The (Possible) Future of Alternative Energy

Sponge! writes: "The stuff that turns oil into margarine. The stuff that made the Hindenburg float. The stuff that combines with oxygen to make water and with carbon to make methane. The stuff that sends the space shuttle skyward and could someday power your car, office building, house, cell phone, even your hearing aid. That "Stuff" is hydrogen, and according to Amory Lovins, it is the future of energy. Here is an interesting article on Lovins and his view of hydrogen as the number one fuel."

Comments

Hydrogen for free

[CaptainCarrot]

I work for Lockheed Martin. Many years before the merger that created this company, when I worked for what was then called Lockheed Missiles & Space Co., there was a series of articles in the company rag talking about a technology we were developing that generated electricity from the temperature differential between shallow and deep seawater. This was back in the early 1980's. The process is called OTEC for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, and there's a a bit of information about it available online.

Such a plant could generate enough electricity to pump seawater up and crack it into hydrogen and oxygen. It would be a whole hell of a lot cleaner than oil rigs on offshore platforms, and could in fact be set up on oil platforms in tropical regions (like the Gulf of Mexico) that no longer produce enough crude oil to be profitable, or that must be shut down over environmental concerns. OTEC plants are very clean, very safe, and fairly inexpensive to run. They could be a viable method for producing hydrogen almost for free.

Power & Current Alternatives

[Neutron_F1uX]

Why is everyone so affraid of Nuclear power? Pound for pound, Nuclear Energy is far cleaner and environmentally friendly then coal power plants, that's been proven already. The chances of a catastrophic reactor melt down are not very likely, as long as they are properly maintained and staffed. While I'm all for new forms of energy, we are currently not even using what is within our grasps. How can we expect power companies, who have a lot of money sunk into their current operations, to change their way of thinking? I doubt they see it as a viable thought to try these things out when they may flop. I have little faith that anything such as this article describes will be used, when we are not even using Nuclear Energy to what it could be. Look at the Navy, they have tons of nuclear reactors on their ships. Have there been any indicents with them? Not that we know of, and it'd be hard to hide something like that. Of course, those are smaller reactors, but none the less, it just proves the government knows what is going on. They are using the technology we already have, while the power companies are still stuck back a 100 years ago.

Re:He's fission and I bit

[Grond]

3 points.

First, engineers do not regard nuclear power as a dirty source of energy that must be contained, lest it kill everyone. I live in a small city in Arkansas (Russellville, population ~25,000) that is the site of a large nuclear power plant. I know many engineers who work at the plant and a few people involved with the construction and design of the plant (such as my father, who did the environmental impact work on the 'steam cycle,' more on that later). Those engineers regard nuclear power as an extremely safe, potentially cheap form of power. The total number of American deaths from nuclear power is incredibly small compared to that of coal/oil/natural gas and their related activities (such as coal mining).

Second, nuclear power plants can be built very cheaply. The cost of construction is only about a third of the cost of building a plant (a large plant would, if built today, cost in the neighborhood of 300 million dollars, depending on location (i.e., availability of natural cooling sources like lakes and rivers) and output). Whenever a nuclear power plant is built, the design documents, environmental impact studies, evacuation plans, etc, must all be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as though no nuclear plants had ever been built before. Read that again. The majority of the cost of building a nuclear power plant in the United States is red tape. Nuclear power is cheap. Nuclear power plants can be cheap. In France, most of the power plants follow the same, well-tested design.

Third, the water used in the steam cycle is extremely clean. During construction of the plant, the chemists (such as my father) had a valve system in place such that they could take samples of the water at every stage in the cycle. After testing the water, the chemists would often wet their whistles with the excess. The water was just plain, distilled water. The only thing that happens to it is being heated and cooled over and over again. The steam (water vapor, technically) put off by cooling towers is likewise incredibly pure. In the Russellville case, the only thing in the water vapor other than H20 is a small amount of (non-radioactive) Xenon, which, for those of you who slept through chemistry, is inert. Perhaps you meant the coolant itself? Well, the coolant is heavily laced with Boron (in the form of Borax soap, actually), which is a neutron absorber. It's only a 'coolant' in the sense that it absorbs neutrons. Even if the Boron did become radioactive (and I'm fairly certain it doesn't), that water isn't part of the steam cycle and the Boron can be removed from the water anyway.

The majority of your fears (and the public's fears) about nuclear power are unfounded.

PS He's 'fission' and you bit, but then I bit off of your line. Who is worse, the troll, the troll who followed him, or the idiot who responded to both? ;)