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Can Your Car Get 1,700 MPG?
Xaroth writes "Given all the hubbub over EPA mileage ratings, I'm a little surprised that this one hasn't come up earlier. SAE apparently holds a contest each year to encourage students to design single-person, fuel-efficient vehicles. This year's winner achieved 1,747.4 MPG, with the press release that tipped me off pointing out that third got a 'measly' 1,194. There are more details on the competition over at SAE's site about the competition. Now, if only they could make these street-legal..." However, even the winner has nothing on top entries we mentioned in Shell's competition a few years back.
How hard would it have been to just put them in text format?
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
http://badnarik.org/blog/blog_a.php?p=467&more=1&c =1&tb=1&pb=1
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Vote Badnarik for President
www.badnarik.org
It is nice to see that my old engineering school has placed so high. They even topped out 1st in 2001, and 2nd in 2002.
Makes me proud to be a Wildcat on many different levels.
I am billdar, and I approve this message.
You can rant, so I can rant.
... it's human greed. And the nature of radioactivity (can't be sensed, long term damage, can't be destroyed, possibility of large area contamination)
There seems to be a surprisingly active nuclear power fanclub on Slashdot.
Now repeat after me:
NUCLEAR POWER IS NO SOLUTION ! IT DOESN'T WORK !
Were all the demonstrations, all the marches in the 80's for nothing ? Just so that a new generation makes the same mistakes again ?
Between now and the last 30 years, nothing fundamentally has changed about nuclear power, and it won't in the forseeable future.
The same problems are still there:
- you don't know were to go with nuclear waste that will be radioactive for the next gazillion years. (Don't tell me about Yucca mountain)
- you have not only the waste from the reactor, but also the reactor itself to bury, after it's lifetime is over.
- Everybody wants energy, but nobody wants to live next to a reactor.
Ok, so you are a geek, and you are really convinced a safe reactor can be built, and I even believe you.
But given the corruptness of todays politicians and CEOs, do you really believe they won't cut corners on your safe (and costly) reactor design ?
Or a bright greedy boss will mix in some mildly radioactive steel into the steel your car is made of ?
The problem is not technology
Over and over nuclear technology has proven that you can't trust it's owners. There's too much money at stake.
Fuel cells:
You fail to realize that many types of fuel cells can be powered by fossil fuels, e.g. natural gas or petrol (they have a converter that splits the fuel into hydrogen and carbon monoxide). If somebody would invent a viable, efficient, car-ready fuel cell, you could increase mileage drastically. Still running on fossil fuels, but better than nothing.
The original 30-something % efficiency of combustion engines is a function of the temperature difference between combustion temp and exhaust temp. In theory you could increase efficiency by burning it hotter, but the material sets the limitations here.
Instead of praising nuclear power, try to encourage putting a tiny tiny bit of nuclear research money (over the past 50 years) into alternative energy sources.
I've heard all the arguments against solar and wind power, including the more ridiculous ones. But the sun (windpower is effectivly solar power) can provide us with more power than we need.
Of course there are problems. Research them, spend money on it. You want an engineering challenge ? This is one.
So we need to store energy efficiently for the "off" times. Or transmit energy efficiently over long distances. Or build large offshore windfarms. Even if we just get to 15%, it would be a huge success.
"Republicans believe every day is 4th of July, but Democrats believe every day is April 15." - Ronald Reagan
Yeah - Republicans believe in illegal bombs, and Democrats believe in paying for government services. And Ronald Reagan was too oblivious to notice either one.
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make install -not war
I wholeheartedly agree that nuclear is the way to go at the moment, but I think you are underrating hydrogen as a fuel source. It has a high enough energy density to be interesting, can be retrofit into many of the places we currently both fossil fuel and electrical energy, and burns very clean. If you can make a fuel cell which is either very long-lasting or utterly recyclable (or both) then hydrogen is a highly attractive means of storing energy. Batteries currently have the problem that they are toxic, and difficult and costly to recycle, so what's left? Flywheels? They're not too bad for stationary power storage, but I don't think they're much of a mobile solution.
Also, I should not have to point out that a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle shares one positive aspect with pure-electric cars (with traditional chemical batteries) - if your power generation is clean, the whole process is clean. Put another way, you only have to control pollution in one place. Eliminating the gasoline engine means you not only stop burning gasoline and generating toxic byproducts, but you also eliminate the need to carry around such great quantities of fossil fuels and other petroleum distillates, or their synthetic equivalents. No more motor oil, for example, and a reduced quantity of transmission fluid or gear oil, not to mention coolant, all of which is nasty stuff that you would prefer not to dump all over the highway and have run off into the dirt when you drive down the road, or when your vehicle ends up strewn all across it as the result of some questionable decision on someone's part.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
> Democrats believe in paying for government services
I hate replying to trolls, but you misstated that -- Democrats believe in adding MORE AND MORE AND MORE government services, even when they aren't even close to cost-efficient or have any evidence of helping anyone.
But yes, Republicans do believe in illegal bombs. So do Democrats, so I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say.
Compare Clinton, who reversed the Reagan/Bush deficit into a surplus, with Bush Jr, who has created a vaster government than ever imagined. You can quote their smokescreen rhetoric, but the fact is that Republicans increase the size of the government, with more waste and corporate welfare, while Democrats actually deliver more services to citizens at a lower cost. The illegal bombs I'm talking about are covert bombs, like Iran/Contra, and its modern extension (with the same employees) in Iraq, as well as the intervening covert action in Afghanistan that created Al Qaeda. Nice work, old boys.
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make install -not war