OT: BP - The tip of the iceberg

[Josepi]

Bad google!

Damn Canuck companies! Time for yahoo.ca...ooops .ca?

[HeyBub]

You best tell him why.

Almost all of the oil, both domestic and imported, is used for transportation. Some is used for heating, lubricants, and plastics, but the amount so used is minuscule.

There are none, or almost none, oil-fired power plants.

[HeyBub]

Never seen a pig sty, eh?

Pig food goes into pen #1. Waste from pen #1 is cycled to pen#2 for those pigs to eat. And so on.

[krw]

Only because the pigs don't get a vote. Left on their own, pigs are very clean animals.

[Lobby Dosser]

Clarification: Anything that has a half-life of 10,000 years is not all that dangerous. Anything that is (dangerous) has a half-life far shorter and is a fuel source itself. Thorium is also quite plentiful; enough for our needs for thousands of years. Another source usually forgotten is Plutonium. There's enough highly enriched Plutonium, now, to meet our electricity needs for a couple of centuries. That still doesn't get us transportation.

------------------------------------------------------------------------- Electric vehicles.

[J. Clarke]

'Fraid not. To be a fuel source it has to be fissionable by neutron capture.

Isotopes with short half lives can generate a lot of heat but they aren't controllable--you can't use them in any application where they could generate enough heat to melt down if the cooling failed because there's no way to turn them off. They have been used in relatively low powered thermionic generators but for primary power production they're very limited.

Uranium works as a fuel because you can by controlling the neutron flux control the reaction rate.

Thorium captures one neutron, beta decays twice, and you get U-233, and it's the U-233 that you burn with pretty much the same results as any other isotope of uranium.

(a) Uranium has to be enriched to be used in reactors, plutonium does not--it is produced in reactors from uranium 238 and then is chemically separated from the uranium.

(b) It is hardly "forgotten". There have been plans for decades to produce breeder reactors to make plutonium from relatively abundant uranium 235, but this has met with significant political resistance.

[krw]

Nope. Not a *chance* of a high enough energy density, by a couple of orders of magnitude.

[Lobby Dosser]

Trams. Trolleys. Light Rail. Heavy Rail. High Speed Rail. Batteries. Fuel Manufacture (H).

[HeyBub]

Right. All animals are equal - except pigs, who are more equal.

[J. Clarke]

OK in cities. Try running trams to every middlesex, village, and farm.

Same as trams.

Same limitation as trams. Many cities already have most of these, others are considering them. Not gonna make a significant dent in fuel consumption though.

Not profitable in the US and hasn't been for decades.

Make the "low speed rail" run as fast as it did in 1940 and get back to us.

Require a new breakthrough of some kind--not something you can do by throwing money at the problem.

Works fine, but won't be cost effective until fossil fuel prices are a lot higher than they are. And not efficient in any sense.

[Josepi]

Wouldn't that be "equaler"?

[e-mail] wrote:

[phorbin]

With a very small human population.

[Robatoy]

4 legs. What do you expect?

[keithw86]

What good does that do? It takes more energy to reverse the process than you get out of it. Might just as well bury money.

[keithw86]

No, pigs don't carry Colts. Well, some carry Glocks, but that's a whole different animal.

[Larry Blanchard]

That depends on what costs are factored in. Most passenger trains did run at a loss to the railroads, although IIRC a few were profitable. But if the environmental costs are factored in, passenger trains look a lot better.

And freight trains are still the most efficient way to move freight over long distances. If we could eliminate 50% of current interstate trucking by rail shipment we'd cut out quite a bit of fuel consumption. One way to do that is to make the trucking industries pay their full share of highway construction and maintenance costs.

[Lew Hodgett]

------------------------------------ Somebody forgot to tell Warren Buffet.

Lew

[J. Clarke]

So so who is going to pay the railroads the value of "the environmental costs"?

If the tax you propose was effective then the EU would be running a higher percentage of freight via rail than does the US. In fact the opposite is the case and the EU has been trying for decades to get shippers to use rail instead of truck. They have imposed the sort of taxes you propose and the taxes don't do diddly-squat.

[J. Clarke]

Has he run a passenger railroad at a profit in the US? If so which one and for how long?

[Lew Hodgett]

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J. Clarke wrote:

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For once try reading and understanding.

There was no reference to "passenger railroad" in my previous post.

Lew