Nuclear power is all good, but there is a huge risk that goes along with it. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island are very interesting to read about.

 

There was a link on a handicap site I'm registered on, went to a site with study done on a battery powered with urine, it was basically a chemical packit that you simply pee in, the reaction causes electricity, giving you a battery for emergency use.

 

ya i know but it would work good

 

One thing to consider is that although coal doesn't burn 'clean', whatever that means, the new generation of coal power plants actually attain efficiencies of something like 65%. This is compared to about 25%-30% for gasoline ICEs and 40-45% for diesel. So even though coal supposedly doesn't burn as cleanly, you get more of the potential power out of it and so don't need to burn as much. Also, its not true that a car burns much cleaner than a power plant. Power plants are so much larger that they can burn fuel much more efficiently than cars. Also, power plants are better at cleaning the exaust gasses than automobiles. For example, modern coal plants use turbine engines, similar to jet engines, which spin electric generators. These turbines are powered not from liquid fuel, but from gassified coal. The gassification is accomplished by using the exaust heat from the turbine, to 'cook' the coal so that it releases simple hydrocarbon gasses. Also, the exaust heat boils water which runs more traditional steam turbine power generators. This is how such high efficiencies are obtained. This said, I have heard arguments both ways about the 'cleanliness' of power plants versus automobiles.



As far as battery technology, lithium ion batteries are available, but they are also expensive. Lithium ion batteries are incredibly light.

In ford's electric ranger, the upgraded NiMH battery pack, which cost $30,000, weighed about 1020 pounds. This gave the vehicle a range of 115 miles at 45mph and 75 miles at 60mph.

Now, for the same weight, with lithium ion batteries, you can more than double that range. However, it would cost about $105,000.

On, the opposite end of the spectrum, if you were to construct a battery pack from lead acid batteries of the same weight as the two other cases, it would cost about $4000, and would give you about half the range of the NiMH battery pack.

 

J6Szczecin is correct, as a technician that builds electric vehicles for a living, I can say that there are many other exotic batteries being used by my company like Lithium Ion, Nickel Metal Hyd., nickel cad, nickel metal sodium hyd., and a couple of others that I can't pronounce yet but we are in the process of testing. I might add that as you brake the vehicle it regenerated electricity to recharge the batteries. As for plugging in your vehicle whenever you can, this is the way you can recover the cost of the vehicle in a resonable amount of time. Even at the highest means of buying electricity, power company burning oil to spin generators, the cost is less compared to you buying gas at $3.00 per gallon to fill your tank in your Hybrid or using a personal gas gererator to charge your batteries. Believe me we all have to move forward in our way of thinking about our gasoline vehicle and know that EV cars Hybrids or pure electric are here and to be used with more high tech equipment than any car that is being produce today, we just have to go out and look for alternative fueled vehicles.
We also have to speed up our development of Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. I have helped build a Hydrogen fuel cell/battery powered passenger bus at Hickam AFB in Hawaii along with a new Hydrogen fuel cell Stepvan which has 220vac and 110vac aux. outlets for the user as a separate power source ect. If you are really interested in changing your mentallity about using only fossil fuel as a primary power source the technology is out there and being used. The USA has to catch up with the rest of the world, if the American car companies allow us to do so.

 

[Sarcasm on] What? Americans change their minds? Gee, aren't we blessed by God and our might to enjoy massive entitlement? [/Sarcasm off]

Unfortunately, when you believe in your "rightness", your mentality will not change until forced to by "the market"...and someday, that'll be too late. Nice thought, though. Keep fighting the good fight.

 

Remind me to keep an eye on this:
http://www.physorg.com/news67796415.html

The Russians are at it again. This world could use another race. Cheap/clean electricity is as good a focus as any. This might end up being as fun as Ultracaps, but cheaper.

(Note to self; Heteroelectrocyclic Battery)

 

HAH! This is too cool.. This is all the reason more to haul a load full of beer
in back of the truck!

 

This is of some relevance to the discussion, a new movie out titled "Who killed the Electric Car?"
Link to trailer:
http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/
http://www.terrapass.com/terrablog/posts/000262.html


Go see the movie beofre you blow it off as some liberal/greenie conspiracy thing. Keep in mind the fact that L.A. had the countries best urban commuter train system in the '50s before government and car makers conspired to tear it up and uses buses instead.

 

Here's the article:
Russian scientists have invented a battery that can capture energy not only from the sun, but also from the stars, the head of a research institute at the Dubna Nuclear Institute, near Moscow, said.

First, batteries don't usually capture energy, they just store it. Second, because of their distance, the energy that could be captured from stars (aside from the nearby Sun) is practically zero.

So IMHO, that article is pure BS and/or hoax.

 

Umm... Dubna isn't just a community college. There's more emitted from stars than just visible light and the Russians are pretty good with this science stuff. If we want a new battery, we better start thinking outside the box and redefine the term battery. This is just what I want, a solar cell that works just as well at night as it does on cloudy days, effectively and actively "storing" energy all the time.

It'll probably end up being like the space program, where they just go and do it while we always come in second and call it a race. I mean, here we are still trying to decide if string theory exists, while the russians are developing applications for it.

Of course, it could end up being like the 2KW atomic generators, which worked great - until they had to clean up the mess.

 

We shall see. The news was apparently carried by Itar-Tass, too, and there they mentioned a "heteroelectric" cell....

Based on the available data I stick to my originall assessment. Yes, there is the cosmic background radiation and we're in a sea of meutrinos, but harnessing those is not trivial.