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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (15462)	11/20/1998 11:57:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Joan, I haven't read all the posts here, but as far as I understand, I'd agree with others that electric cars are far from ready for prime time. Has California backed off of its ZEV deadline? I thought that law was pretty foolish, it wouldn't allow hybrid vehicles, which looks like the best bet for electrics, short term. Plus, it just relocates the pollution and does nothing for greenhouse gases. As long as I've been reading about electric cars, there's been some wonder battery on the horizon, but they never seem to get any closer to reality, at least on the scale needed to power a car. Lead acid is at least cheap, mature, reliable technology, it'll be a long time before anything new-fangled can match those attributes. Maybe fuel cells or aluminum hydride batteries or something will eventually pan out, but it's still pretty speculative to project that. On the moderately related topic of nuclear energy, it's fine with me in principle. Pollution wise, it's far, far better than coal, plus no CO2. But, it's expensive, and it's not just the governments fault. Incompetent electric utilities and nuclear contractors had something to do with the problem too. Then there was the cute little WPPS default play in Washington State. The safety issue is overblown, Three Mile Island was a full core disintegration, it required the grossest incompetence imaginable to make it happen, and no harm was done, except in money to the utility. No significant radiation escaped. Chernobyl, nothing like that will ever be built in the west. Waste disposal is a political problem more than anything else. But developing a new generation of plants would require a lot of development, and a lot of capital to deploy, and who's going to pay for it? The government paid for the lion's share of the R&D so far, the chance of that happening again is remote. Cheers, Dan.

To: jbe who wrote (15462)	11/21/1998 7:33:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

I admit I am no engineer either. But as a practicing chemist and self-avowed "natural philosopher" (in the seventeenth-century sense) I am familiar with engineering principles. I grant that diesel fuel in its current form and use is dirty. But I maintain that its unsurpassed energy density and ease of mechanical transduction (a Diesel engine is a pretty simple piece of equipment, once you allow for the industrial skill in its actual manufacture). I further believe (until convinced otherwise) that gas or diesel power can be easily matured to a very clean state. I was not restricting myself to lead-acid batteries. Nickel metal hydride batteries, experimental sodium-sulfur batteries, etc. all rely on internally stored fuel and oxidizer to generate electrochemical energy. As a result, the laws of physics and chemistry restrict batteries to pretty low energy densities. This means that if you want one horsepower-hour of energy, you're gonna have to lug around a lot of pounds of battery to store it. All the technology in the world will only allow you to approach that energy density theory figure from below. Flywheels and [ultra]capacitors have one fatal flaw imho. They cannot be proofed against instantaneous discharge. If the energy of one gallon of gas or diesel were instantaneously discharged (after admixing the right amount of air) the energy release would equal that of a fourfold weight of high explosive. That's fifteen kilos of plastique, and what that will do to a car and its surrounding twenty-meter radius... does not make a polite topic. They are potentially useful as short-distance drives (like a kilometer or less) but for a car or truck - I just don't see it. I will further opine that the author's statement that alternative energy vehicles "are... ultimately the only potion" is not factual. In fact, it smells of politics to me. I have suggested that hydrocarbon vehicles can be made greenhouse neutral by recycling carbon-bearing fuel from the atmosphere. Plants can be conveniently used to bind solar energy (perhaps the ultimate "green power" source) in oil form. Veggie oil makes excellent diesel! As for non CO@ emissions - were already there with gas engines. The current Honda Accord four-cylinder is a practical, affordable car which passes muster as a Zero Emissions Vehicle. Of course its emissions aren't zero - but a poor diet by a passenger is liable to double them. :-) I don't doubt that specialist electric cars have been built to go 600 miles on a charge. But I'll wager that the specific power requirement of such a car is very, very low. With such a low specific power requirement, a microdiesel could be built to the same weight and maybe do the NY-CA run. (I think the highest fuel mileage recorded from a specialty research car is better than 1300 mpg. But that is one of those one-man teardrops running on bicycle wheels - not exactly family fare.) To me (jmho of course) the SciAm article proves one thing in spades. Electric and alternative-power vehicles are riding a wave of popularity out of proportion to their technical "executability". The story "between the lines" in this article is that to mature these technologies to an economic level may be impractical or just never happen. I place it on the same level as popular-science articles from my youth, some thirty years ago, which promised a car-sized personal aircraft in every garage in the near future. The exuberance of those authors, indeed the Sixties-innocent embracement of the mythos of technical Progress, was not yet subjected to the "reality check" of real-life physics and economics. Those twin shoals will be a tough strait for E-cars to navigate.