Bill Daniels wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...
On Jul 24, 8:35 pm, Dan Nafe wrote:


I love it. We need to stop using ferin' oil, this is the first of
many steps in the right direction.

Except that way too much electricity is being generated
using oil or natural gas, and the losses of efficiency in first
burning the stuff, then generating electricity, transmitting it long
distances and losing more, then the heat losses in running chargers
and more heat off the batteries, I think we'd end up burning nearly
twice as much as if we just stuck a VW on it.
Coal is more available but is so dirty. Nuclear is really
avaiable but isn't cheap and scares too many folks.

Dan

The beauty of electricity is its flexibility not its efficiency -
although it can be efficient too. The source can be solar cells,
wind, hydro, nuclear or conventional coal fired generators. Whatever
the source, the pollution can be tightly controlled. No matter the
source, delivery is the same.

Nuclear power is steadilly attracting supporters from the
environmentallist ranks. It's the least poluting, least disruptive
power source available. Solar, wind and biofuels will me massively
harmful to the environment if scaled up to meet a large fraction of
the demand. To meet total electric demand, a solar plant would have
to be the size of Texas as would the farm land needed to produce an
equivalent demand for biofuels. When the greenies do their math
homework, nuclear starts looking good to them.
Obviously, the problem with electric airplanes is range. It's
doubtful if electricity storage will ever reach the energy density of
gasoline. One thing that amazes me is that electrons weight almost
nothing. A charged battery, for all practical purposes, weighes the
same charged or not - the energy the battery contains weighs nothing.
It seems like the boffins could figure out a way to pressurize a
container with electrons.
There are already electric self-launch gliders you can buy. The
battery pack provides more than an hour of power with the capability
to climb 10,000 feet. For a glider, that's easilly a two hour flight
without lift.
Bill Daniels


We are along way from even getting close to a replacement for gasoline in
aircraft or for that matter cars where weight isn't near as critical. BUT,
if we would stop using petroleum products in everything other than the
transportation sector we would reduce their use by 25%. And doing that would
be huge.

Many of the steps being taken now are nothing but "feel good" moves that
really don't reduce the amount of petroleum used just move some of the use
out of the public eye. In fact many of the current fuel saving programs
probably increase the net use of petroleum. Add to that the fact that we are
now replacing fuel with what should be food and you are just begging for
real problems in the future.

I think it is funny that the environmentalists are getting back on the Nuke
bandwagon, since it was mainly they that stopped construction of new nuclear
power plants in the first place. Nuclear energy is safe. The US Navy has
proved that. I've often wondered how large an area could be powered with the
reactor from a nuclear powered carrier? One of the big problems with
commercial nuke plants is that they almost always started each plant from
scratch on a clean sheet of paper. Think how much less it would cost if we
had an assembly line of small reactors. Yes I realize there is the issue of
what to do with the waste. The answer to that is reprocess until you can't
reprocess any more then shoot what's left into the sun. It would be like one
guy ****ing in the ocean.