Eh, I would refuse to buy such a car anyway, ICE's forever.

And we'd have enough materials, as I've already mentioned and with reprocessing of spent fuel we can use 97% of all the waste as well, we're looking at thousands of years of fuel reserves and there is atleast 100 years of cheap mineable uranium uranium left even if we factor in a huge increase.

There is also thorium which is much much more abdundant than uranium, there are lots of trials ongoing in India with this since they have large resources of it.

Secondly coal contains trace amounts of uranium and thoruim, infact they contain so much that one large coal plant releases as much radiation into the atomsphere each year as the Three Mile Island incident did, which only really goes to show how little radiation was actually leaked there.

Anyway the US is just burning away millions of tons of uranium and thorium into the atomsphere each year through coal burning, the value of the uranium and thorium wasted I believe exceed a trillion dollars each year.

 

Nuclear wuld be the only feasible way for us to reduce dependance on oil, at least for electricity means. As long as we can use them for power generatio for a long time, we could also start using other less-efficient means, for the time when nuclear fuel runs out. (the stuff I mentioned earlier)

However, there's another side to the coil that hasn't been touched on yet, and that's all the myriad of chemicals we can create and obtain from crude oil. Something like 500,000 things need crude oil in one form or another. Gasoline is just one of those. Even if we all switched over to nuclear-powered electric-generation of cheap hydrogen, we would still need to depend on oil to produce 499,998 other things... Plastics, waxes, lubricants of all kinds, drungs, food (certain additives), pesticides, and a host of other materials and products.

Oil is used to make fuel, yes, but it's used in so many other applications that just limiting its use on one area might not matter terribly much in the Big Picture. (This is mentioned in many Peak Oil scenarios, but I'm not going to get totally into that, I'm just mentioning that fuel is not the sole reason we need oil.)

 

Yea, Peak oil is just plain scary. Lets not get into that, i'm still having nightmares...
It just shows that once we run out of oil, we won't be able to make anything (like plastic, rubber, etc. etc.), and we'll go back to living in caves chasing tigers with spears.

 

Yeah, Definitly not a pretty scenario to contemplate. I thnk I'll go clean my guns now...

 

Petrochemicals rules our lives right now as we speak and we will have a hard time dealing without them. Within the next 30 to 40 years all the cheap oil will be gone. There will be more left but it's gonna be pricy. World wars may be fought over it too. I'm no fortune teller, just my best guess.

 

I think it would be just as safe.

 

I just want to scream when I see that. It's such a horrible misrepresentation of hydrogen and what happened.

The Facts on the Hindenburg Disaster:

1. The bags of hydrogen that provided the lifting force for the Hindenburg were NOT the main contributor to the fire. The surface of the ship was coated with a combination of dark iron oxide and reflective aluminum paint. These components are extremely flammable and burn at a tremendously energetic rate once ignited. The skin of the airship was ignited by electrical discharge from the clouds while docking during an electrical storm. This reaction has been proven chemically for years, and was demonstrated with actual remnants of the Hindenburg sixty years later, which burned as vigorously as on the day of the disaster.

2. The hydrogen burned quickly, safely, above the occupants. When the escaping hydrogen was ignited by the burning skin of the airship, it burned far above the airship, and was completely consumed within 60 seconds of the ignition. During this period of time, the airship descended to the ground from the 150-foot docking tower.

3. Almost all deaths were caused by jumping or falling from the airship. Of the 35 deaths from the disaster, 33 were caused by jumping or falling. Only two deaths were caused by burning, and it is likely that those two were from proximity to the burning skin of the airship, or from the stores of diesel fuel that were ignited by the covering. Whereas the hydrogen burned within one minute of ignition, the diesel fires burned for up to ten hours after the ignition.

4. The Hindenburg would have burned if it had been filled with inert helium gas. Even if the Hindenburg had not been lifted by hydrogen, the ignition of the covering would still have happened, and would then have set ablaze the diesel stores, resulting in the same disaster.

5. The main cause of the disaster was pilot error. The only way to prevent the disaster would have been if the pilot had chosen to land in better conditions elsewhere, which was very feasible, considering he had had enough fuel remaining to reach all the way to California.

 

I just like the album cover.

I believe it would be just as safe as any other fuel.

 

Ah, I thought you where being sarcastic or something.

Hydrogen storage is a problem still with current technology though.

Still these are issues that look solveable in the near future, what interests me are issues like hydrogen embrittlement(how severe will it be, can it be prevented?) and what sort of alterations would needed in a 3rd gen(do you need higher compression heads? ECM?)

Supercharging and intercooling where two things used by Ford to get their hydrogen engine working at 38% efficiency.

 

Are those efficiency #'s that low on gasoline engines?

I know that at work our "external combustion engines" (boilers) are around 60% efficient on Natural Gas. With an economizer and a secondary turbine (we don't use these, ours are for generating steam heat for the cook process) a power generating unit or peaker can reach percentages in the 90's.

I would like to see a kit made that would be multi-port for performance V8 apps. One could buy the kit with an ECM, injectors and a manifold for their motor.

If it was not a ton of money, I would buy and use on of these kits. My T/A is for recreational use only and typically only saw 175 to 200 miles of driving every month before I tore it apart to rebuild it. That means (according to their claims, I would only have to run the generator for 8 days or so every month as long as my driving habits stayed the same.

Maybe some day.

 

With normal gasoline engines and you are looking at figures between 18-25%, so 38% is a 13-20% efficiency increase.

According to Ford it's a 25% increase but I think thats nonsense, they are probably just using low end figures for gasoline engines(or really old figures) to make their engine seem even more impressive, not that my estimated figures aren't already impressive IMO.

The thing is that with an engine built for gasoline and then being run on hydrogen you are looking at 85% of what you'd normally get with gasoline, you could run both however and an intercooler/supercharger would help both hydrogen and gasoline combustion, there is still the problem of a TPI injection system, it's a bottleneck.

Direct injection systems however can give you a 20% increase with a regular engine though, I am not sure how many more per cent a supercharger and intercooler would give.

I think that with a converted TPI engine you might get something close to equal performance from hydrogen, though I guess if one changed the whole injection system...

 

Alright, I'm a ME major. What is the point of using hydrogen? What I mean is, if the world can find a way to create hydrogen WITHOUT burning carbon, that would be great and worth it. For example, you can obtain hydrogen from water, but by how? -burning carbon. If an entire country converted to hydrogen powered cars, i think the petroleum fules used in the factories that create the hydrogen will balance out the emmisions on our atmosphere. For now, there is no better performing engine than the combustion engines in "normal cars."
Gas is just one of the most effient means of fuel that delivers the biggest bang, even though the avg car has like a 15-20% efficiency use of gas. I'm more of a motorhead than a "save the enviroment" person and the only other efficient(again, i do not mean just pure efficiency! I mean the energy it emmits) forms of energy besides gas is nuclear...

 

The point would be for me is that it'd be cheaper than gas, given some rough math I could get fuel for 2 bucks a gallon here, which is a good price since the price for gas where I live is like 5-6 bucks a gallon.

And the way to create hydrogen exists, the energy required to power said method doesn't, using petroleum products to create hydrogen defeat the purpose of hydrogen in the first place, the point is to reduce atmospheric emissions and get rid of the dependency on fossil fuels.

Hydrogen is also much more efficient than gasoline if you optimize the engine for it, therefore it can give the highest bang for the buck if thats what you are interested in, personally I don't much care about a 15% efficiency difference on an unoptimized engine, you can just offset that by burning more fuel, cheapness is a big factor for me.

And yeah nuclear, as someone who cares about the enviroment and knows alot about nuclear power(something the average person doesn't, trust me on this, what they think they know is often greenpeace style bull****) I know that nuclear is the most efficient, safest and enviromentially friendly form of energy generation there is,