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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (212657)	12/4/2004 3:29:21 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578148

Have you heard of the new effort by the EU along with countries like Japan to develop new fission energy? It has to do with replicating how the sun creates energy. The U.S. is not involved with this project. Very sad how we are losing touch with key future technologies.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (212657)	12/4/2004 4:37:46 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1578148

"Hydrogen Production Method Could Bolster Fuel Supplies" Realistically speaking, nuclear energy is the only way hydrogen is going to get off the ground, so to speak. There have been many proposals on ways to do it with nuclear power, up to and including thermochemical production. It, however, still doesn't eliminate the disposal problem, but that is still a smaller problem than the CO2, particulates and dependence on foreign producers that the current system has. In addition, the remaining problems listed in the article, namely storage and transportation and the cost of the fuel cells are both readily solvable. The storage and transportation can be solved by using sodium borohydride. It is pretty stable, nontoxic and nonflammable. An aqueous solution can have as high of an energy density as gasoline. The downside is that it produces a sodium borate solution that should be recycled. The high cost of fuel cells is mainly a factor of production levels, in high production they will be cheaper. At this point in time it is a choice. This is the sort of thing that probably should be kickstarted by the government. It should build and run the initial nuclear plants for the production of sodium borohydride. That way they would take the riskiest part of the burden and that could be indemnified by the whole country. The rest of the infrastructure is up to industry. That could be helped by guaranteed buys by the government, say a committment to have government owned vehicles (exempting the military) switched to hydrogen by a certain date. If Bush is truly interested, a program could be announced in a matter of months, and work started shortly afterwards. All of the technology is in hand, all it lacks is the money. Given that the deficit is rising at unprecidented rates, what's another $20 or $30 billion? This is the sort of infrastructure investment that governments should do, it's like with the canals in the Northeast, the railroads and the highway system...