hopefully I’m wrong, but I think a lot of the carbon capture stuff will either be pipe dreams or scams.

Keep in mind, people said this about both wind turbines and solar panels in the 90s, that they would never be efficient enough to be worthwhile, that they were just money pits and the people taking government money to develop prototype projects were scammers.

Are you referring to algae biofuels? I used to see a lot of articles about that, but I haven’t seen anything recently. Last I knew, no one had really managed to develop it into an effective process. Is there something newer that you know of?

Ethanol and alcohol are both hygroscopic, they pull humidity from the air, so you end up with water content in your fuel. The higher the purity is, the worse the problem is. It’s fine if you’re burning it off regularly, but if it sits in your car for very long it can rust the inside of your engine block. Newer cars have better sealed fuel systems to prevent air intrusion, but older vehicles could be ruined by ethanol content in the fuel.

Yup.

What’s that line? “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity”?

Technically it won’t be emission-free. The idea is to derive synthesized fuel from captured CO₂. The CO₂ will be re-emitted when the fuel burns.

This research does not address the carbon capture part of the cycle, just the fuel synthesizing part.

The cycle starts with carbon dioxide (CO2) being removed from the biosphere or atmosphere and transformed into alcohols like methanol or ethanol.

This part seems problematic. There’s not a lot of specifics in the article, so I assume for the research they are just using supplied CO₂, it doesn’t sound like they’re actually doing any atmospheric gas capture and refining as part of this work.

Based on this, the fuel itself won’t be any less polluting. The green side of it depends on recapturing CO₂ from the environment, which will ultimately be released again when the fuel burns.

The biggest upshot is that this possibly creates an economic motivation for carbon capture, rather than just being a dead-end cost sink, and that might be helpful. If you can make a profit pulling CO₂ out of the atmosphere and reselling it as fuel, there might be actual demand for this technology.

Two problems:

1. The cost to implement the capture-refine-synthesize process will have to beat out the existing oil industry’s drill-pump-refine process. I doubt OPEC will be a friendly competitor.

2. Best case scenario, this turns into net-zero carbon fuel for vehicles. It doesn’t actually reduce the average level of carbon in the atmosphere, because what is capture is constantly released again. Still, if this pushes money into the carbon capture industry that could be beneficial.

The best time to build a chip fab is 10 years ago. The second best time is right now.