The Shrine

http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9712548-7.html

Why don't they just combine this technology? Get a Diesel plug-in hybrid? It would get astounding MPG.

Hasn't battery technology gotten to the point where we can have a pure plug-in electric car that'll get about 150 miles on a charge? If they could build a production car that could get 60 miles a charge 11 years ago you'd think with the increases in lithium ion technology we could probably double that now. Perfect commuter car that meets about 95% of the world's driving needs with zero emissions....

....and very, very minimal maintenance. Thus, we'll never see a car company make it. Forget about the oil companies, they're not the ones hanging on to the very obsolete internal combustion engine as basically every documentary and anyone who's said anything about this will tell you. It's the car manufacturers who rely on maintenance as their main revenue stream. They sell the car to you for as little as $200 markup in hopes of getting your maintenance. My bud's a service advisor, his life is reliant on "regularly scheduled maintenance". But so is the continued profit streams of GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, etc.

We need to be thinking far beyond hybrids and biodiesel and pressuring the gov't to do something about it. We should have been driving these hybrid or biodiesel cars 15 years ago.

But that won't happen, that would actually cause people to care about real issues not what we're told to care about

Electric should be very viable anymore... except the danger the increased electric demands would put on the US's already strained and aged energy system... why the fuck are we still scared of nuclear?

What REALLY pisses me off is the whole Ethanol push. We're fucking using CORN, a HORRIBLE source of ethanol, and it's pushing up the price of all food. Ethanol, the way the US wants to do it, will be more damaging and more expensive than oil, and will make us even more reliant on external markets.

Lesson of the day-- don't fuck with the food supply. Seriously, knock it off. Come on... stop it Don't make my Corn Pops cost $20 a box...

Pure electric cars won't go well because it's basically shifting from a oil-based fuel to a non-oil-based fuel. Such a drastic shift in power would be met with the same resistance as we had 11 years ago. (Maybe not as bad, but it wouldn't be pretty.)

Therefore, we will have plug-in hybrids. It's a good middle man to pure electric cars. Most people driving to work won't even need to use the gas. I think electric cars will still be a niche market, because of the lack of long-haul use, but at least it would be a surviving market, like the hybrids are today.

I don't really buy the whole corn pushing up the price of food 'cause we're using it for ethanol. Up here, after the avian flu scare we saw a 40-50% increase in chicken prices...and they never went down. What, have grain prices increased that significantly? Bullshit. The companies are just trying to take advantage of whatever they can using whatever excuse they can to reset the prices as high as they can.

We also had a fire at a refinery up here in Ontario and saw a jump in gasoline prices. The oligopoly up here used that as an excuse to set prices 10cent high. Not only that, those motherfuckers also work together to ensure there's no real competition now. Before we used to see the prices go up and down every week as some company would drop the price at a station thinking it could make more money with greater volume, the other company with a station down the road or across the street following suit, and the ripple effect working its way across the city/province.

Now these wastes of skins and bones have gotten together and agreed not to do that anymore; in other words, to get rid of competition. They actually started upping the prices randomly for no reason now during the course of a day (like on Saturdays) in order to try and maintain the price level. I normally wouldn't care but ALL of the gas stations are starting to do it all at the same time. Rather than one of them saying "hey, they went up 10%, if we stay where we are, we can make a KILLING" they raise the price at that station to match the one across the road. That's anti-competitive practices at its worst...and our motherless-fuck politicians ain't doin' nothing about it. Why? 'Cause we don't force them to, that's why.

The good thing about ethanol is that it's at least renewable and any country can "make" it. You don't have to rely on a cartel to move. Then you'd have true market prices like you would with biodiesel instead of seeing a doubling of gas prices with no equivalent increases in refining (there's a reason all those gas companies, and not just OPEC, are recording record profits).

At the end of the day, we can break our reliance on petroleum for everything (except maybe plastics) tomorrow if we wanted to. We just have to freakin' want to. Fat chance of that happening 'cause then we'd actually have to care about something important rather than what dress which star is wearing at which useless award show.

Corn based Ethanol is NOT the way to go. The corn prices may not be too noticable yet, but wait until even 20% of the country is using it to drive. I don't want milk going to $15 / gallon. Nobody has the land required to support a country's fuel based on corn. It is TERRIBLY inefficient in terms of ethanol and requires more pollution and gas to produce than it saves.

If we want an efficient version of Ethanol cane sugar is the best so far. Corn is just a horrible way to kake it.

And this is the problem: Talking about one item that will solve all of our energy problems. If 20% of the country is using ANY one thing as fuel, it's no longer a "renewable resource". Ethanol, biodiesel, hybrids, pebble bed reactors, solar, wind, hydro, thermal, etc., etc., etc. Use them ALL!

Hell, a good start would be to put solar panels on all of our roofs. It wouldn't power everything, but it should be enough to power our homes. Pebble bed reactors is another good start. We need to get out of our caves and quit being paranoid of nuclear energy!

We've been into nuclear energy for a while up here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU

Although they did shut most of the down they're actually in the process of turning some back on 'cause of the pressue on the power grid

Tessian wrote:Corn based Ethanol is NOT the way to go. The corn prices may not be too noticable yet, but wait until even 20% of the country is using it to drive. I don't want milk going to $15 / gallon. Nobody has the land required to support a country's fuel based on corn. It is TERRIBLY inefficient in terms of ethanol and requires more pollution and gas to produce than it saves.

If we want an efficient version of Ethanol cane sugar is the best so far. Corn is just a horrible way to kake it.

Well, isn't Brazil and a lot of other Central and South American countries already converting to sugar cane? Brazil's jumped on the ethanol bandwagon big time:

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=6817

Zeus wrote:

Tessian wrote:Corn based Ethanol is NOT the way to go. The corn prices may not be too noticable yet, but wait until even 20% of the country is using it to drive. I don't want milk going to $15 / gallon. Nobody has the land required to support a country's fuel based on corn. It is TERRIBLY inefficient in terms of ethanol and requires more pollution and gas to produce than it saves.

If we want an efficient version of Ethanol cane sugar is the best so far. Corn is just a horrible way to kake it.

Well, isn't Brazil and a lot of other Central and South American countries already converting to sugar cane? Brazil's jumped on the ethanol bandwagon big time:

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=6817

Yes, and they are doing Ethanol the RIGHT way. Much more efficient and cheaper to produce ethanol with.

Zeus wrote:We've been into nuclear energy for a while up here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU

Although they did shut most of the down they're actually in the process of turning some back on 'cause of the pressue on the power grid

Yeah, but can you turn off all of the safeties and watch it NOT blow up in a nuclear meltdown?

Wired article I linked above wrote:Wearing disposable blue paper gowns and booties, the grad student leads the way to a windowless control room that houses three industry-standard PC workstations and the inevitable electronic schematic, all valves, pressure lines, and color-coded readouts. In a conventional reactor's control room, there would be far more to look at - control panels for emergency core cooling, containment-area sprinklers, pressurized water tanks. None of that is here. The usual layers of what the industry calls engineered safety are superfluous. Suppose a coolant pipe blows, a pressure valve sticks, terrorists knock the top off the reactor vessel, an operator goes postal and yanks the control rods that regulate the nuclear chain reaction - no radioactive nightmare. This reactor is meltdown-proof.

Zhang Zuoyi, the project's 42-year-old director, explains why. The key trick is a phenomenon known as Doppler broadening - the hotter atoms get, the more they spread apart, making it harder for an incoming neutron to strike a nucleus. In the dense core of a conventional reactor, the effect is marginal. But HTR-10's carefully designed geometry, low fuel density, and small size make for a very different story. In the event of a catastrophic cooling-system failure, instead of skyrocketing into a bad movie plot, the core temperature climbs to only about 1,600 degrees Celsius - comfortably below the balls' 2,000-plus-degree melting point - and then falls. This temperature ceiling makes HTR-10 what engineers privately call walk-away safe. As in, you can walk away from any situation and go have a pizza.

"In a conventional reactor emergency, you have only seconds to make the right decision," Zhang notes. "With HTR-10, it's days, even weeks - as much time as we could ever need to fix a problem."

This unusual margin of safety isn't merely theoretical. INET's engineers have already done what would be unthinkable in a conventional reactor: switched off HTR-10's helium coolant and let the reactor cool down all by itself. Indeed, Zhang plans a show-stopping repeat performance at an international conference of reactor physicists in Beijing in September. "We think our kind of test may be required in the market someday," he adds.

WOW! that is actually pretty awesome. Now all we need to do is find a way to dispose of the nuclear waste. My suggestion = build a magnetic rail launcher to shoot radioactive waste into the sun.

bovine wrote:WOW! that is actually pretty awesome. Now all we need to do is find a way to dispose of the nuclear waste. My suggestion = build a magnetic rail launcher to shoot radioactive waste into the sun.

Why into the sun? Just launch it away from us not directly at another planet and we're good

Zeus wrote: Why into the sun? Just launch it away from us not directly at another planet and we're good

Because then it'll eventually land on the planet Omicron Percei VIII and then we're fucked.

Tessian wrote:Because then it'll eventually land on the planet Omicron Percei VIII and then we're fucked.

Or worse, we'll have to hit the collective mass of waste with another equally sized collective mass of waste in a 1000 years.

Tessian wrote:

Zeus wrote: Why into the sun? Just launch it away from us not directly at another planet and we're good

Because then it'll eventually land on the planet Omicron Percei VIII and then we're fucked.

The issue of disposing radioactive waste in outer space or the sun is a pretty contentious one.

Outer space actually seems to me that it would be fine, for *present* levels of human existence. What I'd worry about is a few hundred years from now when you can have a reactor in your living room, and either space or planets around us are slowly starting to get filled with radioactive ooze, though, so I don't know whether or not I even want to recommend that.

As far as I know, the sun would *not* really be a good choice, because the fusion reaction that powers it is actually surprisingly fragile. It might not do anything bad with present levels, but again, if we get into the habit of it, that could really, really fuck up our sun, and I don't know that I need to tell anyone that that would be really bad for us.

Personally, I'm more about renewable and environmentally-friendly sources, myself. It's a challenge to coexist with nature, but the alternatives are really crappy. Nuclear power is sort of hard for me to get behind on a mass scale, though do I think it's definitely something we should be putting research into and continuing to use in limited circumstances (nuclear submarines and carriers, for instance).

I'd never advocate nuclear power on a personal level... basically nothing smaller than a military submarine should have one..

But I'm all building new plants around the country to meet our growing power requirements... I mean god damn, how many oil and coal plants do we still have? Tell me that those are better for the environment than nuclear waste which we bottle in nearly impenetrable canisters and store inside a specially designed complex at the bottom of a mountain in Nevada?

We had one scare (not too far from me) back in the 70's and it's been taboo to even think of putting any new ones up since. Like nuclear technology and safety measures haven't improved in 30 years with the rest of the world... I'd rather live near one of them than a coal/oil plant. At least then in the HORRIBLY rare almost unimaginable instance something went wrong at least I die easier than slowly choking on soot in my lungs all my life.

Hell I bet if we switched out even just the oil burning ones we would see a huge drop in oil usage in this country.

Actually, this is a good point. I'll take nuke power any day of the week over either coal or oil, both of which are *fucked up*.

Speaking of power issues...

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/05/ ... index.html

One of the more refreshing things I've seen lately. I like the GOP Senator bemoaning the unfairness to the energy industry...

I didn't see this before, pretty cool. Although I don't know if we wanna start taxing oil companies; won't that mean prices for gas go up again?

The shame of it is if we built a new coal plant today with current technology... the amount of pollution it would produce would be negligable. The problem is it's expensive to do... but technology does exist today to make creating energy from coal a lot less harmful. This, along with the fact that coal is this country's largest natural resource, would be a good combination but as I said... no one wants to bother spending the money up front to make it cleaner.

Didn't like this though...

Democrats avoided a nasty fight by ignoring -- at least for the time being -- calls for automakers to make vehicles more fuel-efficient. Cars, sport utility vehicles and small trucks use most of the country's oil and produce almost one-third of the carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming.

Oh and the part after that about pushing for more corn based ethanol... brilliant. Let's trade one foreign dependency on another, woohoo!


And someone needs to clue this guy in...

"There's a war going on against energy from fossil fuels," said Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas. "I can't understand the pure venom felt against the oil and gas industry."

Gee, wouldn't have ANYTHING to do with those massive record breaking profits the oil and gas companies have been getting while we get reamed at over $3/gallon... idiot.

Nev wrote:Speaking of power issues...

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/05/ ... index.html

One of the more refreshing things I've seen lately. I like the GOP Senator bemoaning the unfairness to the energy industry...

I think there needs to be a serious inquisition over the long-term benefits of such a bill. It doe use the corn-based ethanol which some (Tess) seem to think is not a good solution. It doesn't touch the cars which is the biggest thing that needs to be addressed. And who knows, until there's a debate, how effective the solutions proposed will be. As we've all seen in the past, bills don't necessarily work as they appear on the surface.

Besides, it won't happen unless Hilary wins so it's a moot point.

Zeus wrote: It doe use the corn-based ethanol which some (Tess) seem to think is not a good solution.

Go do some googling, it's not an opinion-- it's fact. Corn is a horribly inefficient and expensive way to make ethanol. US already importing food, WHO thinks it's a good idea to take away a large portion of farm land and use it to create not nearly enough fuel?

I don't have the sources anymore, but basically the cost of and pollution generated to create corn based ethanol was a lot more than unleaded gas. corn-based Ethanol is a more retarded replacement for oil than hydrogen.

Nev wrote:Speaking of power issues...

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/05/ ... index.html

One of the more refreshing things I've seen lately. I like the GOP Senator bemoaning the unfairness to the energy industry...

Meh. Wake me up when they give me a 100% tax refund on solar panel roofs.

Tessian wrote:I didn't see this before, pretty cool. Although I don't know if we wanna start taxing oil companies; won't that mean prices for gas go up again?

We are already pissed off as a country with the oil prices. If it goes much higher, Congress would either impose price caps, or declare oil a utility. If the latter happens, the oil companies are really fucked (and it would be MUCH better for us).

Tessian wrote:The shame of it is if we built a new coal plant today with current technology... the amount of pollution it would produce would be negligable.

You tell that to the coal miners that have to mine that shit. No amount of technology would make the extraction of coal "safe".

Tessian wrote:And someone needs to clue this guy in...

"There's a war going on against energy from fossil fuels," said Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas. "I can't understand the pure venom felt against the oil and gas industry."

Gee, wouldn't have ANYTHING to do with those massive record breaking profits the oil and gas companies have been getting while we get reamed at over $3/gallon... idiot.

R-Texas. Do I even need to say anything else?

Zeus wrote:Besides, it won't happen unless Hilary wins so it's a moot point.

Not a 2/3rd majority, but certainly had some Republican backing. Bush's approval rating is in the toilet, and he's actually is starting to support alternative energy and global warming science. I have my doubts that he would veto this bill, at least not without a lot of flak from the press.

SineSwiper wrote:

Tessian wrote:I didn't see this before, pretty cool. Although I don't know if we wanna start taxing oil companies; won't that mean prices for gas go up again?

We are already pissed off as a country with the oil prices. If it goes much higher, Congress would either impose price caps, or declare oil a utility. If the latter happens, the oil companies are really fucked (and it would be MUCH better for us).

You're old enough to remember the 70's, right? Government imposes price caps, oil company limits supply, you get to wait 2 hours in line to fill up your car. Sanctions and price caps will destroy things.

Tessian wrote:You're old enough to remember the 70's, right? Government imposes price caps, oil company limits supply, you get to wait 2 hours in line to fill up your car. Sanctions and price caps will destroy things.

You're mixing up cause and effect. The price caps was BECAUSE OPEC decided to drastically raise prices. This was in direct response to the US's support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

Besides, if we run into a situation like that again, we let them eat sand. That's how we solved it in the 70's. We have just as much food here in the States as they have oil in the Middle East.

Tessian wrote:US already importing food, WHO thinks it's a good idea to take away a large portion of farm land and use it to create not nearly enough fuel?

All countries import food. We do not, however, import corn, because we make a lot of it. That is, in fact, the reason that the predominant sweetner used in the US is corn syrup and not sugar.

There may be other reasons why corn is not an good replacement - I have not researched it - but this one does not convince me.

Kupek wrote:There may be other reasons why corn is not an good replacement - I have not researched it - but this one does not convince me.

I'll say it a thousand times: ONE THING isn't the end-all solution to all of our problems! That's why we are in this mess in the first place. Sure, corn-based fuels is a good idea, but when you think of it as a total replacement for oil, you are taking one vice and replacing it with another.

SineSwiper wrote: I'll say it a thousand times: ONE THING isn't the end-all solution to all of our problems! That's why we are in this mess in the first place. Sure, corn-based fuels is a good idea, but when you think of it as a total replacement for oil, you are taking one vice and replacing it with another.

I think what you meant was that a "renewable resource" is a good idea. The rest of your statement is very true, but at least in terms of automative energy we need to be standardized... I guess the key would be to have multiple methods of getting the same energy source.

Since everyone seems to want to just write off my stance on corn-based ethanol instead of reading about it themselves... this was the #1 Google result for "corn based ethanol". What I also noted here-- Kupek you mentioned how all our corn is in house... but did you know that 70% of that corn is fed to livestock and poultry in our country? Using corn for gas would NEVER raise prices for meat then, would it?

http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/0 ... hanol.html

Most economic analyses of corn-to-ethanol production overlook the costs of environmental damages, which Pimentel says should add another 23 cents per gallon. "Corn production in the U.S. erodes soil about 12 times faster than the soil can be reformed, and irrigating corn mines groundwater 25 percent faster than the natural recharge rate of ground water. The environmental system in which corn is being produced is being rapidly degraded. Corn should not be considered a renewable resource for ethanol energy production, especially when human food is being converted into ethanol," Pimentel said.

Sine, I never said anything of the sort.

Tessian, you're right, I haven't even bothered to Google it. I haven't bothered to research it. I stated so myself. I am, however, reading what you're saying and seeing logical or factual mistakes. For example, your point that meat prices would increase: so? Environmental damages aside, oil is basically giving us a free ride. By switching to another fuel source (or multiple different fuel sources, calm down Sine), we're going to have to take the hit somewhere else. That's just the way things work.

Stupid question: ethanol is not the same as biodiesel, right? If that's the case, shouldn't we be lookin' past ethanol and to biodiesel or is there just as much inefficiencies there as there is with something like corn-based ethanol?

After all, this did start out as a biodiesel thread :-)

Haha I think biofuel is slightly different... but I can't figure out from looking around... if biofuel means any biomass turned into energy... I guess ethanol would fall under that category?

Biodiesel is pretty much just putting some french fry oil (or any cooking oil), taking out any impurities, and fuel up.

I think McDonalds needs to put out gas stations. They would make a killing just recycling their oil into biodiesel.

SineSwiper wrote:Biodiesel is pretty much just putting some french fry oil (or any cooking oil), taking out any impurities, and fuel up.

I think McDonalds needs to put out gas stations. They would make a killing just recycling their oil into biodiesel.

If they added what people leave behind in their bathrooms after eating their shit they could almost give the stuff away.

SineSwiper wrote:Biodiesel is pretty much just putting some french fry oil (or any cooking oil), taking out any impurities, and fuel up.

I think McDonalds needs to put out gas stations. They would make a killing just recycling their oil into biodiesel.

Too lazy to look right now, but if I'm not mistaken, vege oil for biofuel is actually better if it's been used rather than fresh oil. Something to do with the frying process (racid oil is better?) I think.

Someone look it up and prove me wrong.....