I like the convenience of batteries. Just good ones, for example, lithium primary cells like what they put in 10 year smoke alarms contain more energy than alkaline, last like 5 times as long in "standby" role, won't crud up the battery compartment by leaking, they're much lighter, etc...

Don't like the cost, but oh well.

They have their own communication channels for that.

However, part of national security is keeping the civilians alive and relatively unharmed. The idea is that with the infrastructure in an area being fubar, you can use AM radio from elsewhere to spread information like evac routes, how to get clean water, when to expect rescue, etc...

When everybody had at least an AM radio that could run off batteries or crank, useful.

All the cell phones jamming up duing emergencies and being useless if the towers are down...

Why yes, my somewhat paranoid self has a battery operated radio still.

Well, if they're willing to drop AM radio in order to "save a few bucks", which really translates to "make a few more bucks", couldn't the fact that AM radio competes, at least some of the time, with satellite radio, which over the life of the car would add up to quite a few more bucks, be a possible motivation?

Remember, going higher doesn't necessarily mean getting somebody who knows how. Especially when you go to the government and not the bank's troubleshooter employees.

I'm just saying that I read a very similar story once, and they were able to stop the charges the 2nd/3rd time around, but he actually had to go into the bank and work with somebody.

Their attitude was "tough luck"?

My response would be simple: You just gave away your own money. I didn't authorize the account to be re-opened, for that recurring charge to be authorized, etc... You just illegally opened an account in my name without my authorization. Go bug that company for your money back if you want. I'm not paying. I will back that up with legal action if necessary.

Fortunately, I've never had to do that.

I'd imagine that they'd have reported the uber eats somebody else was ordering as fraudulent.

I've heard of banks eventually figuring out how to prevent said charges, but you have to get somebody who knows how. Keep disputing the charges. They should figure it out.

Indeed. Cases where canceling the card may be a valid option - and note, you have to cancel the card, IE drop the card with that bank completely, not just get a replacement card, would be things like gym memberships, car wash subscriptions*, etc...

I almost signed up for a car wash subscription, as bonus it covers a number of washes in the general area - but it automatically renews every month, and you must cancel at the store you signed up at. They billed being unable to cancel otherwise as a "Security feature". Oh, the employee said they'd totally allow me to cancel over the phone - but that isn't in the written contract. So no, I didn't sign up.

Epic battles to cancel gym memberships have been all over reddit at times. They're known offenders as well.

*Pay a fee and get unlimited car washes every month.

I was aware that there's pumps in filling stations currently for hydrogen, but I wasn't aware that they had an intermediate tank that could delay the fueling of the next car. That could be solved, of course, by delivering higher pressure hydrogen more often, by including a bladder that you can fill up to keep the larger tank at pressure - but that would increase maintenance costs as well.

I was NOT figuring on the hydrogen fuel tank having a seriously limited life necessitating regular replacement. Replacing the fuel cell was an issue that I forgot to mention.

While recycling fuel cells to recover the rare earths is possible, unlike a battery you're flowing a lot of material through it - some of the degradation is from the catalysts literally wearing away, not recoverable.

Result is, though, hydrogen is even more expensive and makes even less sense than what I figured, and it was already something of a landslide win for the battery side. Which brings up another point: BEVs get to take advantage of regenerative braking to reduce energy useage. But with a fuel cell vehicle, unless you include a battery anyways, like a hybrid, it's going to have to scrub energy just like an ICE vehicle. That will increase hydrogen useage considerably.

Put in a battery to get regeneration, and you're back to needing to maintain it, deal with its weight, etc... Would also probably allow you to make the fuel cell smaller.

But then you run into - just make the battery bigger, get rid of the fuel cell, and you have a simpler system that can recharge just about anywhere there's electricity, doesn't need all the hydrogen stuff, and actually lasts longer without high-cost replacement of parts.

Pretty much. Anything that shortens the war tends to lower casualties, both military and civilian. A long term grind like in Ukraine right now is about the worst type of war to suffer.

And it's not like Russia is going to stop using cluster munitions, including ones with 50%+ failure rates, unless they literally can't get or build the components for them anymore. Denying them western parts just makes the problem worse. Well, on the UXO front. I'll generally take a UXO any day over a munition actually exploding on target.

Perhaps so, but it's not "that would work", it's "it does work", as in it is operational today.

Like I said - "designed for that exact purpose".

And if you're taking huge loads up from an open cast mine, well, I've seen giant conveyors used to do that instead, and you can relatively easily run those off the grid. Avoid having to constantly haul the mass of a truck up out of the pit, just the relatively light conveyor belt - and you even much of the conveyor belt energy back when that portion heads down again. So the belt only has frictional losses to worry about.

I remember reading up on cluster munitions and the banning stuff.

Okay, the problem with cluster bombs is that generally speaking, you pay attention to the fusing mechanism on a 500 or 2k pound bomb. You're dropping a lot of explosives there, of course. Even if it fails, you only have a single UXO.

With cluster bombs, a lot of places "skimped" on the fuses. So you could have a failure rate of 20% or more where they don't go boom, so from a single cluster bomb you could end up with like 40 UXOs to worry about. Less damage individually, but still plenty to really cause harm if they explode, for example if a curious child picks one up and takes it home.

The USA did a deliberate development on this stuff - mines that automatically disarm themselves after X time, cluster munitions with failure rates under 1%, etc... So they fixed the problems that people had with the munitions. Which is why the USA tends to refuse to sign the bans.

Russia, of course, is dumping "forever" mines all over the place, as well as cluster munitions. It's going to be as bad or worse than much of Europe after WWII on the UXO front for quite a while.

Actually, I'd argue that "electric heavy duty trucks" range between "drastically more economical than diesel" all the way to "yeah, no."

When you move to heavy duty equipment, it generally tends to be for very specific tasks, and designed for that exact purpose.
So, on the "drastically more economical" end, you have that gigantic electric dump truck that never needs charging - it picks up a load up a mountain, regenerative brakes on the way down, and has picked up enough energy from that to go back up afterwards. On the "yeah, no" side, you have long haul trucking, I'd say.

Probably about the same as EV cars would be local transport, short haul day cab stuff. Pepsi has a number of routes that are very limited mileage, where they start with a fully loaded semi, visiting the local grocery stores. Most of the routes are less than 100 miles, take all day, and consist of a lot of stop and go. Then the semi can be plugged in overnight to charge back up. They seem to view the electric semis they got as working much better than the diesels. I will fully admit that this is a "worst case" scenario for diesel efficiency, of course. But for Pepsi, those routes are predictable, they can fully buy trucks to take that into account. Including, if it doesn't make sense, having a few diesels for the longer routes that actually get onto highways.

For now, those team-driving a semi should probably stick with diesel.

Arguably, due to recycling (which is coming online), battery materials only have to be mined sort of once for the total capacity of batteries produced - IE you can recycle and get close to 100% of the materials back.
So, in a theoretical future where we've reached a stable state of total EV capacity, we'd only need to mine enough to replace materials lost during recycling, accidents like fires where the elements end up re-oxidized and released, etc... Maybe 2-5% of each battery.

Don't forget that fuel cells are also, besides lasting less time than modern batteries, also hilariously more expensive for the power level needed. At least right now, and more development is necessary to bring that price down, not just expansion to a good economy of scale. This is primarily because they also use rare earth elements to operate.
Note: Most EV batteries have plenty of power capability once they're big enough to provide enough energy for decent range. But you need like 40kW and up for a fuel cell.

Power: How fast you can get energy out, watts
Energy: How much energy, kWh, joules, etc...

Steam reformation of methane is the primary method of producing hydrogen for things like rockets today. And all the other industrial uses of hydrogen.

So "steam reformation" very much exists.

Now, steam reformation to convert H2O into H2 and O2? As Londo Mollari says, that basically doesn't exist today, at least not outside of laboratories. It's a relatively simple process if you can get the temperature high enough.

This process would normally use some electrolysis, which generally would give you the H2 and O2 in separate spots that you can then use as reasonably pure sources.

If they're produced in a mixed state, well, cool to 70K and you can just let the now liquid O2 flow out, while keeping the still gaseous hydrogen going elsewhere. Use a backflow heat exchanger to keep the process reasonably efficient. If you pressurize to ~50 bar, you'd only need to chill it to ~155K.

Or use some sort of molecular sieve, like with desalination. O2 is a relatively big molecule, H2 very small. The membrane shouldn't be hard.

When I did the analysis, using the electricity with conventional battery powered EVs did make better fiscal sense. It's a back of napkin analysis, of course.
1. You can make electricity from nuclear power, especially if you're using a GenIV reactor, with relatively high efficiency. Current nuclear is around 30% due to Carnot cycle limitations - you can only keep water liquid at limited temperatures, even at extreme pressures. If you switch to molten salt/metal, you can drastically increase temperatures, which increases electricity efficiency - you go from 30% to 50% (roughly). Which means you go from 3GWt producing 1GWe to 2GWt producing 1 GWe, meaning you go from having to dispose of 2GW of heat down to 1GW. You just cut your cooling demands in half.
Anyways, you want the new reactor designs if you're going to be producing hydrogen because the current plants don't get hot enough. But they can produce hydrogen using mostly heat. WNA predicts "50% or more", up from 25% current, using "direct thermochemical production" - which requires over 1000C. Given that current reactors are limited to around 300C...
Conclusion: Hydrogen and Electrical production efficiency around equal.
2. Compression: This is something that electricity doesn't have, but you're going to use around 8% of the energy potential of the hydrogen just to compress it: ~2.6 kWh/kg. There's 33.33 kWh/kilogram of Hydrogen. So even if you're using direct thermo from nuclear to produce the hydrogen, you're still going to want a turbine to produce electricity just to power pumps to render the hydrogen into a practical form for storage (though I suppose you could also use direct mechanical from steam turbines for that, but electrical is more controllable). That's 1k bar, you'd save some energy, most hydrogen cars are 700 bar, but that raises a question: Do you compress more to make shipping more compact and not need pumps at the station, or do you pressurize to 700 bar, and now need some sort of pumping system at fueling points... I used 1k bar because that's what the internet popped out when I searched.
3. Distribution: With electricity you can use the existing power grid, though at some point you obviously want to beef it up. With hydrogen production from nuclear power, you'd need to ship it everywhere. Shipping hydrogen is a pain because it likes to leak out of everything and anything. This means either hydrogen trucks or piping. While you can apparently retask some natural gas piping with minimal refits at acceptable leak rates*, it still probably means a lot of new piping, as opposed to just upgrading electrical lines more and faster.
4. Use: If you think batteries are expensive, wait until you see fuel cell prices. Sure, you can use an ICE with hydrogen, but then you're down at ICE efficiency levels. Worried about rare earth use in batteries, fuel cells use the really pricy stuff, and they have limited lifespans as well. Overall efficiency with hydrogen is also less than battery. Which, if you want to bring that up, means you still need a traction battery, like with a hybrid car, because otherwise you're not storing braking energy to really boost efficiency.
5. Weight: Sure, the hydrogen is the highest energy density stuff by mass going. It's also one of the least energy dense ones by volume. And getting the volume down enough to be practical requires high pressure - 700 bar for hydrogen cars. A PWR reactor is a bit over 200 Bar. You end up with the same problem as batteries - the storage vessel ends up weighing enough to be a significant factor in mileage, and that weight doesn't really drop as you drive.

*Tiny leaks aren't actually a fire hazard; the hydrogen disperses too fast.