I'm not pushing hydrogen. But the other guy brought it up. My point was that there is no special relationship between hydrogen and nuclear versus hydrogen and other ways of making electricity.
AIUI, fuel cells are practically essential for spacecraft, because the byproducts are electricity and pure water. Solar cells are an alternative, but it seems they don't use them everywhere if I recall the pictures.
And in the city they are at least potentially useful because they don't make noise and they don't pollute (the pollution is made at the power plant, where perhaps it can be controlled better than at individual gas or ethanol engines. I expect sure ethanol makes some sort of pollution, no?)
And they are lighter than lead-acid batteries, or any rechargeable batteries I think.
Not really. With a declining population, alternative solutions have a chance of meeting demand. With a growing population, no matter what solutions are tried, sooner or later, we run out of resources.
Cut all you want. With more and more people, in the long run, something breaks.
If you remember the Bush / Kerry presidential debates, it was Bush that made political hay out of saying he would not authorize the use of Yucca mountain.
Is he the anti-nuclear obstructionist you are thinking of?
Well, I was thinking about the hydrogen car being in a collision with a semi. She'd be blowed up REAL good. With proprane, I only thought "how much can happen between the hardware store and my house". Propane car rail accidents never occurred to me.
AHH, but studies of the emissions from coal plants show clearly that the amount of radiation vented to the atmosphere from coal plants EXCEEDS normal annual radiation released from a nuclear plant!!!!
There is a very low level of radioactivity in coal. When you burn ALOT of it, the radiation gets released. Thorium and uranium are present in very nearly MINE ABLE quantities in the ash that gets trapped in the waste pile.
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This link explains some of the hazards of coal fired plants.
In the 1950s I lived near a town that processed lots of wood into paper and lumber products. Those processes needed LOTS of high pressure steam heat. The plants were in a valley in the mountains of North Carolina. Coal was the fuel of choice for these plants, HUGE piles of it were lying around on the ground surrounding the boilers. The stink was awful, you had to roll up the windows (no AC in cars those days), hold your breath and close your eyes (eyes burned)
Course those plants did not have fly ash precipitators on them and all coal power plants now have such, capturing over 99% of the ash before reaching the atmosphere.
I can see where you would think I was directly linking them, because I do believe nuclear makes the most sense for the energy source to generate hydrogen.
One key reason is because it preserves hydrogen's zero green house gas emissions, which is one of the key points about hydrogen that it's proponents always proclaim. The problem is that the hydrogen has to come from somewhere and you need a lot of it. Currently most of it is generated from natural gas, but that isn't a very viable solution, because the supply of natural gas is also constrained and the price is way up. If you go to coal, which is in abundance, then you have lots of CO2 emissions, which there isn't any viable way to eliminate, as well as other pollutants to deal with. So, if you want to generate hydrogen as a fuel for cars, nuclear seems to me to be the most workable solution.
The problem here that I think we agree on, is that there is no easy solution and no free lunch. Which is why I get annoyed when I see folks claiming all we need to do is use hydrogen, that it's plentiful because it's contained in water, it's all not happening because of some conspiracy, etc. Many do this out of ignorance, but some know better, but just want to ignore it, because they have their own agenda.
You're correct. The plants I'm familiar with are required to add 5% gasoline to the alcohol they produce to denature it. It can be denatured with other things but gasoline is easiest for them.
When compared to gasoline, you won't get an argument that ethanol can't give you the energy output that gasoline can. But, it does have sufficient energy output to drive a vehicle and, when added in amounts around 10%, ethanol has beneficial environmental effects and the mix is not as energy inefficient as pure ethanol because of the improved burning of the gasoline portion of the mix.
Nature, left to it's own devices, came up with a fantastic process to capture energy from the sunlight. We've been deriving benefits from that process for years as we pump crude oil from the ground, crude oil that the photosynthetic process enabled natural earth processes to store away. Eventually, that storehouse will be depleted. Can we replace it with some renewable fuel source? We'd better be able to. Will it be fuel ethanol derived from grain? Definitely not completely. Could it be fuel ethanol derived from cellulosic materials? Yes, if that process is sufficiently perfected. More likely, it will be replaced by a mix of technologies.
There's a lot of concern that the use of corn for manufacturing fuel ethanol primarily benefits the corn producer. I think that the folks who voice this concern miss that fact that every form of energy that we use benefits some more that others, i.e., OPEC, the crude producers, drilling equipment manufacturers and the people who drill wells, oil companies, coal producers, natural gas suppliers, electricity producers, and on and on.
You can bet that the fuel ethanol plants currently operating aren't losing money. Those on the drawing boards, and there are a considerable number planned, will never be built if it looks like they'll lose money.
Again, let the marketplace decide if it's weak and wasteful. The marketplace in this country is very efficient at ferreting out inefficient processes.
I'm pretty sure that the BATF requires you to poison (err... "de-nature") any alcohol that's not intended and stamped for human consumption, but you shouldn't then be subject to the 26 USC 5001 taxes on spirits, which IIRC, is about $13.50/gallon.
325 Terrawatts-hours/month. (or, around 437,158,602 kilowatts, continuously.)
For comparison, the solar power density at earths orbital distance is around 1.4 kilowatts/meter.(1) So an orbiting solar plant, in full sun, with 100% conversion efficiency, only needs around 312 square kilometers of solar collector.
About half of the available energy hitting the top of the atmosphere makes it to the surface. About half the time, any given part of the planet is in darkness. Divide by 2 again to account for dawn/evening, and the fact that your solar plants aren't on the equator. Optomistically, current technology allows for around 20% conversion.
So 312 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 5 ~= 25,000 sq. km is needed to replace the current electric generating capacity of the US with solar.
That's certainly do-able. I mean, it's only a chunk of land the size of Macedonia. I'm pretty sure AOL has mailed out enough CDs to make the reflectors.. (or maybe maryland. Can we pave maryland? PLEASE????)
(1) Numbers from sources more than about a decade old will be around 10% less than this, the difference appears to be an increase in solar energy output.
And a country that's already trillions of dollars in debt has to cough up trillions more dollars to build the nukes and infrastructure. The money comes up front, present generations benefit and future generations get stuck with the bill. China already holds over 20% of US debt; if you stay this course, the communists will own America.
A multiple front attack on the problem is inevitable. There is no silver bullet, but a lot of smaller changes have some hope of getting us a lot closer to the solution.
And unfortunately, most people claim these pissers and moaners are all left-wing environmentalists, In fact, right-wing politicians in the back pockets of special interest groups are just as much of a problem.
You do know that there are propane-powered cars, don't you?
They do to me, because my grandfather was transportation manager for a very large oil company (since morphed twice), and he got to supervise the results as well as interact with his peers in industry/government on how to avoid the problems repeating themselves.
There was a major accident back I think in the late 50's/early 60's where a propane derailment just north of Toronto seemed to be just fine - no fire, everything seemed secure.
Hours later, while they were trying to assess/extricate stuff, a safety OP valve on one car popped, and the propane flowed downhill almost half a mile before encountering an ignition source. Then flashed back to the derailment site... Which happened to be adjacent to a fuel storage area... It didn't all go up, but it wasn't nice at all. Fortunately, there was no homes near it.
[This isn't the "great Mississauga train derailment" which was many years later, it had propane, and it burned reasonably innocuously - it was spectacular because they had to evacuate something like 200,000 people for a couple days. The thing they were scared of was the chlorine cars letting loose... No, it wasn't my grandfather's company ;-)]
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