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

To: tejek who wrote (230965)	4/28/2005 2:25:19 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574059

Good article Ted, I agree with almost all of it. I'm not against any of the Bush proposals. But we need a lot more incentive on the conservation side. Why limit tax credits to hybrids, when there are other high mileage solutions? Why not raise the revenue needed for the high mileage tax credits by taxing the gas guzzlers? Make the deal revenue neutral so it's more effective and isn't a budget drain. What about solar, what about wind? I think he 'mentioned' biodiesel, but that's a front burner solution that could dramatically decrease oil consumption. Then you have the house passing an "energy bill" that consists almost entirely of $9Billion in tax credits to the oil companies, nothing about conservation. XON just reported $7Billion in profits... for the quarter; they hardly need tax credits. Talk is cheap... we need to get some serious action on the supply AND conservation side. John

To: tejek who wrote (230965)	4/28/2005 4:04:45 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574059

"Bush Is Blowing Smoke on Energy" To no ones great surprise. But in this case, I can't blame him. As his father found out, stating that you aren't going to take action when people are concerned is a recipe for failure. Better to show you are doing something, anything is better than inaction. At least he is proposing something other than a tax cut. If he is promoting easing restrictions nuclear power plants, how about doing it in such a way that it actually addresses the problem, long term? Nuclear power plants are a good source of energy, albeit the problem of disposal needs to be addressed. But that is a problem that can be put off for a few years. But our biggest problem is for transportation, i.e. gasoline and diesel fuel. Electric vehicles have the battery problem, the energy density isn't all that high and they wear out. Plus, the batteries are expensive and usually consist of nasty chemicals. Fuel cells offer some hope, but how to fuel them? Sure, you could take hydrocarbons and reform them to get the hydrogen, but the reformers aren't cheap and are complex. You can remove the reformer from the car and replace it with sodium borohydride which allows the charging with hydrogen to be done at a central facility. It makes the system complex because the discharged borax solution should be retained and returned for recharging. But the system still uses hydrocarbons. Unless... Why not use a nuclear power plant to electrolosyze the water? Admittedly a brute force solution, but it could work. Consider, a typical gigawatt reactor can produce about 4k moles of molecular hydrogen a second. That is right at 30 metric tons of molecular hydrogen an hour. Consider that an existing gigawatt reactor costs about $15k an hour to operate, that makes the cost of the hydrogen about $500 a metric ton or 50 cents a kilogram. Now gasoline weighs between 5.8 and 6.5 pounds/gallon or a max. of about 3 kilos. That means about 150 MJoules of energy, or roughly the same amount of energy as that kilogram of molecular hydrogen. Given that a fuel cell/electric motor combination is going to be close to twice the efficiency of a gasoline engine and produces no CO2 or any other waste product other than water, it could be an even bigger win than that. Ok, this ignores the infrastructure that needs to be built up. But if Bush wants to build nuclear power plants any way, why not build one and dedicate it to this? Convert the federal government and city government in Washington DC to fuel cell. That would be what? 10k vehicles? It wouldn't use the whole output of a reactor, but it would be substantial amount. Plus it would give a market to kick off the use of fuel cell vehicles. Now true, any vehicles so converted or built would be restricted to the DC area, but that covers a lot. That would probably push costs down to the point where SoCal and the NYC area could be added. And that would cover a large enough market where it is just a matter of building the refueling centers fast enough. So a couple of decades could see 50% or more of our transportation needs covered this way. What this does is put a cap of about $1.25 per gallon of gasoline equivalent(including taxes). When you factor in the elimination of pollution and the cutting of dependencies on foreign oil, it seems a net win. It would require some up front money, but it would be measured in a few billion, probably a lot less than whatever tax breaks are being planned to encourage oil exploration. And it would buy something a lot more valuable. Now true, it makes the eventual disposal problem a lot worse...