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Hydrogen also is produced from fossil fuels. Just because we can make it cleanly doesn't mean it will be done so until it is cheaper than squeezing out the last dregs from methane.

It also leaks from any containment much faster than any other fuel. It is also potentially harmful to the ozone layer (free radicals of hydrogen produced by cosmic rays at the ozone layer can form water vapor which will fall, rather than stay in the oxygen-ozone-oxygen cycle). Hydrogen can also escape into interstellar space.

The best thing to do would be to cleanly make long chain hydrocarbons from water and atmospheric CO2. This is exactly as clean and renewable as hydrogen. And hydrogen, because it is cheaper to make from fossil fuels, is exactly as clean and renewable as gasoline. The only differences are: hydrogen is MUCH harder to use safely, and it produces less "pollution" at the consumption level.

I am all for clean fuel, but hydrogen is not it. I suggest elemental boron. Go on, read it and try not to say "wow, that would be perfect if we could get around to doing all that".

The whole reason people have been saying for years that Uranium is running out is only because ore of very high purity was running out ...

There is or was a mine in Namibia, the Rossing mine IIRC, that gets uranium out of 0.03 percent ore, but that probably depends or depended on very cheap labour. Most places the trend in the last 20-to-30 years has been to much higher grades, because that's what prospectors have been finding.

To within a half-order-of-magnitude, they've been finding about a thousand tonnes per day, and the cost of this finding has been a million dollars per day. That may sound like a lot, but the world's current oil burn rate is only a thousand tonne-U-equivalents per day, and for
petroleum propectors to find a kilotonne-U-equivalent has been costing $500 million.

If any large contingent of government-funded people really believed uranium was running out, they could accelerate the process by buying it and taking it on long ocean voyages and, on the way, dissolving it in acid and losing the solution overboard. By losing a dollar's worth of uranium in this way, they could force electricity vendors to burn $20 worth of natural gas instead; government would make more than a dollar on that. And the oceans would not be harmed. Not at all. Can you guess why not?

( How fire can be domesticated )

It's tricky business because the oxygen maker consumes a lot of energy. Graham R.L. Cowan has some numbers about this (search for on-board oxygen purification). His idea of using elemental boron as fuel is interesting but a little crazy.

The best way to have both an efficient and green system is to have a gasoline-air fuel cell. If only we had spent all the money on the hydrogen fuel cells on gasoline fuel cells.

Storing hydrogen is a pain. How about that wonder metal (metal?) discussed in another article, Boron?

FTR: "The Office" is a newsroom at a medium-market Canadian television station.

I don't know if you see yourself as some kind of crusading news-hero or something, but you have no idea what you're talking about, and the question as you have framed it is simply nonsense. It is based on a false premise.

Because you are too lazy, or too lacking in talent, or just too stupid to do even a tiny little bit of research and find out for yourself why this is the case, I have done in a few minutes what you could have done at any time to figure out why there is no correlation between the quality of a journalist's work and what ethical rules they use during interviews, especially with respect to one narrowly-defined situation.

Follow the links and read:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/omid-memarian/samantha-power-ethical-jo_b_91401.html

http://www.journalismethics.ca/ethics_in_news/adams.htm

http://www.rrj.ca/issue/2006/spring/617/

http://www.eagle.ca/caj/

If, having read what you will find there, you still cannot understand why your question and its underlying assumptions are based upon an indefensible lack of understanding, then you should probably enrol yourself in a remedial reading course.

I am fairly confident that you won't bother to read what you will find at these URL's. At least one of them might take as much as five or six minutes to read in its entirety. If you actually do read them instead of just searching for "record" and reading sentences where the word appears, all will become clear to you, and it will be like the sun breaking out from behind clouds.

Personally, I'm expecting rain.

If you're going to go with something boron, why not simplify further and use boron itself? You can't even burn it with a blowtorch unless the conditions are right (like in the engine - so no exploding cars), it's nontoxic, and it's got a high energy density both by mass and volume.

Actually hydrogen is non-starter, because it is so hard to store. Whoever came up with the bright idea of selling hydrogen as viable motor fuel was on LSD. Instead you would either continue to use liquid hydrocarbons, synthesised from water, air and heat in a Fischer-Tropsch process, or somebody has a bright idea of using something else, maybe boron (see http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.htm l).

Also there is an interesting and detailed site about using boron as an energy carrier (quite like TFA?)
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html

I found this sitewhere this guy claims that Boron would be a safer, more efficient, and friendlier fuel for transportation. He makes an interesting case... but IANAS. Ok, I got a BSc in Chemistry wayyyy back but I was a C student ;-) Anyway worth looking at.

I believe hydrogen is more dangerous because it is a gas. Like methane, if leaked to air, it mixes and forms fuel-air explosive. The air temperature is usually too low for gasoline to do that, and always too low for diesel fuel to do so.

There is also empirical evidence. The very low direct usage of hydrogen as fuel doesn't mean there is no evidence of risk, because millions of tonnes of it are used each year for other purposes. About a thousandth as much, in terms of energy content, as petroleum and natural gas.

My idea of a safe fuel.

Direct thermal production of H2 from water has been tried. Rather than losing much of the heat making electricity, and much of the electricity making H2, lose only one much

But water is the wrong oxide to crack. Virtually zero-emission central station energy production has been demonstrated, and so has virtually zero-emission vehicle energy. So I think the important distinction is between zero-local-emission vehicle energy that people will voluntarily buy, because it rivals or beats gasoline's space efficiency, and bulky energy that they won't. Here are some alternative-fuel authorities saying alternative fuel is inevitably bulky, so you should just get over it. I can't.