If "green" means "nonthreatening to governments' fossil fuel revenues", it never can be so. But if it means safe, clean, and effective, the date of the Nautilus's safe return to port after circumnavigating the world is a good candidate to be the moment you're looking for.
If it was then we wouldn't have to warn people about the location of waste sites.
Now you understand the pro-fossil-fuel deception Beck is attempting. We do not have to warn people about the location of old waste sites.
We have the Gordon Lightfoot song telling us there was a cook on board -- which would seem plausible anyway -- and that suggests there might have been saltshakers on board. So is there a threat that they will leak, and render the big lake undrinkable?
Even just a few decades out, the radioactivity of nuclear waste has declined so much that it is the same order of magnitude as the saltshaker threat. Beck is lying to protect the petroleum and natural gas tax component of his, and everyone he talks to's, paycheque.
In so doing he is working to protect a real waste threat that will kill one or more real persons, with names and histories, today: carbon monoxide.
It's OK, the watchdogs are also, some of them, chosen for their lack of knowledge of nuclear engineering.
Also, an isotope production reactor doesn't produce electricity, so it doesn't compete with natural gas-fired electricity producers. With natural gas at $4 million per uranium-tonne-equivalent and the real thing at only $0.24 million, and hidden taxes on the $4 million, an electricity production reactor has enemies in government that an isotope production one does not.
Hearing about non-stop EVs makes me wonder, how far is the farthest run any non-space vehicle has done. 2,700 megawatt-years from one core works out to a lot of batteries.
It's nifty stuff, and the reaction of Si and N2 can be moderately hot, but nothing in comparison to the reaction of silicon and oxygen. (Obviously, since we have all that SiO2 lying around in contact with N2.)
Silicon as energy carrier has an advocate in N. Auner, Institut für Anorganische Chemie, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt. There is a synopsis. It seems idiotic to me.
There are more concerns over the safety of petrol than there used to be, not as many as there will be.
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.
One thing that hydrogen enthusiasts often seem not to know is that hydrogen is already produced on a large scale, a megatonne or two annually in North America, from fossil fuels.
Nor is a hydrogen infrastructure absent. There are lH2 tanker trucks. Not enough of them, of course, to support tens of millions of hydrogen cars.
Abundantly enough, though, to support the number of such cars that that deep-pocketed clean-motoring enthusiasts, not affiliated with government nor with a car company's research division, have insisted on pioneering. (To the best of my knowledge, that number is holding steady at zero.)
This makes greenie hydrogen enthusiasts' position seem to boil down to, "Nothing's missing but much higher-priced hydrogen."
A more respectable sort of hydrogen advocate, indeed almost as good as me, since I once was so, is the kind that expect cheaper-than-fossil-derived hydrogen to be made using nuclear thermal methods such as this: http://inisjp.tokai.jaeri.go.jp/ACT00E/09/0903.htm
You are right that a fuel must have high chemical potential energy, otherwise it is inert, and a non-fuel. But this does not justify the conclusion ("fuel is dangerous") because it is possible for a substance to have a high chemical potential energy content and be inert.
Elemental hydrogen certainly isn't an example, but various pure elements are: aluminum, boron, beryllium, and silicon. Even carbon might be so considered, although without the hydrogen its energy per pound isn't that high.
Aluminum isn't inert if you scrape the sapphire off it. Do so underwater and you'll see bubbles where you have exposed new surface. These are hydrogen bubbles; naked aluminum has taken their oxygen away.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
If "green" means "nonthreatening to governments' fossil fuel revenues", it never can be so. But if it means safe, clean, and effective, the date of the Nautilus's safe return to port after circumnavigating the world is a good candidate to be the moment you're looking for.
Now you understand the pro-fossil-fuel deception Beck is attempting. We do not have to warn people about the location of old waste sites.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
"Die within a few days"? Why?
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/thyd/peterson/papers/Repository.pdf
We have the Gordon Lightfoot song telling us there was a cook on board -- which would seem plausible anyway -- and that suggests there might have been saltshakers on board. So is there a threat that they will leak, and render the big lake undrinkable?
Even just a few decades out, the radioactivity of nuclear waste has declined so much that it is the same order of magnitude as the saltshaker threat. Beck is lying to protect the petroleum and natural gas tax component of his, and everyone he talks to's, paycheque.
In so doing he is working to protect a real waste threat that will kill one or more real persons, with names and histories, today: carbon monoxide.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
It's OK, the watchdogs are also, some of them, chosen for their lack of knowledge of nuclear engineering.
Also, an isotope production reactor doesn't produce electricity, so it doesn't compete with natural gas-fired electricity producers. With natural gas at $4 million per uranium-tonne-equivalent and the real thing at only $0.24 million, and hidden taxes on the $4 million, an electricity production reactor has enemies in government that an isotope production one does not.
Hearing about non-stop EVs makes me wonder,
how far is the farthest run any non-space vehicle
has done. 2,700 megawatt-years from one core
works out to a lot of batteries.
The sunlight reaching ground or sea level in a year? 10,000 quads? I think you'll find that's a day's accumulation, not a year's.
Silicon as energy carrier has an advocate in N. Auner, Institut für Anorganische Chemie, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt. There is a synopsis. It seems idiotic to me.
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.
One thing that hydrogen enthusiasts often seem not to know is that hydrogen is already produced on a large scale, a megatonne or two annually in North America, from fossil fuels.
Nor is a hydrogen infrastructure absent. There are lH2 tanker trucks. Not enough of them, of course, to support tens of millions of hydrogen cars.
Abundantly enough, though, to support the number of such cars that that deep-pocketed clean-motoring enthusiasts, not affiliated with government nor with a car company's research division, have insisted on pioneering. (To the best of my knowledge, that number is holding steady at zero.)
And hydrogen cars, too, exist and have existed for many years (http://www.hydrogen.org/h2cars/overview/cardata/6 7.html, http://www.hydrogen.org/h2cars/overview/cardata/78 . tm).
This makes greenie hydrogen enthusiasts' position seem to boil down to, "Nothing's missing but much higher-priced hydrogen."
A more respectable sort of hydrogen advocate, indeed almost as good as me, since I once was so, is the kind that expect cheaper-than-fossil-derived hydrogen to be made using nuclear thermal methods such as this: http://inisjp.tokai.jaeri.go.jp/ACT00E/09/0903.htm
You are right that a fuel must have high chemical potential energy, otherwise it is inert, and a non-fuel. But this does not justify the conclusion ("fuel is dangerous") because it is possible for a substance to have a high chemical potential energy content and be inert.
Elemental hydrogen certainly isn't an example, but various pure elements are: aluminum, boron, beryllium, and silicon. Even carbon might be so considered, although without the hydrogen its energy per pound isn't that high.
Aluminum isn't inert if you scrape the sapphire off it. Do so underwater and you'll see bubbles where you have exposed new surface. These are hydrogen bubbles; naked aluminum has taken their oxygen away.
Boron is inert even without an oxide coat (PDF file).
As vehicle fuels, both of these have fuel-plus-containment masses and volumes way less than those of hydrogen. Hydrogen at car scale is a heavy 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.