Hybrid Lovers Read This and Lament

Which is the best make and model of Hybrid cars and/or fuel cells

I guess all the major car companies have at least one for you to try out

Lets say ordinary petrol/diesel cars have a lifespan of 10 years with all their moving parts

The fuel cell cars have a lot less moving parts and theoretically they could last for decades

We are then talking about comfort and usability of the cars

You do not take ordinary car and turn it into a fuel cell car

Because we are in fact talking about a revolution, there is hardly any experince with these cars yet

Even if the numbers are marginal at the moment in a few years they will be taking over from the others

There is not much production capacity for these cars yet

It is changing dramatically and fast

All the infrastructures for energydistribution needs to be built up and it will

The need for oil will eventually drop

Fuel cells can be used for heating up houses and in your cell phones

Nuclear plants will be built to generate electricity

There is a lot riding on this new technology

We may not need to pay terrorists for the energy in the future

Thanks for the interesting reply.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:

What are you going to do with all that nuclear waste?

Store it safely for a few decades, until we learn how to extract the remaining energy. Maybe at low toxicity levels, it will be sold for use in individual Mr. Fusion home power plants.

Yes exactly. We have a few squillion square miles of unused dirt (so have you) that we could store horrendous amounts of waste. If you fly over Canada you get some idea of just how much unused dirt we really have. It's even bigger then Texas! (O: (O:

There are two types of Nuclear energy One of them has no waste The other has a lot less waste than oil

I've heard it tastes great as a seasoning in soups.

Ted

You don't think we could re-enrich it and send it to be stored where we get all of our oil from at the moment? We've got lots of unused ICBM's sitting around ;-) Kidding of course ;-)

BTW How much waste is generated by fusion reactors? can't be too much.

I believe that there's more radioactive medical waste generated than power plant radioactive waste. (but I could be wrong) No one is saying that we should quit treating people to reduce pollution are they?

Theoretically, yes, but you don't understand modern business, which is good at taking things that have an inherent nature of lasting a lifetime and thinning things down, using less critical materials, etc. to last only as long as is economically optimum for themselves. All it takes is a little research for them to find out which part(s) or component(s) they can exactly control to make it fail at the prescribed time to end up having a break-even of about what it is with competing technologies.

But you're right - it will probably happen. Just like with other things, a lot will be promised in the beginning with a lot of genuine technical potential, but the results will be engineered and politicized and environmentallized to the point that it's no better than anything else.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

You can strike it lucky and you can gain a lot by being a pioneer The new technology may be faulty and you can get a faulty system The likelyhood of striking out is not very great because the companies are well aware that they have to create a good image and not let you get anything that brakes straightaway Ok at least some of them anyway The real problem at the moment is that the infrastructure of the country is not ready So you might not be able to travel very far away if you are into the most modern technologies and no place to get fuel

The question is how new this technology is really There were electrical cars before combustion engine cars cam along Also these hybrid cars have been decades in development stage Lots of the companies have been trying to overcome probelms with pure electrical cars Always failing because of refueling problems, battery sizes and weight With a fuel cell and electrical car hybrid most problems are gone With oil and electrical hybrids as a medium term solution Toyota seems to be way ahead of the pack, Honda a good second with the rest scrambling to catch up Problem for most of the big companies is they have to get rid of old technologies, old plants, old workers, old bad image before they can start really down the road of the future with these new technologies They have for obvious reasons been dragging their feet of going in for these changes but they seem to have realized that if they do not do it then they will be stuck with all those old problems and nothing to replace it once the closures are a fact

So now we have started to see plants being closed down and plans for more closures

Question is where will the new plants be built, by whom and how fast will these changes take place

Who will live to make the change

Pretty exciting times ahead for us customers

wrote

If you're talking fusion, you're completely wrong that it has no waste.

FloydR

fusion has only helium and energy as results What you may be thinking of are some experiments have needed fission as a starter then you may get some waste from the starter Other methods of starters give no waste Fusion contained in a magnetic fields and started by electricity is the future of nuclear Until then fission is a good alternative and has a proven very good record Nuclear will rise again

Nuclear waste will be confined to the Yucca mountain site, as soon as the 'politics' of doing so is settled. That is a far more secure place of storing it then under six feet of water in the power plants as is the case now.

mike hunt

wrote

No. You are ignoring the facts of real engineering, as opposed to an ideal thought experiment - which can never be realized in the physical world. All current experiments in fusion have resulted in radioactive waste - google TFTR, or google fusion waste if you want examples.

All fusion reactors will, unavoidably, produce radioactive waste, mostly due to the interaction of the neutron flux produced as it impacts the vessel walls or coolant.

FloydR

The fission solution is available, safe, competitive, reliable, operational. The problem of high activity waste disposal is, objectively, a minor problem, changed into a severe social problem by mass medias. The nuclear waste problem is tiny compared to the gigantic one generated by billions tons of CO2, SO2, NOX sent every year in our atmosphere from fossils fuels.

Fusion is without waste

wrote

sigh.