Alt fuels was Re: [AT] Gasoline $

ken knierim wild1 at cpe-66-1-196-61.az.sprintbbd.net
Wed Aug 10 13:43:51 PDT 2005


I'm not sure how a reactor is going to power my car or tractors, but
anything is possible, and you're right, it would reduce that demand on
electrical generation. There seems to be some question on what to do
with the waste stream from nuclear power (arguably less than for other
sources, I'm told). One more note... a lot of reactors are being uprated
to get more power out of them. By bumping the output of existing
reactors, there has been a considerable increase in nuclear power.
Obviously there are trade-offs, as they have had some issues with
components wearing out faster and such.

As far as solar, you might look at what else the crazy Zonies are up to:
http://www.greenwatts.com/pages/SolarOutput.asp

It's certainly not the do-all and end-all but it's in commercial
production and without trying something, we're not going to get
anywhere.

      Another idea, touched on briefly by Len Rugen, is using
photosynthesis. This makes some of the best sense to me. Sweden (and
others) used wood gasification to fuel motive power during WWII. While I
don't see this passing EPA in my lifetime, there are derivations of this
that might make sense, depending on economics. 
    The wood gasification process can apparently be used to feed a
catalytic conversion process that generates ethanol from the gases. I'm
not a chemist so I have no idea how well it would work, but it's one of
the many novel ideas that people start to look at when fuel costs start
to hurt. 
    It would be nice to see some new crop that actually gets more
valuable as the price of fuel goes up. Hmm.... am I dreaming again? :)

> >
> In the long run the only real solution to 99 percent of the problem is
> Nuclear power. Use it instead of oil and oil derived products for
> electrical generation and you will see large gains.
> Solar sounds good BUT the cost of making the cells, maintenance and the
> back-up storage systems for the times when power spikes or low sun days
> wipes out any perceived advantage for large scale use. The last time I
> checked it would run almost 20K for a system that would deliver
> equivalent power to my home/shop and that was just the array, no storage
> or backup systems.
> 
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