4th June 2004, 1:37 PM
Now relax about nuclear power. While fission does involve a lot of waste, which is very hard to dispose of, FUSION has no waste! It actually produces stuff useful to us! I mean, hydrogen fuel cells ARE a sort of fusion, of oxygen (easily obtainable from the air) and hydrogen (harder to get, but hydrogen is actually just a single proton remember (if you're talking a positive ion of it anyway) so I'm sure eventually a great way of obtaining it will be found, and methanol does work pretty good anyway) into water to make electricity. They don't release it as pure heat energy like actual nuclear fusion mind you, but fusion is involved. Nuclear fusion reactors, once we get the hang of it, will never have the risk of meltdown and don't use highly unstable materials like fission does. It's still a ways off, the average scientist estimates the first useful reactors will arrive in about 15 years, but it's fully within our life times that it's expected to happen. Once it's figured out, you could plug in a fusion battery and keep that thing running longer than you will. Fusion is the holy grail, but until then... many electric sources need to be found...
Sheer battery power is actually a VERY likely solution. Electric cars as they are NOW just don't cut it. While an electric engine of a certain level of force will totally outclass an equal strength gas engine (instant power as opposed to working up to it, and constant, and so much simpler than normal cars so you could likely fix it all by yourself when the only real part breaks down), unfortunatly, getting engines to that level of power is tough. Not really tough if you have the electricity mind you, but there's the problem. Shove it into an outlet, you can get a spinning fan blade that will knock down houses and can be used to test wind flow over cars and such (wind tunnel), but ya can't drive it. Batteries however just don't hold enough for long enough and take too long to charge.
However, the latest batteries sure seem to be helping that along. The fuel cell battery is one solution that just needs the methanol to get going (converting it into hydrogen, though "dirty" hydrogen right now, hence why it doesn't work very good yet). An alternative is the lithium-ion batteries, which basically are just long strips of lithium stacked one on top of the other that are filled with electrons. Those things, as you have noticed from your GBASP, are VERY nice. However, you need to fill an entire car with them before it can outclass a gas engine. As such, these cars some have made with that in mind are the size of a normal car, can go just as fast as a normal car, have NO gear changes, instant acceleration and decelation in the same pedal, will go about 300 miles or so on a single charge on highways (sorry I didn't catch the km's on this show), and longer in the city due to a method of recharging a little bit of power whenever you release the pedal to break, and due to the weight of the batteries have normal car momentum.
BUT, they are VERY expensive to make. Prohibitively so. Not only that, you look like a jackarse recharging that thing somewhere for about 4 or so hours. For normal living, they would be fine so long as you plugged it in at night, but for the long trips, they are about to get much longer... People won't want that (I can imagine if they DID tolerate it, gas stations would fade out, and um, movie theaters would fade into those locations with all the parking lots having pay-to-charge outlets or something :D). So, getting the charge time and price down is the key issue. One tech exists, but is still too expensive yet and has charge time, the other could easily solve that, but would eliminate one plus (being able to refill from your own outlet would no longer be an optinon) and on top of that, doesn't exist yet.
Two options that are GETTING close to replasing gas for good, but aren't there yet. Lithium-ion says give them 5 years, fuel cell says give them 10. (And fusion is a very long way off, requiring 15 years just to get a very unusable by the average person reactor going.)
Sheer battery power is actually a VERY likely solution. Electric cars as they are NOW just don't cut it. While an electric engine of a certain level of force will totally outclass an equal strength gas engine (instant power as opposed to working up to it, and constant, and so much simpler than normal cars so you could likely fix it all by yourself when the only real part breaks down), unfortunatly, getting engines to that level of power is tough. Not really tough if you have the electricity mind you, but there's the problem. Shove it into an outlet, you can get a spinning fan blade that will knock down houses and can be used to test wind flow over cars and such (wind tunnel), but ya can't drive it. Batteries however just don't hold enough for long enough and take too long to charge.
However, the latest batteries sure seem to be helping that along. The fuel cell battery is one solution that just needs the methanol to get going (converting it into hydrogen, though "dirty" hydrogen right now, hence why it doesn't work very good yet). An alternative is the lithium-ion batteries, which basically are just long strips of lithium stacked one on top of the other that are filled with electrons. Those things, as you have noticed from your GBASP, are VERY nice. However, you need to fill an entire car with them before it can outclass a gas engine. As such, these cars some have made with that in mind are the size of a normal car, can go just as fast as a normal car, have NO gear changes, instant acceleration and decelation in the same pedal, will go about 300 miles or so on a single charge on highways (sorry I didn't catch the km's on this show), and longer in the city due to a method of recharging a little bit of power whenever you release the pedal to break, and due to the weight of the batteries have normal car momentum.
BUT, they are VERY expensive to make. Prohibitively so. Not only that, you look like a jackarse recharging that thing somewhere for about 4 or so hours. For normal living, they would be fine so long as you plugged it in at night, but for the long trips, they are about to get much longer... People won't want that (I can imagine if they DID tolerate it, gas stations would fade out, and um, movie theaters would fade into those locations with all the parking lots having pay-to-charge outlets or something :D). So, getting the charge time and price down is the key issue. One tech exists, but is still too expensive yet and has charge time, the other could easily solve that, but would eliminate one plus (being able to refill from your own outlet would no longer be an optinon) and on top of that, doesn't exist yet.
Two options that are GETTING close to replasing gas for good, but aren't there yet. Lithium-ion says give them 5 years, fuel cell says give them 10. (And fusion is a very long way off, requiring 15 years just to get a very unusable by the average person reactor going.)
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)