Obama's Oval Office Oration

[Admiral Valdemar]

Wrong.

Just build sufficient numbers of gigawatt scale ATOMIC powerplants which set to cracking ammonia from the air itself. Ammonia has many of the useful properties of gasoline, in that it remains liquid at a wide variety of temperatures; and is (relatively) non toxic -- though you don't want to huff the fumes anyway -- and existing engines can be modified to run on it really easily.

It's only real drawback is that it has about half or less the energy density of gasoline, requiring either bigger tanks or shorter ranges. But who cares when you can fill up for $0.50 cents a gallon of ammonia?

I'm well aware of the physics of that system, Shep. I've proposed it in the past years ago. My comment wasn't about technical feasibility, and never have been.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

Post subject: Re: Obama's Oval Office Oration Reply with quote
Also, and I believe it was Mike who pointed this out:

It's a lot more hazardous to recharge a battery than to refill a gas tank. I can stop at the pump and transfer twelve gallons of gas to my car in a minute or two; that's about 1.6 gigajoules of chemical energy, and it's enough to keep my car running all week given the rate I consume fuel.

But that's over 400 kilowatt-hours of electricity right there. How long would it take me to charge a battery with that much energy? Especially if I can't use high voltage/high amperage electricity because the average person who stops at a fuel station is likely to screw up if asked to do safe high voltage connections? It takes a certain amount of training to handle HV hardware like that.

So recharging car batteries is always going to be a problem in electrics, unless you can afford to leave them plugged in all night.

Actually, as I understand it, the technology now exists for extremely quick charging lithium-ion batteries that also don't lose their ability to hold charge over time. So, you wouldn't need to leave the car plugged in all night.

The caveat, of course, is that charging a car that quickly would require an extremely high amperage which no electrical grid on Earth could support if everybody was doing it, even if the generating capacity to provide that much electricity existed. You'd have to massively upgrade the infrastructure of any country you care to name. That might not be a bad thing, but at the moment, the money doesn't exist to fund such a project.

[Gil Hamilton]

Alternately if you're throwing huge amounts of energy into producing hydrogen, why not just use the hydrogen more directly in a fuel cell system?

Hydrogen gas is a real bastard to store and if you want to store it as a gas, you need enormous tanks. If you store it at LH2, which is usually how it's done, it has it's own problems. The schemes that people are coming up with is to lock the hydrogen up in metal hydrides until you are ready to use them. An example, one of the groups here is developing a tungsten metallocene complex that can be used to attach hydrogen to as a hyride and will release it as hydrogen gas if hit with the right frequency light (it's tunable based on the substituents on the pentacenes) and a source of electrons. It's also rechargable this way, so you can reuse the complex by flooding it with H2 and a current to put the hydrogens back on the complex.

That's why using the H2 is better for making ammonia. Ammonia is alot easier to deal with. What might be cool is if you could reverse Haber-Bosch it to hydrogen gas ON SITE in the car engine and react it with atmospheric oxygen, but I'm sure that's got some fundamental problems.

Also, what exactly takes so long to process the paperwork for a nuclear plant? Does it actually require people to spend years going over the documentation or is there some other bottleneck? You'd think there would be a push from every nuclear operator to try and restructure the approval process to not take so much time and money.

The red tape, approvals, and handshaking for a nuclear policy that EVERYONE agrees with every step of the way takes ten years to go through the government because there is so much "you agree and I agree and thus we agree" stuff, toes that may not be stepped on, and offices that need to look over everything. The hurdle for building a new nuclear powerplant is that literally no one wants one local to them, even if they approve of nuclear power in general. Once a possible site is selected, it has to be surveyed, analyzed in triplicate, and usually the huge protests from the locals who'd much perfer if the nuclear power plant was built, but in the next county over, has been worked through, it's many years later. That's why there haven't been any new nuke plants since the 70s, because it is damn impossible to get everyone who legally has to agree on building one to build one. It's an intractable problem unless you are willing to be draconian and FORCE communities to take them with public domain and threats to cut off any funding the community may get forever unless they agree.