What a load of **** this commercial is. Same with that GM H+ car commercial with that black guy from the WAMU commercials.

I especially love the last line on the BMW commercials that say, "Ready for the world when the world is ready." Are we not ready now? Am I missing something here?

We've known for years that H+ is a plausible alternative granted the cars were the size of a van. ****ing sell the damn things already.

 

I think they mean how H+ isn't available on every other block like gas is. We also fear change

 

According to BMW this car runs on gasoline as well. Is that true?

 

no clue if its true, I know nothing about the car

 

If it's BMW's car, I would assume it true. If you had a car company, would you advertise that it runs on water then when the consumer buys it you say "Foooooled you, it runs on 100 Octane ONLY."

It's probably some type of hybrid engine that is H+/Gasoline.

 

What bothers me about all of these alternative fuels is that none of them help. Here's the reason; Hydrogen and ethanol are energy storage materials. They can be burned like gas to release energy. But how where they created? They require energy. In the case of gasoline/oil, the energy came from the sun millions of years ago and was stored in living organisms, that died, and now we have the energy in gas. Hydrogen and ethanol has to be made. Ethanol is closer to gas, where we use living material (corn/sugar cane) to make us stuff that we can ferment into fuel. Hydrogen, on the other hand, needs to be made from water with a huge amount of energy. And unfortunately, even though ethanol sounds awesome, the calculations show that the amount of energy we put into making the land fertile, making pesticides to keep the corn alive, and harvesting and fermenting the sugar (which takes a lot of heat) all take more energy than we store in the ethanol. So we have two fuels which take MORE or our energy (not the sun's or the wind's, etc...) to make than they release once they are burned. That means that, while both fuels create less pollution at the user level, they actually cost humanity MORE of our energy funds and pollute MORE than using gas itself.
So, unless we start making hydrogen from nuclear/solar/wind/hydroelectric energy (and not at all from fossil fuel energy), it's a dumb *** idea that will only speed the depletion of our energy and our environment. Similarly, unless we figure out a way to manufacture ethanol that doesn't use so much land, pesticides, and other energy inputs, it is also worse than just using gas.

 

So why don't we make them at those levels. I don't get why we don't use nuclear energy anymore? Rancho Seco is a sitting duck now, and for what?

I'm naive to this field. Are steps being made to develop massive amounts of H that are relatively clean?

School me, MVWRX.

 

I wish I knew more. As far as I can tell, the reason we don't use more nuclear power is a combination of the gas/oil lobby and the environuts that think used up nuclear fuel will kill the planet. We even have methods to refine the used nuclear fuel into usable fuel, over and over, until the waste is barely radioactive...but it's against international law to do so, because it is also one of the steps in making nuclear waste into nuclear weapons. So that's a problem.

As far as the reasons we don't use other methods of power production...I'm not sure exactly. We're pretty good about using hydroelectric where we can. Wind and solar seem to be unpopular (probably because of the oil lobby, but also because are resistant for some reason).

The other major down side to hydrogen as energy storage, is actually storing hydrogen. Storing it in gas form is obviously very dangerous. A lot of research is going into storing it absorbed or adsorbed into other materials, like carbon nanotubes, and other things, so it wouldn't be so dangerous. Last I heard though, it's slow going.

I'm a huge fan of well-regulated (as in safety) nuclear power. It's clean, plentiful, and efficient. And if we could run everything off of electricity, then the whole hydrogen thing would be a moot point.

 

oh how i wish things could be powered by Rock.

 

That's what I don't get. Why not implement an extreme level of PMCS to reactors and implement safety measures to minimize damage and health concerns if a meltdown occured. I think Chernobyl really scared a lot of people.