Next Big thing: Apple Electric Vehicle- Apple ev

Everything about electric vehicles is great accept for the batteries. Frankly I don't think they will be popular until a compact nuclear power source is realized. At least not for anything beyound a compact commuter car.

If Apple really wants to invest in the future they should be looking at clean nuclear technologies. it is a shame that the word nuclear scares people off, in the end it is far less dangerous that many of the so called green technologies.

And while they're expanding into completely unrelated businesses, how about restaurants? Applebees might be for sale. A perfect fit!

Nuclear technology is the best we have so far. The amount of nuclear material required to power a phone for 10-20 years is nothing compared to the size of the batteries we have inside them. The batteries are of course storage and not generators and they store electricity generated by nuclear power, it's just generated somewhere else but a mini nuclear reactor in every device and vehicle would be brilliant. You could pretty much remove every wire from your home and all electricity pylons and cables across every country.

The energy density of Uranium should provide about 2 billion times the energy of a AA battery in a comparable size. So to power a phone for 100 years would only need about 1/2000th of a AA's worth of nuclear material.

Of course if your phone even gets slightly warm, you're going to wet yourself.

You could post a link to that.

Hi Marvin;

The tech that I was thinking about is sometimes called Focus Fusion. If the technique can be developed we would have a relatively clean source of energy that would be suitable for larger vehicles and the like. The unfortunate thing is that new ideas in nuclear technology have a very hard time getting funding in this country. For Apple throwing a couple hundred million at these guys over the course of a five or so years wouldn't be a big deal. If the tech can be made to work the pay off would be huge.

Here are some links:

• http://focusfusion.org/
• http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus
• http://www.icdmp.pl/pf1000.html
• http://www.plasmafocus.net/
• http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysic...ment&Itemid=90
• http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/ne...-focus-fusion/

In any event even if they fail they have developed some really interesting technology. Sadly failing doesn't appear to be a technical issue so much as an issue of money. Sometimes I just want to scream at our government and its short sighted need to appease the windmill crowd. Well that in the inability to take on anything with a risk of failure. Of course there is plenty of money for welfare so that the lazy are certain to vote your way. What a pathetic government we have now.

Apple should develop their own nuclear deterrent. Then they wouldn't have to pay taxes.

Yeah, it will probably be a while before large-scale reactors scale down to pocket-size so the next step would have to be vehicles and home generators but that still would be a good step forward. You never know though, they made a tiny petrol engine the size of a fingernail:

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage...ticle80219.ece

They overcame the heat issues using ceramics. 700 times more energy than a battery and lasts 2 years on a small amount of fuel.


All they'd have to do is say that the device is needed to help with a war and they'd go for it. They'd even approve it if you said it needed stem cells to work. The military budget is enormous and the technology would in fact help a great deal in the military as vehicles wouldn't have incendiary material nor would they need refuelling in remote areas.

But then, the plan falls apart because if you have renewable energy, there's no reason to go to war.

If they get this to work I could see nuclear powered trains, trucks and construction equipment. The process is certainly worth pursuing, even if they don't succeed the science is extremely interesting.

With our luck we will have to put a catalytic converter on it.

An interesting aside; I went to Cabin Fever in York PA, which is a model engineering show with a strong lean towards engines both model and antique. The show is always worth the effort and some of the scale models (functional) are just amazing. Of course nothing that small.

There is an interesting flick that Googgle has that goes over the struggles with focus fusion fianacing. Apparently they had some DARPA funding but that got cut because the department of defense isn't authorized to do nuclear research. The department of energy isn't interested because the have their billion dollar projects to fund.

In any event look up the focus fusion talk at Googgle as I probably messed something up. In any event it highlights just how stupid our government can be at times.

No if you believe the wars in the middle east have anything to do with energy you are mistaken. The issues are complex but one look at Egypt right now should highlight just how volital the area is. There is no certainty to the outcome of the disturbances in Egypt or any other Arab country for that matter. Attitudes to the west could get worst or better.

I checked out a talk about Focus Fusion and it mentioned DARPA but one of the reasons given for lack of financing was the 6 year time to get a prototype to demonstrate net gain as well as the unstable reaction used though it makes sense if they can't fund it because of the Cold War events in the 60s. There is an article here saying the military would be happy with mini nuclear reactors:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03...ors/page3.html

so long as you can't make a bomb out of it and it can't melt the ground, which are reasonable requests. I guess that rules out Uranium:

"DARPA would like to see porta-reactor proposals able to carry a 5 to 10 megawatt electrical load in addition to producing 15,000 gallons of JP-8 or road fuel daily - enough to fill up a Chinook helicopter around a dozen times. They also want designs which are "inherently safe (negative temperature coefficient)", ie ones which can't suffer a runaway if damaged and melt their way down out of the base into a glowing tunnel in the Earth's crust."

The temperatures in Focus Fusion are still very high. For the mainstream, there needs to be a device that operates at room temperature. Trouble is, it just gets too many snake-oil salesmen into the mix. Steorn's Orbo was one using back-emf in motors. There is a recent one here with a cold fusion reactor:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-...ion-video.html

I hope someday someone pulls it off but as soon as they do press-releases with no peer-reviews and have irreproducible experiments, it's almost certain they are just scamming people.

Apple's next big thing is to make the TV set a computer. Aside from that, no other big things exist on the horizon.