Fuel From Air and Water
09-28-2009, 07:57 AM
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Fuel From Air and Water
Nuclear Energy: The Only Solution
Monday, September 28, 2009
By Frank J. Tipler
Biofuels are all the rage these days, as illustrated by a particularly silly article that appeared in the New York Times recently. It claimed that homebrew biodiesel could significantly reduce the U.S. demand for imported oil.
There is no way that ethanol from sugar, corn, or biomass is going to make a significant reduction in the U.S. demand for crude oil. Do the numbers:
The U.S. currently consumes 9.286 million barrels per day of gasoline (388.6 million gallons/day). According to the Times article cited above, between 10 and 14 pounds of sugar will be required to make a gallon of ethanol. This means that to replace the current U.S. consumption of gasoline with ethanol, which we will assume for simplicity has the same energy content per gallon as gasoline (actually a gallon of ethanol has about 80 percent the energy content of a gallon of gasoline), then we would need about two million tons of sugar per day, assuming the low end of 10 pounds of sugar per gallon.
The total sugar production of the U.S. is currently about 8 million tons per year; Mexico’s production is slightly less. So we are about a factor of 100 too low in our sugar production. This is an enormous shortfall. Just to meet the 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol per year mandated in the 2005 law has required one-third of the entire U.S. corn crop. In other words, to supply twenty days gasoline consumption, we had to use a third of all our yearly corn production.
Biomass of any type just uses surface area that could be used for other production, like trees for wood. In Brazil, they are now razing the rain forests to supply the biomass. I think the rain forests are far more valuable to humanity as rain forests. Beside the nice trees, there are also the animals that live therein.
The bottom line: solar energy, which is the source of biomass/grain/sugar, is just too diffuse to provide the energy we need for transportation.
The only solution is nuclear energy.
A recent study by Los Alamos National Laboratories shows how to manufacture gasoline from water and CO2 from the air: a nuclear reactor’s energy is used to split the hydrogen and carbon off from the oxygen in water and carbon dioxide, and to combine the two elements to create gasoline.
Los Alamos estimates that with off-the-shelf technology, the price at the pump for nuclear-generated gasoline is $4.60 per gallon, and a $5 billion off-the-shelf reactor/synthetic gasoline complex could supply 18,400 barrels per day. So to provide for current U.S. gasoline needs, we would need 500 reactors and associated complexes — a total cost of 2.5 trillion dollars, slightly more than this year’s federal budget deficit. Los Alamos also argues that modest technological improvements would be expected to halve the capital cost of the reactors and to reduce the gasoline price at the pump to $3.40 per gallon, a bit less than last summer’s U.S. average price for regular. In Europe today, the pump price is between $5.00 to $6.50 per gallon, due to high European gasoline taxes.
We’ve got the capital. Since September 2008, we have spent — completely wasted! — some $4 trillion dollars trying to get out of the financial crisis, twice the capital required.
If we assume that capital is free, then the cost of synthetic gasoline would be $2.20 a gallon — less than today’s pump price.
Furthermore, creating gasoline by using carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would just endlessly recycle the CO2 between our cars and the atmosphere. There would be no net addition of CO2 to the atmosphere. If one believes in anthropogenic global warming — I don’t — the problem is solved!
But of course, the global warming crowd doesn’t believe in carbon dioxide-caused global warming anymore than I do. The Kyoto treaty gives no credit for replacing any carbon dioxide generating energy source with nuclear energy. The Los Alamos proposal, which would reduce America’s CO2 net output from transportation to zero, would not count as reducing carbon dioxide at all.
It would be even cheaper to get the carbon for synthetic gasoline from our abundant coal reserves, using the nuclear reactor to supply the energy for the synthesis, but I’ve described only the ultimate carbon neutral synthesis.
The problems associated with conventional reactors — namely nuclear waste — were all solved in the 1980s. And there is the promising thorium reactor, which has the added advantage of being incapable of producing bomb material — the laws of physics prohibit it, so we need not depend on signing treaties to keep nukes out of the hands of terrorists with thorium reactors — and whose radioactive waste is very quickly no more radioactive than natural uranium ore. There is no real problem with radioactive waste even with current uranium reactors, provided the plutonium in the waste is removed and used to fuel reactors. Many of our reactors now are “burning” plutonium from bombs that we had to decommission as required by a treaty with the Russian Federation. Either we burn the plutonium, or it will be around for thousands of years just waiting for terrorists to recycle into bombs. If the plutonium is removed, the remaining waste becomes no more radioactive than naturally occurring pitchblende (a uranium ore) after about a century.
For decades, nuclear engineers have proposed that the waste be stored permanently in the mountains of Nevada, where it will be forever kept away from the biosphere. The politicians — won’t allow this. Instead, they prefer that the radioactive waste be kept in steel drums, where it is currently leaking into the environment in Washington State.
Biomass is, once again, dependent on solar power, which is itself too diffuse to supply the high intensity energy required for transportation. Only nuclear energy is sufficiently concentrated to supply the necessary energy in the amounts we need.
Non-physicists don’t think about energy correctly. Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, in one of his popular books, emphasized the correct way to think about energy: it is something that can be transformed from one form to another. Thus all current energy is ultimately nuclear energy, either nuclear fusion energy from the Sun or fission energy from nuclear reactors. Fission energy in turn is really stored gravitational collapse energy from supernovae, and solar hydrogen fusion is just the release of energy stored in protons created in the very early universe.
With synthetic gasoline we are just transferring the energy stored in uranium or thorium into the chemical bonds of hydrocarbons. The carbon and hydrogen are never used, just endlessly recycled through the atmosphere. In effect, using synthetic gasoline, we would run our cars on nuclear energy. But we are really doing that now.
With synthetic gasoline we need not incur the capital cost needed to switch to ethanol or hydrogen fuel cells or whatever. Ultimately these alternative stores of transportation energy would require a non-diffuse energy source, and the only such source is nuclear energy. So we will have to build the reactors anyway. Why not use a store of transportation energy that uses the current transportation infrastructure?
The free market would build the nuclear reactors, if it were allowed to do so. Only regulation and lawsuit threat keeps the CO2 and foreign oil problems unsolved. Instead of the free market, we have ridiculous government mandates for ethanol from grains. Even libertarians and conservatives like Newt Gingrich have bought into the anti-free market idea of mandating automobiles that run on multiple sources of energy. The free market knows that gasoline is the most efficient form of energy storage for transportation, given foreseeable technology, and won’t go along with Gingrich, T. Boone Pickens, and others without the application of government coercion.
Think of the alternative energy storage proposals as alternative scientific theories. Only false theories have to be imposed by force. People can always be persuaded to accept true theories.
Frank J. Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University. He is the co-author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press) and the author of The Physics of Immortality and The Physics of Christianity both published by Doubleday.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 4:47 am and is filed under Analysis, Economics, Science & Nature, Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 71 views | Trackback | Print this page |
Monday, September 28, 2009
By Frank J. Tipler
Biofuels are all the rage these days, as illustrated by a particularly silly article that appeared in the New York Times recently. It claimed that homebrew biodiesel could significantly reduce the U.S. demand for imported oil.
There is no way that ethanol from sugar, corn, or biomass is going to make a significant reduction in the U.S. demand for crude oil. Do the numbers:
The U.S. currently consumes 9.286 million barrels per day of gasoline (388.6 million gallons/day). According to the Times article cited above, between 10 and 14 pounds of sugar will be required to make a gallon of ethanol. This means that to replace the current U.S. consumption of gasoline with ethanol, which we will assume for simplicity has the same energy content per gallon as gasoline (actually a gallon of ethanol has about 80 percent the energy content of a gallon of gasoline), then we would need about two million tons of sugar per day, assuming the low end of 10 pounds of sugar per gallon.
The total sugar production of the U.S. is currently about 8 million tons per year; Mexico’s production is slightly less. So we are about a factor of 100 too low in our sugar production. This is an enormous shortfall. Just to meet the 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol per year mandated in the 2005 law has required one-third of the entire U.S. corn crop. In other words, to supply twenty days gasoline consumption, we had to use a third of all our yearly corn production.
Biomass of any type just uses surface area that could be used for other production, like trees for wood. In Brazil, they are now razing the rain forests to supply the biomass. I think the rain forests are far more valuable to humanity as rain forests. Beside the nice trees, there are also the animals that live therein.
The bottom line: solar energy, which is the source of biomass/grain/sugar, is just too diffuse to provide the energy we need for transportation.
The only solution is nuclear energy.
A recent study by Los Alamos National Laboratories shows how to manufacture gasoline from water and CO2 from the air: a nuclear reactor’s energy is used to split the hydrogen and carbon off from the oxygen in water and carbon dioxide, and to combine the two elements to create gasoline.
Los Alamos estimates that with off-the-shelf technology, the price at the pump for nuclear-generated gasoline is $4.60 per gallon, and a $5 billion off-the-shelf reactor/synthetic gasoline complex could supply 18,400 barrels per day. So to provide for current U.S. gasoline needs, we would need 500 reactors and associated complexes — a total cost of 2.5 trillion dollars, slightly more than this year’s federal budget deficit. Los Alamos also argues that modest technological improvements would be expected to halve the capital cost of the reactors and to reduce the gasoline price at the pump to $3.40 per gallon, a bit less than last summer’s U.S. average price for regular. In Europe today, the pump price is between $5.00 to $6.50 per gallon, due to high European gasoline taxes.
We’ve got the capital. Since September 2008, we have spent — completely wasted! — some $4 trillion dollars trying to get out of the financial crisis, twice the capital required.
If we assume that capital is free, then the cost of synthetic gasoline would be $2.20 a gallon — less than today’s pump price.
Furthermore, creating gasoline by using carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would just endlessly recycle the CO2 between our cars and the atmosphere. There would be no net addition of CO2 to the atmosphere. If one believes in anthropogenic global warming — I don’t — the problem is solved!
But of course, the global warming crowd doesn’t believe in carbon dioxide-caused global warming anymore than I do. The Kyoto treaty gives no credit for replacing any carbon dioxide generating energy source with nuclear energy. The Los Alamos proposal, which would reduce America’s CO2 net output from transportation to zero, would not count as reducing carbon dioxide at all.
It would be even cheaper to get the carbon for synthetic gasoline from our abundant coal reserves, using the nuclear reactor to supply the energy for the synthesis, but I’ve described only the ultimate carbon neutral synthesis.
The problems associated with conventional reactors — namely nuclear waste — were all solved in the 1980s. And there is the promising thorium reactor, which has the added advantage of being incapable of producing bomb material — the laws of physics prohibit it, so we need not depend on signing treaties to keep nukes out of the hands of terrorists with thorium reactors — and whose radioactive waste is very quickly no more radioactive than natural uranium ore. There is no real problem with radioactive waste even with current uranium reactors, provided the plutonium in the waste is removed and used to fuel reactors. Many of our reactors now are “burning” plutonium from bombs that we had to decommission as required by a treaty with the Russian Federation. Either we burn the plutonium, or it will be around for thousands of years just waiting for terrorists to recycle into bombs. If the plutonium is removed, the remaining waste becomes no more radioactive than naturally occurring pitchblende (a uranium ore) after about a century.
For decades, nuclear engineers have proposed that the waste be stored permanently in the mountains of Nevada, where it will be forever kept away from the biosphere. The politicians — won’t allow this. Instead, they prefer that the radioactive waste be kept in steel drums, where it is currently leaking into the environment in Washington State.
Biomass is, once again, dependent on solar power, which is itself too diffuse to supply the high intensity energy required for transportation. Only nuclear energy is sufficiently concentrated to supply the necessary energy in the amounts we need.
Non-physicists don’t think about energy correctly. Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, in one of his popular books, emphasized the correct way to think about energy: it is something that can be transformed from one form to another. Thus all current energy is ultimately nuclear energy, either nuclear fusion energy from the Sun or fission energy from nuclear reactors. Fission energy in turn is really stored gravitational collapse energy from supernovae, and solar hydrogen fusion is just the release of energy stored in protons created in the very early universe.
With synthetic gasoline we are just transferring the energy stored in uranium or thorium into the chemical bonds of hydrocarbons. The carbon and hydrogen are never used, just endlessly recycled through the atmosphere. In effect, using synthetic gasoline, we would run our cars on nuclear energy. But we are really doing that now.
With synthetic gasoline we need not incur the capital cost needed to switch to ethanol or hydrogen fuel cells or whatever. Ultimately these alternative stores of transportation energy would require a non-diffuse energy source, and the only such source is nuclear energy. So we will have to build the reactors anyway. Why not use a store of transportation energy that uses the current transportation infrastructure?
The free market would build the nuclear reactors, if it were allowed to do so. Only regulation and lawsuit threat keeps the CO2 and foreign oil problems unsolved. Instead of the free market, we have ridiculous government mandates for ethanol from grains. Even libertarians and conservatives like Newt Gingrich have bought into the anti-free market idea of mandating automobiles that run on multiple sources of energy. The free market knows that gasoline is the most efficient form of energy storage for transportation, given foreseeable technology, and won’t go along with Gingrich, T. Boone Pickens, and others without the application of government coercion.
Think of the alternative energy storage proposals as alternative scientific theories. Only false theories have to be imposed by force. People can always be persuaded to accept true theories.
Frank J. Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University. He is the co-author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press) and the author of The Physics of Immortality and The Physics of Christianity both published by Doubleday.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 4:47 am and is filed under Analysis, Economics, Science & Nature, Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 71 views | Trackback | Print this page |
Last edited by jungle; 09-28-2009 at 08:55 AM.
09-28-2009, 01:41 PM
#2
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Jan 2007
Position: 150 left seat if I'm lucky
Posts: 172
I wish people would get off corn. Cellulosic ethanol is much more promising. Also it's a fallacy to say researching any alternative power source is a waste of time if it cannot replace ALL of our needs, rather than just a portion.
That said, it WOULD be nice if we could follow the lead of countries like FRANCE and build more reactors. If you think that environmentalists are the sole problem, however, you'd be wrong, the biggest problem is capital costs. The only reason France is able to do it is because the state is eating the enormous capital costs which private companies don't see the point in when they could build a coal, oil, or natural gas plant and charge less per kWh. Despite the fact that the raw materials and waste disposal costs for fossil fuel plants are MORE than a comparable nuclear plant, the capital costs of making the nuclear plant cannot be paid back over its projected lifetime without charging significantly more per kWh. It's not a coincidence that the only US nuclear plant being built is being done by the TVA.
That said, it WOULD be nice if we could follow the lead of countries like FRANCE and build more reactors. If you think that environmentalists are the sole problem, however, you'd be wrong, the biggest problem is capital costs. The only reason France is able to do it is because the state is eating the enormous capital costs which private companies don't see the point in when they could build a coal, oil, or natural gas plant and charge less per kWh. Despite the fact that the raw materials and waste disposal costs for fossil fuel plants are MORE than a comparable nuclear plant, the capital costs of making the nuclear plant cannot be paid back over its projected lifetime without charging significantly more per kWh. It's not a coincidence that the only US nuclear plant being built is being done by the TVA.
09-28-2009, 04:13 PM
#3
Moderator
Joined APC: May 2006
Position: ATP, CFI etc.
Posts: 6,056
I am not an authority on much anything except how to make a good cup of coffee, but my readings on this tell me this author is wrong. I agree that home-brewed biofuel is not the way to go, but you can keep the rest of this.
1. Nuclear energy is always very strongly opposed and disliked by the general taxpayer. This is not to pass judgment on it one way or the other, just to say it is going to be a very hard selling 500 more nuclear sites in the US.
2. The author claims that biomass sources of biofuel are too diffuse to produce enough energy to supply our fuel needs, and that they are in competition with better uses of the land for things like food, trees, rain forests, livestock, housing etc. but this is not shown to be true and there is strong evidence that it is not true. For example, camelina, jatropha, switchgrass and algae are sources of biomass for fuel manufacturing and none of them use arable or otherwise useful land. We could even put this sort of fuel source out on the oceans for that matter. We are not short of land for growing biomass plants.
3. I do not think most surface vehicles for short range applications should ultimately run on liquid fuels anyway, no matter how the fuel is made. My readings tell me that some sort of battery technology will arrive fairly soon after which point it will be far better to have electricity than gas or diesel. Even without new batteries, enough electricity for cars and trucks can be made from wind power and other renewable sources. I doubt these "green" sources would cost as much as going totally nuclear. His argument that the cost in terms of retooling of the world's cars and trucks to use electricity is not very good, if you consider they all wear out anyway and have to be replaced. The cost of replacement will be there either way. Why not use that opportunity to go to electric? The cost is a bit prohibitive right now, but with larger volumes of production the costs will go way down.
4. Hydrocarbon fuels can be made from water using other sources than nuclear fission or fusion. The Navy is experimenting with seawater for example, here is a news story from my thread Future 737.
5. He says solar energy is diffuse and it is, but not too diffuse. There are many types of mature solar technologies available and it is possible to gather it up. Wind farms, solar arrays, geothermal systems, on and on, and these systems can even be located in or on the oceans. No doubt it will require a large number of transmission lines to gather enough for most of our energy needs, but the advantage of solar is the immense, unlimited, and renewable nature of the energy. There is no greater source of energy available on the planet and as the author says, solar is a direct byproduct of nuclear fission in the Sun. He seems to be making the argument that going directly to nuclear is somehow more efficient, but the argument has no substance because solar energy is already abundantly supplied and can be easily changed into a usable form (electricity).
6. If you take a side in the anthropomorphic-global warming debate (and like the author, I do not), then making more hydrocarbon fuels like gasoline is not a very good idea. He goes on to say that making it out of the CO in the normal atmosphere is a way to do it without adding any from coal or other traditional sources. The idea according to the global warming crowd is we need to remove all the surplus carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere, not leave it there cycling around even if the cycle is a zero-sum-gain equation. He needs to make more convincing the argument that enough CO can be extracted from ordinary air to make fuel via nuclear fission without tilting the proper atmospheric balance. He would have to show that nuclear-derived fuels can be made with a very small amount of the normal quantity of CO in the atmosphere, and that taking it out to make liquid fuels would not upset that balance.
It's an interesting article, but not very convincing.
1. Nuclear energy is always very strongly opposed and disliked by the general taxpayer. This is not to pass judgment on it one way or the other, just to say it is going to be a very hard selling 500 more nuclear sites in the US.
2. The author claims that biomass sources of biofuel are too diffuse to produce enough energy to supply our fuel needs, and that they are in competition with better uses of the land for things like food, trees, rain forests, livestock, housing etc. but this is not shown to be true and there is strong evidence that it is not true. For example, camelina, jatropha, switchgrass and algae are sources of biomass for fuel manufacturing and none of them use arable or otherwise useful land. We could even put this sort of fuel source out on the oceans for that matter. We are not short of land for growing biomass plants.
3. I do not think most surface vehicles for short range applications should ultimately run on liquid fuels anyway, no matter how the fuel is made. My readings tell me that some sort of battery technology will arrive fairly soon after which point it will be far better to have electricity than gas or diesel. Even without new batteries, enough electricity for cars and trucks can be made from wind power and other renewable sources. I doubt these "green" sources would cost as much as going totally nuclear. His argument that the cost in terms of retooling of the world's cars and trucks to use electricity is not very good, if you consider they all wear out anyway and have to be replaced. The cost of replacement will be there either way. Why not use that opportunity to go to electric? The cost is a bit prohibitive right now, but with larger volumes of production the costs will go way down.
4. Hydrocarbon fuels can be made from water using other sources than nuclear fission or fusion. The Navy is experimenting with seawater for example, here is a news story from my thread Future 737.
5. He says solar energy is diffuse and it is, but not too diffuse. There are many types of mature solar technologies available and it is possible to gather it up. Wind farms, solar arrays, geothermal systems, on and on, and these systems can even be located in or on the oceans. No doubt it will require a large number of transmission lines to gather enough for most of our energy needs, but the advantage of solar is the immense, unlimited, and renewable nature of the energy. There is no greater source of energy available on the planet and as the author says, solar is a direct byproduct of nuclear fission in the Sun. He seems to be making the argument that going directly to nuclear is somehow more efficient, but the argument has no substance because solar energy is already abundantly supplied and can be easily changed into a usable form (electricity).
6. If you take a side in the anthropomorphic-global warming debate (and like the author, I do not), then making more hydrocarbon fuels like gasoline is not a very good idea. He goes on to say that making it out of the CO in the normal atmosphere is a way to do it without adding any from coal or other traditional sources. The idea according to the global warming crowd is we need to remove all the surplus carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere, not leave it there cycling around even if the cycle is a zero-sum-gain equation. He needs to make more convincing the argument that enough CO can be extracted from ordinary air to make fuel via nuclear fission without tilting the proper atmospheric balance. He would have to show that nuclear-derived fuels can be made with a very small amount of the normal quantity of CO in the atmosphere, and that taking it out to make liquid fuels would not upset that balance.
It's an interesting article, but not very convincing.
10-01-2009, 12:32 PM
#4
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Mar 2007
Position: Capt
Posts: 3,215
Hi!
Nuclear is THE energy source we need to smoothly make the transition away from oil/coal to renewable energy.
Will we get enough nuclear power in time to make the transition easily?
Probably not. Too bad for us!
cliff
NBO
Nuclear is THE energy source we need to smoothly make the transition away from oil/coal to renewable energy.
Will we get enough nuclear power in time to make the transition easily?
Probably not. Too bad for us!
cliff
NBO
10-04-2009, 06:15 PM
#6
Moderator
Joined APC: May 2006
Position: ATP, CFI etc.
Posts: 6,056
One of the things they taught me in aerospace school was that as leading engineers, we must learn to gauge public reaction to any form of new technology we plan to introduce. Specifically, I made a report predicting how likely my design for a supersonic airliner would fare in terms of public opinion felt through Congress. I made the case that I thought it would be likely for my design to overturn current laws against S/S airplanes over the continental US because of published research showing that if sound pressure levels were kept to such a level, people would not care if we flew around at such speeds. Short of miracles these designs- and public opinions- were unlikely.
Nuclear energy may be a wonderful solution of itself, but the general public has to be ready in order for it to happen. Show me the evidence the general populace will accept a nuclear plant in every other county and I'll gladly come to your side.
Nuclear energy may be a wonderful solution of itself, but the general public has to be ready in order for it to happen. Show me the evidence the general populace will accept a nuclear plant in every other county and I'll gladly come to your side.
Last edited by Cubdriver; 10-04-2009 at 06:26 PM.
10-05-2009, 06:45 AM
#7
Libertarian Resistance
Joined APC: Feb 2007
Position: 757 FO
Posts: 1,057
Originally Posted by Cubdriver
One of the things they taught me in aerospace school was that as leading engineers, we must learn to gauge public reaction to any form of new technology we plan to introduce. Specifically, I made a report predicting how likely my design for a supersonic airliner would fare in terms of public opinion felt through Congress. I made the case that I thought it would be likely for my design to overturn current laws against S/S airplanes over the continental US because of published research showing that if sound pressure levels were kept to such a level, people would not care if we flew around at such speeds. Short of miracles these designs- and public opinions- were unlikely.
Nuclear energy may be a wonderful solution of itself, but the general public has to be ready in order for it to happen. Show me the evidence the general populace will accept a nuclear plant in every other county and I'll gladly come to your side.
Nuclear energy may be a wonderful solution of itself, but the general public has to be ready in order for it to happen. Show me the evidence the general populace will accept a nuclear plant in every other county and I'll gladly come to your side.
What if the government promoted nukes like they do windmills and solar panels? What if they seriously addressed the problem of nuclear waste and recycling? People that can be convinced that CO2 controls the weather could surely be convinced that nuclear power isn't so bad.
WW
11-03-2009, 06:11 PM
#8
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Sep 2007
Position: 777 Captain in Training
Posts: 1,457
3. I do not think most surface vehicles for short range applications should ultimately run on liquid fuels anyway, no matter how the fuel is made. My readings tell me that some sort of battery technology will arrive fairly soon after which point it will be far better to have electricity than gas or diesel. Even without new batteries, enough electricity for cars and trucks can be made from wind power and other renewable sources. I doubt these "green" sources would cost as much as going totally nuclear. His argument that the cost in terms of retooling of the world's cars and trucks to use electricity is not very good, if you consider they all wear out anyway and have to be replaced. The cost of replacement will be there either way. Why not use that opportunity to go to electric? The cost is a bit prohibitive right now, but with larger volumes of production the costs will go way down.
Why? What about the disposal of batteries? You really think that if all the short range vehicles were battery driven they could be powered by solar/wind only. Nuclear and hydrogen is a better answer.
Why? What about the disposal of batteries? You really think that if all the short range vehicles were battery driven they could be powered by solar/wind only. Nuclear and hydrogen is a better answer.
11-04-2009, 10:25 AM
#9
pants on the ground
Joined APC: Jan 2007
Position: back seat
Posts: 1,358
i like this idea better...
OSU Scientists Able To Harness "Plankton Power"
I'm not expert but the world is something like 70% water. Also, plankton is food for fish/whales(both of which are dwindling away) and plankton is also know to pull massive amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere as it photosynthesizes.
EarthTalk: Affordable Eco-Friendly Cars; The Consequences of Dying Plankton on the World's Oceans
OSU Scientists Able To Harness "Plankton Power"
I'm not expert but the world is something like 70% water. Also, plankton is food for fish/whales(both of which are dwindling away) and plankton is also know to pull massive amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere as it photosynthesizes.
EarthTalk: Affordable Eco-Friendly Cars; The Consequences of Dying Plankton on the World's Oceans
11-05-2009, 04:59 PM
#10
Moderator
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Position: ATP, CFI etc.
Posts: 6,056
Originally Posted by HIFLYR
Why? What about the disposal of batteries? You really think that if all the short range vehicles were battery driven they could be powered by solar/wind only. Nuclear and hydrogen is a better answer.
So, a large scale shift to nuclear energy is problematic because even ignoring the huge political obstacles, the issue of radioactive waste simply sticks around too long. If you think all of it can be recycled, please produce some decent sources. Best estimates put it at about 80% which is not bad, but dealing with radioactive waste is a tough (and serious) problem with that kind of energy. No one wants hundreds of years or more worth of large-scale radioactive waste production from US reactors still here for the people of the earth in ten thousand years. Having the ability to produce it does not necessarily include an ethical license to do it.
Wiki on Nuclear power.
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