Your hard-earned gas money at work

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Just because it can be done doesn't mean it's efficient. As far as creating power goes, I was thinking more along the lines of tidal, solar, geothermal, hydro, and wind power plants scattered through-out. All these plants are either time or location specific, but by using the energy to split hydrogen you can smooth things out.

But that's getting into enviromental, and that's not the point I am making. Even with planes, the same Catch-22 exists. Companies are not going to produce or even heavily research hydrogen powered planes until an infrastructure for providing hydrogen regularly exists. And no one is going to build the infrastructure until there is a market for the product. At some point the government simply has to step in and take the hit to get the hydrogen economy going, either by building the infrastructure itself or by researching and mass-producing the planes themselves. The free market model simply can't solve this model, unless gas gets so expensive that it's no longer usable.

I agree that government subsidies are necessary, HOWERVER the "Eco-Friendly" methods you suggested : wind, tidal, geothermal,solar, & hydro-electric will certainly NOT be anywhere NEAR the required efficieny needed to supply electricity both to power homes and cities AND to produce Hydrogen via electrolysis. Moving to hydrogen is gonna mean we WILL have to end the moritorium on the nuclear power industry-which we REALLY should do anyway.

Meh, I have little problem with nuclear. With the increased technology and experience today, it's relatively safe. The waste is problematic, but mostly safe methods of storage have been developed - still a few issues, but the benefits outweigh the risks. If nothing else, messing up a small portion of the earth with nuclear waste is better then messing up the whole thing with CO2.

My only real complaint with it on the short term is the amount of lead time needed to fire one up or shut it down. It's great for when you know exactly how much power is needed, but it's not the best for responding to changing demand. Then again, if you always ran them above demand and used the excess to split hydrogen, then maybe that wouldn't be a problem.

On the long term, I worry that it's going to run into the same problem as oil - finite supply. I want some incentives set up to develop better renewable sources of energy, so the same problem doesn't show up.

While I agree that nuclear power itself is a highly efficient way to generate significant power and that it's far safer than the general public believes it to be, there is still one issue with nuclear power in the disposal of the radioactive waste products... there's enough land to safely dispose of the waste being generated by today's reactors, but not for a full-scale infrastructure...

One option is to launch the waste into space. Unfortunately, given the failure rate for escape velocity vehicles, that means alot of radioactive material would be ejected into earth's atmosphere, and we'd be dead in a few years.

Which brings me to option 3: build nuclear reactors in space and use high intensity lasers to beam the power down to earth. While it would be more difficult and expensive, and there would always be a looming threat of space weapons, this would bypass the waste disposal problem entirely since we wouldnt need escape velocity vehicles to get rid of the material (just put it in capsules and send them towards the sun...)

While we're at it, send as much solar power plants into space as we can too...

you mean all that desert wasteland called azriona and nevada and new mexico can't be used?


and what about yucca mountain?

Or go to old nuclear test sites, which are already uninhabitable from bomb tests.

I haven't read through this thread, but am I the only one that supports the high gas prices?

It keeps people from driving and wasting gas which pollutes the earth. Keep the gas prices high, that way it'll keep idiots like those in my neighborhood who feel the need to buy suburbans/escalades/navigators/explorers when they are the only ones in the vehicle. They're not even married or have any kids, yet they feel the need to buy a vehicle which fits a full family.

that might be a little more difficult depending on the level of radiation/safety that needs to be used during the process of preparing the area for storage so it may not be cost efficient to use those particular areas.

That would probably be harder to do then my renewable idea ...



Well, the biggest issue for me would be stable bedrock. An earthquake is probably the greatest danger with burying nuclear waste. The desolation of the area would be secondary, as the shielded caskets they put the stuff in combined with the depth they bury it at pretty much kills the radiation. But a bad earthquake, or many minor ones, could break the caskets and/or bring the waste to the surface.

If only we could do deep core mining... we could send all the waste to the core of the earth, and use it to give a tiny bit more power to the tectonic engine (which is powered by radioactive decay), which in turn would give us more geothermal energy...

Well, they don't have to go hand in hand, but major proponents want that. Greg Mankiw, a major proponent of this seeks a revenue neutral tax, and ultimately likes to reduce taxes.


Well, the proponents of this idea often dislike governmental intervention in the other areas as well.


Yep, and this is why we have corporations that can pool risk in order to do these things. Any new innovation will demand infrastructure to support it, but that does not say how this infrastructure must be created. Frankly, I have heard that hydrogen is a horrible choice for a new energy source anyway, and well, if that is true, then a market can hopefully weigh the information better than a government would, and given the success of betting markets, that seems probable.


Well, ok. It doesn't seem to be a Catch-22 so much as a situation that would require some concurrent systems to be constructed, and that would likely start in some form of niche market and spread out from that as most new things do not immediately start up, but rather ease into the common culture. First, we may get rumored hydrogen vehicles, then we get predicted costs of a larger scale use of hydrogen being less than that of another technology, then we get some people who think that they can exploit that for some group(maybe a trucking company or hippies or some such), then it gets larger and larger based upon that.

The issue with roads is not one of "infrastructure" I would say so much as difficulty in assigning costs to the beneficiaries. Widespread tollroads would be expensive to be maintain.

You were misinformed. Hydrogen is clean and efficient. When it's produced through electrolysis with energy from nuclear reactions, there would be sufficient supplies of it to meet our needs. Nuclear could of course be supplemented with solar, geothermal, wind, hydroelectric, etc but a hydrogen economy would be the ideal.

Yes, but it's also a highly explosive gas and nobody has yet come up with a credible way of distributing it, etc both safely and at a reasonable price. Other alternative energy sources have similar problems, solar is about five times more expensive per unit of energy than fossils. In fact solar cells take up quite a lot of energy to produce, so much that it's possible for them to not even make up for it in their lifetime, depending on where they're placed.





What niche market would buy a car that you couldn't actually use, especially since without economies of scale they would be extremely expensive? And without economies of scale to lower costs, who's going to invest in expensive new infrastructure?

Hydrogen is no more dangerous to transport than gasoline- actually, probably less dangerous. Gasoline actually is more volatile than hydrogen and no one whines about its dangers. I listed other energy sources not as sole sources (or even primary ones) but merely supplements. There are some major advances going on involving solar right now and it soon should be much more feasible, though I still think nuclear is the better option.

Well, hydrogen is also very hard to transport and thus would be very expensive. I am not commenting on it's cleanness and efficiency. As stated by Rosa Young, a physicist and the vice president of advanced materials development at Energy Conversion Devices in Troy, Michigan states: a storage container to contain 5 kg of hydrogen would weigh 661 lbs due to all of the issues with storing it. Not only that, but hydrogen tends to leak given the small size of the element and thus containment issues are a major problem especially given that these leaks can be difficult to find until performance suffers and thus this can cause issues such as the flammability issues brought up by pbcoll.

Gas would have to get highly expensive before the infrastructure would be built and technology for the production would have to get comparatively cheaper. Not only that, but rich people and large companies can be major niches to grow out from as both have a lot of wealth and would be likely to jump upon a new innovation. The issue with large infrastructures is that the gain from creating them would have to be seen as worth the opportunity cost of the money in other sectors, and that issue of economic calculation is important to remember.

Gasoline is not as hard to transport as hydrogen is. Hydrogen is very likely to leak, and one of pbcoll's arguments is transportation costs, which seem very likely to be there with such a source as hydrogen.

Orwell, I'm going to have to call you on this, hydrogen is considerably more dangerous than gasoline. It is flammable over a much wider range of concentrations in air (as well as explosive over a wider range); it has a very low viscosity, so it leaks quickly; it requires relatively little energy to ignite; as a gas it will tend to disperse over a wide area, rather than pool like gasoline, spreading the hazard; it tends to burn with a clear flame, which can make it hard to identify a hydrogen fire; it also has the nasty tendency to degrade metal containers that hold it to the point of failure. It also has a tendency to be extremely explosive at high pressure when contaminated with oxygen or air (something that certainly could happen to an average driver filling up at a hydrogen station).

Many of these issues could be solved with more exotic storage methods, but most of these technologies are still in their infancy, so I wouldn't expect them to be viable for consumer vehicles in the near future.

Personally, I think that all-electric vehicles show the most promise. They have the most direct route from energy source to engine, and thus a high efficiency. Additionally, most of the energy-transport infrastructure already exists, so considerably less new capital needs to be devoted to developing it. The major issue for all-electric vehicles is the batteries: they're expensive, and charge slowly. However, I think these technical issues will likely be solved before the storage issues for hydrogen, so electric cars will likely prove to be a more viable replacement for our current ICE vehicles.