Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

What we need to do is drive up the fuel efficiency of our cars/vehicles past the tens of miles per gallon and up it to hundreds, or at least hundred. We need to worry about consuming less, regardless of what it is. Heh, even better would be a car that runs on CO2.

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I'm no physicist, but what? 100% of the water used would be returned as water vapor? Where does the energy come from?

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This will explain it better than I can.

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A car that takes in carbon dioxide, releases oxygen and craps diamonds!

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Surely you guys have seen or at least heard of this. I don't know- you guys think this may be the solution?

Never heard of it. But dang; that's awesome.

...great, now we're going to drain all the oceans to get the saltwater. And dude, water's a pure substance, not an element.

It would solve the rising sea level crisis, at least!

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a-HA! I see it now.

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You burn the hydrogen. Of course, you get less than 100% of the energy you put into the system.
Of course, if you were to use some sort of solar or wind to create the energy you put into separating the hydrogen and oxygen, you're still putting in energy, but that energy didn't cost you anything. You'd have more of a gain if you were to just use a solar or wind powered vehicle, but that'd be a pain.

The point of separating water into hydrogen is that you can burn the hydrogen later. It's basically a battery. Like I said earlier, though, if you use something like solar, hydro, nuclear, or wind to "charge" the "battery", then you're essentially getting a pollution-free propulsion source (except for the fact that you're emitting water vapor, which is more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, if you care about that stuff).

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.

I already made up a plan for the rising sea level thing, but I didn't have a chance to type it up so I could propose it at our mandatory town meeting for government class (sry juys 4got to save the world). You see, I wanted to dig lakes and trenches all through the Sahara Desert in the most efficient way possible (like, some kind of explosives), and then let the ocean water flow in when it gets too high. Then, the sea level won't actually rise over New York's level, and the whole Sahara will be cultivated to produce food and water access for everyone out there. And there will be more oxygen coming from underwater plants, which would hopefully lead to less CO2 in the atmosphere and end global warming.

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Reactor-grade uranium != weapons-grade uranium

I think the concerns of nuclear reactor material being used for terrorism are greatly exaggerated. I'm not going to say that nuclear plants are absolutely harmless in that regard, but I think a terrorist organization that is focusing on nuclear plants is probably wasting its time and could be killing people by more efficient means. First you gotta figure out what you're going to do with the stuff, then you gotta get the stuff -- ensuring that it is stuff you can in fact use -- and then you gotta successfully use the stuff, none of which is trivial.

More problematic with nuclear power is what exactly to do with the waste afterward. I think Yucca Mountain would be a good solution, but nobody in Nevada likes it. I don't really know why not, though... it's not like you'd ever really notice that it's there.

- Kef

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I guess that makes sense. I'm still fuzzy on how burning the hydrogen means the car emits water vapor. Wouldn't it emit oxygen particles?



Of you could use the solar/wind power to power batteries that actually power the car.


And lots of people are. Nuclear it is!



An interesting (if unfeasible?) idea, but remember the law of unintended consequences. How would this affect the North Africa region? There are people there (the Berbers, for example) who have lived there for centuries. Not to mention the effects on the climate in that area.



An excellent point. It's not like we're burying nuclear waste out in the ground somewhere. We build storage facilities and use those. And if I understand correctly, we're not talking huge installations. Something closet-sized for 50 years of spent rods? It's late, that's probably wrong.

I'll research and be back tomorrow.

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Its not so much as "Going in and stealing uranium," its "Going in and blowing everything up with massive amounts of C4, causing radioactive material to spread over a large radius."

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Still, the spent fuel that is radioactive is kept in deep pools of water that would be unaffected, for the most part, by a large explosion. Reactors are also very well protected. You could fly a plane into them and the reactors would not be affected badly enough to cause radioactive material to be spread.

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Stuff burning or exploding is almost always fuel + oxygen -> something else. In this case, hydrogen combines with oxygen to make the easiest molecule you can make with hydrogen and oxygen, water. It's counterintuitive that water could come from explosions, but that's our crazy universe!

But yeah, like others said, hydrogen's no miracle cure either. It might be a great tool to fight desertification if you use hydrogen power only in desert areas; the deserts would give you vast spaces for solar panels to power hydrogen creation and then the extra vapor would encourage rain. But elsewhere... can you imagine the humidity in cities? It'd become unlivable.

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ATTN: LOWER BOARD USERS HAVE MOVED TO ANOTHER FORUM. COME JOIN THE FUN!

Yeah, my friend and I made it up as a joke, and we were going to present it at a town meeting. The fun part was I was it was pretty easy to shoot down everyone's arguments against it, so pretty I convinced myself it would work....

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Again, a car that releases oxygen and craps diamonds. Think about it.

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That makes more sense. The only issue is that batteries are big, heavy things. The hydrogen you'd store to make a car go a certain distance is lighter than the batteries it'd take to hold enough electricity to make the car go the same distance. Solar would power a car when the sun was shining. Wind would only power the car when it was moving. You'd have to get the car moving. Efficiency would mean that wind power alone wouldn't power the car because you'd have to keep putting in energy to keep the car moving... I can't really explain this, so I hope it makes sense.



And lots of people are. Nuclear it is! [/quote]
Funny thing: A couple of the leading global warming scientists received some funding from a nuclear industry lobbying group.
If never actually receiving funding from Exxon on any big project he has never worked on makes people say John Christy is in the pocket of "Big Oil" and will lie to cover up global warming, certainly anyone claiming Global Warming is killing the planet that has received funding from a lobbying group for an industry that releases no CO2 should also be put under the microscope.

I don't really care about nuclear either. I lived near Brown's Ferry when I was in Alabama, and I didn't give it a second thought. With the global warming people about to crush coal power (adding a $200/ton carbon tax to $70-80/ton coal certainly ain't going to bring down the price of electricity)... The poor in Kentucky (and other places) can barely pay electric bills as it is, so I have real problems of conscience in trying to work on any sort of climate change issues that involve "carbon taxes".


Yucca Mountain is about the safest plan we can come up with. It's in the middle of nowhere and is about as geologically stable as we can hope for. Unlike previous disposals of toxic waste, Yucca Mountain will not become a Superfund site of the future.

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.

Hey good news guys! The price of oil fell $5 dollars today.

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At that rate we'll have cheap-as-free gas by the DNC!

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Funny thing.
Here, gas went up 4 cents a gallon.

I don't follow the logic here.

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.

Because we said we'd start drilling domestically.

Weird how that works.

ATTENTION, DNC! If you really care about all the poor people paying for gas while your car is fueled using tax dollars, stop opposing domestic drilling!

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Gotta compensate somehow, Sree.

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Actually it's because demand fell 5% in the last month.

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Remember that time you said nuclear power plants are great targets for terrorists?

Yeah, your credibility isn't so good right now.

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He does have a point with this, though, Lahi.

Like the housing meltdown, oil is just a bubble.
It'll come back down. Probably not back to the $50/barrel range, but I've heard anywhere from $90 to $100 is the "correct" price.

What they're basing this on is beyond me. It could be pure flop.

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.

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I agree it's a combination of factors, but you dismissed the effect of us announcing we're drilling domestically as being one of them.



But does oil really exist in a free market system?

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But does oil really exist in a free market system?[/quote]
Honestly, I don't know.

This could be a different thing, but I usually eat lunch at Hardees. If, for some reason, I couldn't afford Hardees, I'd go to Wendy's. If that was too much, I could go to McDonalds or bring my lunch.
With oil, it's not that way. I can't suddenly switch to another product.

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.