HOYA SWALLOWS PENTAX !

Ron Hunter wrote:
wrote:
William Graham wrote:
That was solved over 50 years ago.....Nuclear power......Right now, 60% pf
the power we use here in the US comes from burning coal. For some crazy
reason, we are way behind on the utilization of nuclear power....

Nothing crazy about it. It's simply mass hysteria, ignorance, fear,
and a totally effective mass media misinformation campaign.

Nope. Nothing crazy about that.

Hey, William, if I'm ever riding my Harley out Oregon way (I was in
northern California in the summer of '05, so pretty close) I'd like to
stop by and visit with you. (Preferably during the day, of course;
I'm sure you understand!)

Tim

P.S. Did you see where 75% of Americans polled said that they would
"never" buy or eat meat from cloned animals if the FDA permits it to be
marketed? As long as we're talking about things that aren't crazy....

You think that's not crazy? sigh.

You think that's not sarcasm? sigh.

Ron Hunter wrote:
wrote:
William Graham wrote:
That was solved over 50 years ago.....Nuclear power......Right now, 60% pf
the power we use here in the US comes from burning coal. For some crazy
reason, we are way behind on the utilization of nuclear power....

Nothing crazy about it. It's simply mass hysteria, ignorance, fear,
and a totally effective mass media misinformation campaign.

Nope. Nothing crazy about that.

Hey, William, if I'm ever riding my Harley out Oregon way (I was in
northern California in the summer of '05, so pretty close) I'd like to
stop by and visit with you. (Preferably during the day, of course;
I'm sure you understand!)

Tim

P.S. Did you see where 75% of Americans polled said that they would
"never" buy or eat meat from cloned animals if the FDA permits it to be
marketed? As long as we're talking about things that aren't crazy....

You think that's not crazy? sigh.

You think that's not sarcasm? sigh.

"Ron Hunter" wrote in message
...
William Graham wrote:
"Ron Hunter" wrote in message
...
Laurence Payne wrote:
On Fri, 29 Dec 2006 12:56:06 -0700, Bill Funk
wrote:

Don't be quite so condescending.
I never said anything to indicate I am scared. I pointed out that
there are problems with electric cars that most people don't think of,
and that they can be overcome.
And, why would we need to find a way that embraces expensive and
scarce energy? Shouldn't we be looking for a way to embrace
inexpensive and easily available energy?
I first visited America in the early 70s. One thing surprised me. My
hosts were incapable of rational discussion on the subject of
communism. (Which they confused with socialism.) Anyway, they were
frightened of it. I now detect the same regarding energy and
pollution. I'm sure I over-generalise. But I'm definitely detecting
it here.
Communism and socialism are quite similar, differing only in who decides
how goods and services are be distributed, and by whom.

Yup. - I put them in the same bag with liberalism......Or, "Robinhoodism"
as I like to call it....Steal from the rich to give to the poor.......
Or government: Steal from everyone, and keep it. Grin.

Yes. They don't always give it to the poor....Sometimes they just shoot it
into space......

"Ron Hunter" wrote in message
...
William Graham wrote:
"Michael" wrote in message
...
"William Graham" wrote in message
. ..
Look. We can make this personal, and about me. Or we can extend the
problem to where it really needs to be....To a general problem that's
not getting any better that affects the whole society. I partially
solved my problem this New Year's Eve by getting a motel room in
Silverton, so I will only have to drive 4 miles after dark, instead of
20. but not everyone can afford, or is willing to go that far. And I
will still have to drive over 4 miles after dark this Sunday evening.
My motel room will cost me about $80.....

This is about YOU taking responsibility for YOURSELF not US taking
responsibility for you.
Bill, you know you have a problem driving after dark yet you continue to
do so.
IF I were in your position I would do what ever I needed to avoid
driving at night.
We are ALL responsible for our own action, no if ans or buts.

An $80 motel room is the best I can do this time.....Normally, My wife
would be here to drive me, but she is down in California visiting her
grandchildren.........The road between Mt. Angel and Silverton is
straight as an arrow, and pretty easy to negotiate. I won't have any
problem......
Yes, I just looked at it on GoogleEarth, and it is quite straight, and not
a long way. Now if no one pulls out in front of you on a tractor.....

That's why I will be going 1/2 the speed limit, and with my brights
on.........

wrote in message
ups.com...

Ron Hunter wrote:
William Graham wrote:

That was solved over 50 years ago.....Nuclear power......Right now, 60%
pf
the power we use here in the US comes from burning coal. For some crazy
reason, we are way behind on the utilization of nuclear power....That
will
have to change......


It won't, because uneducated people have been so scared by those who
have financial interest in other fuels that they go bonkers at the mere
mention of nuclear power.
I gas-powered plant can blow up and it gets 3 inches on page 20, but let
a valve malfunction in a nuclear plant, and it is front page news.

Agreed, but it raises the interesting question of exactly what is the
financial interest that the big media conglomerates have in helping to
prevent the building of safe, economical, and clean nuclear power
plants in the U.S......

Funny....As I remember, back in the 60's, it was the long hair radical
hippie liberals who did all the anti-nuclear protesting....Westinghouse was
all for it.....Hummmmm.....I guess I wasn't there for the history
rewrite......

"J. Clarke" wrote:

On Tue, 26 Dec 2006 14:11:36 +0000, jeremy wrote:

heavily edited, for brevity

Lemme guess--everything you know about cars you learned from Ralph Nadir.


Hello, John:

Ralph "Nadir" sounds like a Freudian slip, if ever there was one. g


Cordially,
John Turco

Colin_D wrote:

William Graham wrote:

"Colin_D" wrote in message
.. .

Ron Hunter wrote:

William Graham wrote:

"Laurence Payne" lpayne1NOSPAM@dslDOTpipexDOTcom wrote in message
...

On Tue, 26 Dec 2006 20:27:00 -0800, "William Graham"
wrote:

And by what you do for a living, and where you have to do it, and
by many
other variables that usually grow along with your other choices,
so changing
overnight is quite impossible, and certainly shouldn't be
expected of a
whole nation of breadwinners.......

If we have to, it will be possible. It could happen tomorrow. Our
attempts to control the oil-producing countries may backfire even
more
seriously than they have already. If the Saudis fall out of our
pocket and align with their kin we could be in real trouble.
Doubtless
if America added its resources (though they'd doubtless dump us) we
could annihilate them. But WINNING the war without destroying the
resources would be harder.

I suggest a much more reasonable scenario....Like, as the worlds
supply of petroleum dries up (over the next 100 years or so) the
price of the commodity will gradually rise to the point where other
energy sources begin to look better and better.....More and more
electric vehicles will appear on the scene, and vehicles powered by
other fuels such as bio-diesels and alcohol burning engines will
become commonplace. By the time gasoline is going for $10 a gallon
or more, there will be very few gasoline burning cars still in
existence.....A few collectors like Jay Leno will still own and
operate them, of course, but the average guy will be charging his
new electro-Buick in his garage every night......

The current problem with electric vehicles is that disposal of used
up batteries is a major problem when considering scaling up the
usage of them to even 10% of the general automobile market. We need
better storage methods.

Current development is with fuel cells, not huge batteries. One car
maker, Honda I think (but may be wrong there) has an experimental
fuel cell running on hydrogen that puts out 100 kilowatts - that's
about 130 hp.

Colin D.

I can't comment on this, because I haven't got the faintest idea of
what a, "fuel cell" is. As far as I know, you can't run a car engine
on hydrogen unless you get liquid hydrogen to run it with. That means
you have to electrolyze it out of sea water, (which is already burned
hydrogen) and then cool and compress it to get it into a 20 gallon
plus dewar. This makes it very expensive, and hard to keep. So when
people say that the ocean is full of hydrogen. so we can use it to run
our cars with, I discount this as being some kind of pie-in-the-sky
reasoning.....The ocean is full of hydrogen.....Already burned! -
Recovering it would be just like getting gasoline back out of exhaust
fumes.....Not impossible, but highly impractical......
So, my question is this. What kind of hydrogen would be burned in
a fuel cell? - And does the fuel cell just take care of the dewar
storage problem, or does it have some other kind of efficiency that I
don't know about? IOW, do you still have to provide liquid hydrogen to
your fuel cells? - If so, then you've still got the same problem, it
seems to me.....It's there, but already burned........

A fuel cell is basically a catalytic reactor that converts H2 + O into
H20 (water) without combustion, and the reaction produces electricity
direct. The H2 is compressed or liquified gas, and the O is from the
atmosphere.

Of course, H is 'burned' in water, or more precisely, the reaction of H2
+ O is exothermic, i.e. produces heat. To split water into H2 and O
again is an endothermic reaction, i.e. requires the input of equivalent
energy produced from the initial reaction. Commonly, this energy is
supplied by an electric current, but that may not be the only way. Heat
from the sun plus a catalyst might work to split the bond, and you can
bet they are working on something like that right now. Possibly, some
sort of nuclear reactor might provide the required energy.

Colin D.


There are fuel cells under development that get their Hydrogen from a
breaking down of methanol, which of course is in liquid form vs
compressed H2 gas... There's a pre-processor that converts the methanol
into the pure H2 and passes it to the actual fuel cell, but the
problem is the preprocessing at present requires high temperatures
(around 400C IIRC). Research continues...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell


Jim

William Graham wrote:
wrote in message
ups.com...

Ron Hunter wrote:
William Graham wrote:

That was solved over 50 years ago.....Nuclear power......Right now, 60%
pf
the power we use here in the US comes from burning coal. For some crazy
reason, we are way behind on the utilization of nuclear power....That
will
have to change......


It won't, because uneducated people have been so scared by those who
have financial interest in other fuels that they go bonkers at the mere
mention of nuclear power.
I gas-powered plant can blow up and it gets 3 inches on page 20, but let
a valve malfunction in a nuclear plant, and it is front page news.

Agreed, but it raises the interesting question of exactly what is the
financial interest that the big media conglomerates have in helping to
prevent the building of safe, economical, and clean nuclear power
plants in the U.S......

Funny....As I remember, back in the 60's, it was the long hair radical
hippie liberals who did all the anti-nuclear protesting....Westinghouse was
all for it.....Hummmmm.....I guess I wasn't there for the history
rewrite......

Well, is it possible that some of those long hair radical hippie
liberals went into ... the media???

wrote in message
ups.com...

William Graham wrote:
wrote in message
ups.com...

Ron Hunter wrote:
William Graham wrote:

That was solved over 50 years ago.....Nuclear power......Right now,
60%
pf
the power we use here in the US comes from burning coal. For some
crazy
reason, we are way behind on the utilization of nuclear
power....That
will
have to change......


It won't, because uneducated people have been so scared by those who
have financial interest in other fuels that they go bonkers at the
mere
mention of nuclear power.
I gas-powered plant can blow up and it gets 3 inches on page 20, but
let
a valve malfunction in a nuclear plant, and it is front page news.

Agreed, but it raises the interesting question of exactly what is the
financial interest that the big media conglomerates have in helping to
prevent the building of safe, economical, and clean nuclear power
plants in the U.S......

Funny....As I remember, back in the 60's, it was the long hair radical
hippie liberals who did all the anti-nuclear protesting....Westinghouse
was
all for it.....Hummmmm.....I guess I wasn't there for the history
rewrite......

Well, is it possible that some of those long hair radical hippie
liberals went into ... the media???

Yeah, but I think Westinghouse owns one of the big media conglomerates,
don't they? - Oh, well.....It's far too complicated for me.........

"J. F. Cornwall" wrote in message
...
Colin_D wrote:

William Graham wrote:

"Colin_D" wrote in message
.. .

Ron Hunter wrote:

William Graham wrote:

"Laurence Payne" lpayne1NOSPAM@dslDOTpipexDOTcom wrote in message
...

On Tue, 26 Dec 2006 20:27:00 -0800, "William Graham"
wrote:

And by what you do for a living, and where you have to do it, and
by many
other variables that usually grow along with your other choices, so
changing
overnight is quite impossible, and certainly shouldn't be expected
of a
whole nation of breadwinners.......

If we have to, it will be possible. It could happen tomorrow. Our
attempts to control the oil-producing countries may backfire even
more
seriously than they have already. If the Saudis fall out of our
pocket and align with their kin we could be in real trouble.
Doubtless
if America added its resources (though they'd doubtless dump us) we
could annihilate them. But WINNING the war without destroying the
resources would be harder.

I suggest a much more reasonable scenario....Like, as the worlds
supply of petroleum dries up (over the next 100 years or so) the
price of the commodity will gradually rise to the point where other
energy sources begin to look better and better.....More and more
electric vehicles will appear on the scene, and vehicles powered by
other fuels such as bio-diesels and alcohol burning engines will
become commonplace. By the time gasoline is going for $10 a gallon or
more, there will be very few gasoline burning cars still in
existence.....A few collectors like Jay Leno will still own and
operate them, of course, but the average guy will be charging his new
electro-Buick in his garage every night......

The current problem with electric vehicles is that disposal of used up
batteries is a major problem when considering scaling up the usage of
them to even 10% of the general automobile market. We need better
storage methods.

Current development is with fuel cells, not huge batteries. One car
maker, Honda I think (but may be wrong there) has an experimental fuel
cell running on hydrogen that puts out 100 kilowatts - that's about 130
hp.

Colin D.

I can't comment on this, because I haven't got the faintest idea of what
a, "fuel cell" is. As far as I know, you can't run a car engine on
hydrogen unless you get liquid hydrogen to run it with. That means you
have to electrolyze it out of sea water, (which is already burned
hydrogen) and then cool and compress it to get it into a 20 gallon plus
dewar. This makes it very expensive, and hard to keep. So when people
say that the ocean is full of hydrogen. so we can use it to run our cars
with, I discount this as being some kind of pie-in-the-sky
reasoning.....The ocean is full of hydrogen.....Already burned! -
Recovering it would be just like getting gasoline back out of exhaust
fumes.....Not impossible, but highly impractical......
So, my question is this. What kind of hydrogen would be burned in a
fuel cell? - And does the fuel cell just take care of the dewar storage
problem, or does it have some other kind of efficiency that I don't know
about? IOW, do you still have to provide liquid hydrogen to your fuel
cells? - If so, then you've still got the same problem, it seems to
me.....It's there, but already burned........

A fuel cell is basically a catalytic reactor that converts H2 + O into
H20 (water) without combustion, and the reaction produces electricity
direct. The H2 is compressed or liquified gas, and the O is from the
atmosphere.

Of course, H is 'burned' in water, or more precisely, the reaction of H2
+ O is exothermic, i.e. produces heat. To split water into H2 and O
again is an endothermic reaction, i.e. requires the input of equivalent
energy produced from the initial reaction. Commonly, this energy is
supplied by an electric current, but that may not be the only way. Heat
from the sun plus a catalyst might work to split the bond, and you can
bet they are working on something like that right now. Possibly, some
sort of nuclear reactor might provide the required energy.

Colin D.


There are fuel cells under development that get their Hydrogen from a
breaking down of methanol, which of course is in liquid form vs compressed
H2 gas... There's a pre-processor that converts the methanol into the
pure H2 and passes it to the actual fuel cell, but the problem is the
preprocessing at present requires high temperatures (around 400C IIRC).
Research continues... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell


Jim

So the answer is yes. You still have to get liquid hydrogen to supply your
fuel cells....this doesn't make their use any cheaper than just burning the
hydrogen, mixed with air in the cylinder of an internal combustion engine,
does it? - IOW, what do you gain from a fuel cell? Maybe it's a little
safer to carry around with you, but it still has a real poor efficiency
problem. I think I will go with the storage battery method, myself. Filling
stations can keep stacks of them, all charged up, and all they have to do is
swap them out in your car for discharged ones, and charge them up after
you've hit the road.....And the power will come from the grid, and whatever
powers the grid. (hopefully nuclear)