The Energy Solution (America, experience)

[c0da]

Everybody should buy a bike and cycle round rather than drive.

I think nuclear energy should be a possibility that is explored. It can be dangerous, but when all the right safety precautions are vigillantly observed, there would be only an extremely small risk of any thing bad happening

[michel]

Originally Posted by finalfrogo

What do you think is the most sensible solution for the energy problem in America? Can we continue with fossil fuels, or should we make a change to alternative energies as soon as possible? Which alternative energies should we use, and why? Is nuclear power an acceptable power source?

I was originally going to post this under "current events," but that's a discussion subforum and people may want to debate on this issue.

Abandon fossil fuels; they are the reason we are having global warming, which will eventually bring on a new ice age if the problems keeps growing.

Nuclear fuel is the cheapest, the most expedient, but we don't know how to dispose of the waste, and are in danger of pluting the planet with a legacy of radiation for goodness knows how many thousands of years.

Wind power and solar panels will never be sufficient to 'fuel our needs', and from what I have heard here in the U.K, wind turbines are very noisy (so badly so that people cannot live within quite a distance of one, for the perpetual noise).

I guess there are alternatives, and that they have already been discovered. The most likely reason for our not being aware of them is that the oil and motor industry have bought up the patents on these as soon as possible, to prevent them being used;(and I might add that governments would be reluctant to lose the revenue on oil).

Originally Posted by c0da2006

Everybody should buy a bike and cycle round rather than drive.

I think nuclear energy should be a possibility that is explored. It can be dangerous, but when all the right safety precautions are vigillantly observed, there would be only an extremely small risk of any thing bad happening

I disagree with the nuclear fuel answer for the reasons I have already stated.

The use of cycles would have such a minute impact; the problem is from cargo overland and overseas transport, aeroplanes. Everyone rushing out to get a cycle would actually be a good idea (if only for the health of our increasingly heavier population); in terms of energy? Negligible.

[Ori]

Well I know that China are building an artificial sun.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20...nt_4341563.htm

I'm not quite intelligent enough to know the repucussions of this, but i'm sure some of you will understand.

[jeffrey]

The cost of solar panels, back in the early 80's was between 4 and 10 grand. I used to sell them. I was listening to a talk show yesterday, people are complaining, but not cutting back on their driving. Public transportation is about the same amount of people using it. People only notice with big jumps in prices. Factor inflation and we are actually paying less for fuel then we were 25 years ago.

[PureX]

Most of the energy in the universe is stored in the form of hydrogen. Most of the energy on Earth is stored in the form of hydrogen. And hydrogen is completely nonpolluting when the energy is recovered from the hydrogen. I believe it's time we took a lesson from nature and begin using hydrogen as our energy storage medium as well.

The only problem is that we need to get past the lying and cheating going on by the government and the oil companies that have most of us believing that hydrogen fuel technology is 20 years in the future.

It's not.

We already have the technology to store hydrogen safely. One of the lies that the oil cronies like to tell us is that hydrogen fuel tanks will explode like the Hindenburg. First off, the Hindenburg exploded because it was painted with a material very similar to rocket fuel. It was not the hydrogen in it that exploded, it only burned after it was ignited. It was the rocket fuel in the surface of the blimp that exploded. And secondly, modern hydrogen fuel tanks employ micro-spheres, or tubes, that lock the hydrogen molecules in and release them slowly, so that you could fire a bullet into a hydrogen fuel tank and all that would happen is that hydrogen will escape slowly from the bullet hole in the tank. You could ignite the escaping gas with a match and all it would do is burn like a candle.

Secondly, the liars tell us that hydrogen fuel cells (the mechanism that extracts electricity from the combining of hydrogen and oxygen molecules) are wildly expensive, which is partly true. But they would quickly become less expensive when mass produced. I saw just yesterday that the German government is using hydrogen fuel cells in their latest attack submarines. The Germans, by the way, already sell hydrogen powered automobiles to the public, and have hydrogen refueling stations available for those car owners to refuel their cars. So it seems that the cost of hydrogen fuel cells is already becoming viable in other countries.

Another lie they like to tell us is that it will take 20 years to change over to a hydrogen fuel infrastructure, and that it will cost huge amounts of money. Yet we just wasted 400 billion dollars on a completely useless and pointless war. That 400 billion could have completely switched us over to a hydrogen fuel infrastructure all by itself. So it seem they can find the money when it's going into their own pockets, and covering up for their own blunders.

Also, cars that are powered by hydrogen fuel cells can be easily set up to extract hydrogen from lots of other kinds of fuels. For example, if you owned a car with a fuel cell, and found yourself far from a hydrogen refueling station, you could fill the car with gasoline, or propane, or any number of other fuels, and it could extract the hydrogen it needs from them very easily, and with less pollution that had it burned them for fuel. So the change-over doesn't have to be complete and immediate. It could happen gradually, as demand for the hydrogen powered cars and hydrogen refueling stations increase.

The other complaint is that we don't have enough hydrogen, or a way of producing it. But this is nonsense as well. All we need to make hydrogen is lots of sunshine and salt water. We can build photovoltaic panels that convert sunlight into electricity, with pipes built into them to convey salt water through them, and hydrogen back. The electric current is used to create electrolysis in the water which separates the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in the water. We simply recover the hydrogen and allow the oxygen to return to the atmosphere. Later, when the hydrogen is passed through the fuel cell, it recombines with the oxygen molecules in the atmosphere, and becomes water again, and as they recombine, the electrons are available for us to use as an energy source. It's an infinitely renewable fuel storage system, and it's completely pollution free.

Now all we have to do is somehow overcome the greed and stupidity of the wealthy and powerful people who are running this country, and we'll have it made!

[Booko]

Originally Posted by c0da2006

Everybody should buy a bike and cycle round rather than drive.

If I did that, I would be dead within the week. Squished by some crazed Atlanta driver.

We build our cities really stupidly here. Everything is much too far away to bike even if you wanted to, and then there's no way to safely share the road with cars.

I loved living in the UK. I'd ride a bike if I lived there too.

I think nuclear energy should be a possibility that is explored. It can be dangerous, but when all the right safety precautions are vigillantly observed, there would be only an extremely small risk of any thing bad happening

Apparently the use of pelleted fuel has improved issues of safety and disposal of spent fuel, but I haven't really kept up reading on that issue.

The real safety issue is not so much the plants themselves, but disposal of spent fuel. People forget that a lot. It's obvious the plant needs to be safely run. But unlike plants that burn fossil fuels, you have something really really dangerous to dispose of afterwards, and even salt mines out West aren't keeping stuff from leaching into the water table.