>> ^coolhund:

I agree completely with visionep. Milkmans points are just not true or avoidable.
Theres also the point of engines not being able to run Ethanol at all. Vintage cars for example.
In the end this bio ethanol is just another farce to make money, at a very high cost to... as always... the poor.
What this guy says in the video is just not true. Even with only E10, a higher priced gasoline will still give you better mileage (up to 10%). This is happening in Germany right now. Nobody is buying this ethanol crap because it simply isnt worth it. Not to mention because of the detrimental effects on people and cars.


Yes, some older cars do not run well with an ethanol blend, and some might take that to a point where they wouldn't run at all.

You say bio ethanol is a farce to make money (aren't all businesses?) and the cost targets the poor. That makes a good soundtext-bite but I don't see how ethanol production is particularly detrimental to the poor, at least not in any way that isn't heavily outweighed by other competitors. Care to elaborate?

About mileage: yes, any blend of ethanol will give lower gas mileage than pure gasoline. The point that I would suggest is that when you burn that gallon of gasoline, it isn't coming back. At least not for a few million years. We can/will keep on burning through oil for a while, but as we do so the prices will go up.

Right now, today, the market settles out so that in Brazil the cost per unit of distance traveled may actually favor gasoline; car owners "vote" at the pump. But I'm talking about the long term, in the future. Corn, or better yet switchgrass, grows back. Not in millions of years, *next* year. We're just a few years down the line from the initial introduction of ethanol and ethanol blends as a fuel. And yet already it is making a bit of competition with big oil.

If better alternative fuels come along (hydrogen fuel cells or whatever), I'll be open to them. But at this point ethanol seems like one that actually works, and has been working, in spite of the fact that it doesn't have a fully stable infrastructure yet.

Where is the science?

Two problems with Ethanol.

1. For the cost and energy input you don't get much additional energy output. (Lookup Ethanol fuel energy balance)

2. It competes with creating food and drives up food prices.

Lately I'm wondering why we don't use more geothermal energy. We have the technology to use it and from what I've seen we could create tons of hydrogen at massive power plants without much if any pollution. The plants also wouldn't take up miles of land like solar plants do.

Batteries and/or hydrogen are definitely the future, ethanol is a waste of time and resources that raise food prices for the gain of a few large farmers and the detriment of most of the poor nations.

Ha Ha - Right - Can't believe I said that - Hydrogen and Oxygen (H20) is what I mean to say - amazing no one else picked up on that

>> ^ForgedReality:

>> ^Sagemind:
I'm not from, nor do I live in the United States but this is about a scary as a Chemist saying "You mean water actually has Water AND Oxygen in it. Where is it because I only see liquid."
If you don't know even the most basic principals of something, you shouldn't be in that business.

Hmmm.. TECHNICALLY, water does not contain ANY water...

>> ^bamdrew:

"Hello my friends, we are currently in international waters, and about to detonate one of the largest hydrogen bombs that any smuggler has dared steal from our great mother Russia."


Nice

"Hello my friends, we are currently in international waters, and about to detonate one of the largest hydrogen bombs that any smuggler has dared steal from our great mother Russia."

From what I know, those zircaloy fuel rods melt at around 1800-2200°C, not 1200°C as suggested in this clip. If I'm not mistaken, the hydrogen explosions might be a direct result of oxidation of those zircaloy rods, thus indicating a partial meltdown simply through the existence of vast amounts of hydrogen.

@Psychologic
If it wasn't irreparable once the fuel rods started melting, it sure as hell turned into scrap the second they inserted sea water.

@Ornthoron
The third containment layer, the reinforced concrete bubble, won't stop the molten sludge made of uranium and zircaloy indefinatly. From what I know, it's a matter of days at best, if enough rods have melted down. If the entire load melts, if a complete meltdown occurs, that's 60+ tons of uranium alone. No concrete or steel will stop that unless it is cooled externally. That's why they use a large area of graphite-concrete composite material as a core-catcher in EPRs and others.

A little bit of *fear mongering from the scientist. His description of a "meltdown" A.K.A. "The China Syndrome" is a little extreme. If anything, Chernobyl proved that it wouldn't happen. The Chernobyl accident wasn't caused by a core meltdown, even though part of the core had begun to melt before the explosion, the explosion was a hydrogen explosion that blew up the reactor. The Chernobyl reactor design doesn't have a full containment structure, and after the explosion the core melted. As the Wikipedia article I linked states: "it is likely that the uranium core would not exceed more than 10 meters of 'boring' due to natural passive safety," is pretty much what happened at Chernobyl. The core melted its way into the basement of the building where it eventually cooled into a solid mass.

>> ^grinter:

1500C while pumping Hydrogen gas over it? Does that sound like a bad idea to anyone else?
Do they do that in an oxygen free environment or something?


Actually they never said it didn't burn off--maybe they don't use that much. Could be just to keep the heat even. But, yeah I'd have to find out about the fabrication process.

1500C while pumping Hydrogen gas over it? Does that sound like a bad idea to anyone else?
Do they do that in an oxygen free environment or something?

>> ^dannym3141:

>> ^AeroMechanical:
As a related note, someone told me that a hydrogen atom is similar in relative scale to the solar system, with the sun being the nucleus and the earth being the electron. I dunno if that's right or not, but it's pretty cool anyways. Maybe Pluto was the electron. Back when it was still a planet.

That interested me.. if you're interested;
Accepted radius of a proton (nucleus of hydrogen) is 0.88 10^-15 m
Radius of sun = 6.96 10^8 m
Divide radius of sun by radius of proton to give how many times bigger the sun is than the proton = 7.91 10^23
Radius of an orbiting electron = 0.0529 10^-9 m
Multiply orbital radius of electron by our scale factor = 4.2 10^13 m.
We're 1.4 10^11 m away from the sun (that's the value of an astronomical unit, it's as good as you can ask for when talking about orbital radius, cos it's not a circle). So it's out by a factor of 300ish. (cos i rounded here and there)
Pluto's orbit is very eccentric (more elliptical than circular), but at its closest, it's about 4.4 10^12 m away from the sun. Out by a factor of 10 there. Or getting close to a factor of 5 at its furthest. Getting close, but still a pretty big difference.
^ all subject to change when (not if) i notice i've dropped a clanger

A factor of 300 is actually not that bad when you're talking about such big numbers.

>> ^AeroMechanical:

As a related note, someone told me that a hydrogen atom is similar in relative scale to the solar system, with the sun being the nucleus and the earth being the electron. I dunno if that's right or not, but it's pretty cool anyways. Maybe Pluto was the electron. Back when it was still a planet.


That interested me.. if you're interested;
Accepted radius of a proton (nucleus of hydrogen) is 0.88*10^-15 m
Radius of sun = 6.96*10^8 m
Divide radius of sun by radius of proton to give how many times bigger the sun is than the proton = 7.91*10^23

Radius of an orbiting electron = 0.0529*10^-9 m
Multiply orbital radius of electron by our scale factor = 4.2*10^13 m.

We're 1.4*10^11 m away from the sun (that's the value of an astronomical unit, it's as good as you can ask for when talking about orbital radius, cos it's not a circle). So it's out by a factor of 300ish. (cos i rounded here and there)

Pluto's orbit is very eccentric (more elliptical than circular), but at its closest, it's about 4.4*10^12 m away from the sun. Out by a factor of 10 there. Or getting close to a factor of 5 at its furthest. Getting close, but still a pretty big difference.

^ all subject to change when (not if) i notice i've dropped a clanger

I remember when i was a kid, we watched a film in school from the 60's that demonstrated the solar system to scale. There was the sun, which was represented by a big circle about 20 feet across or more, and to place the earth (represented by a baseball), they had to get in a car and drive for a while to place it properly.... as best as I can recall, it was probably something like a mile or two away.

I thought that was pretty cool. That video has to be around somewhere...

As a related note, someone told me that a hydrogen atom is similar in relative scale to the solar system, with the sun being the nucleus and the earth being the electron. I dunno if that's right or not, but it's pretty cool anyways. Maybe Pluto was the electron. Back when it was still a planet.

On a side note. It could of been much much much worse. The tanker was an empty Liquid Hydrogen tanker heading back to get another load.

The discovery channel clip was slightly wrong in that most of the planetary accretion occurs before hydrogen fusion begins in the star. The radiation from a T Tauri star (which derives its energy mainly from gravity, but also from lithium/deuterium in later stages) dissipates the unbound gas/dust in the circumstellar disk long before hydrogen fusion begins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_Tauri_star

>> ^spoco2:

>> ^BoneRemake:
This reminds me of "DECENT" what a great Dos game.

I think you mean Descent
Decent, the game, would be about helping old ladies across the street and treating everyone with respect and being the sort of person people say 'Isn't he nice' about .


The second I read what I had said, in the email notifier; I said to myself " oh, that is not spelled correctly "
Glad it was brought to my attention, this travesty could not go on.