America wake up !!!.
The future is in Safe Nuclear Power Source.

VISION-DRIVE_THE_FUTURE-EN.pdf (97 Kb, 43 downloads)

quote:

Originally posted by Nahum Goldenberg:
America wake up !!!.
The future is in Safe Nuclear Power Source.

That advice is 30 years too late. There isn't much that can be done now. The engineers that designed the nuclear plants back then are gone.

We would have to buy the power plants from France if we wanted them quickly.

...agreed. And when you couple in the fact that most US citizens have become "oil-o-holics", well, the following story just makes you scratch your head: http://green.yahoo.com/blog/amorylovins/43/rethinking-t...-of-hybrid-cars.html

Where are things headed?? I am confident that we'll see $5, $6, and on higher per-gallon prices on fuel...but yet change is so slow to happen here that a crisis seems to be on the horizon (that or people will go hungry to pay for fuel to go to work from the suburbs). *smirks and shrugs shoulders*

It is never too late for generations to come.

I heard on NPR this morning a brief news story about the need for someone or something to come in and capitalize on these high gas prices, to help turn the economy and the environment around, with people living closer to where they work, etc. That's why I'm glad I live just a 15-minute drive from downtown Cleveland, and I almost never drive my own car in — I ride in and home with my brother or fiance. Filling up twice a month is a great feeling.

But research continues on more alternative fuel choices, like this most recent announcement from NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). Chemists there are examining crude oil made from pig manure ... even if it smells horrible!

The the NIST team has developed the first detailed chemical analysis revealing what processing is needed to transform pig manure crude oil into fuel for vehicles or heating. Mass production of this type of biofuel could help consume a waste product overflowing at U.S. farms, and possibly enable cutbacks in the nation’s petroleum use and imports. But, according to a new NIST paper, pig manure crude will require a lot of refining.

The ersatz oil used in the NIST analyses was provided by engineer Yuanhui Zhang of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Zhang developed a system using heat and pressure to transform organic compounds such as manure into oil.

As described in the new paper, NIST chemist Tom Bruno and colleagues determined that the pig manure crude contains at least 83 major compounds, including many components that would need to be removed, such as about 15 percent water by volume, sulfur that otherwise could end up as pollution in vehicle exhaust, and lots of char waste containing heavy metals, including iron, zinc, silver, cobalt, chromium, lanthanum, scandium, tungsten and minute amounts of gold and hafnium. Whatever the pigs eat, from dirt to nutritional supplements, ends up in the oil.

While the thick black liquid may look like its petroleum-based counterparts, the NIST study shows that looks can be deceiving. “The fact that pig manure crude oil contains a lot of water is unfavorable. They would need to get the water out,” Bruno says.

The measurements were made with a new NIST test method and apparatus, the advanced distillation curve, which provides highly detailed and accurate data on the makeup and performance of complex fluids. A distillation curve charts the percentage of the total mixture that evaporates as a sample is slowly heated. Because the different components of a complex mixture typically have different boiling points, a distillation curve gives a good measure of the relative amount of each component in the mixture. NIST chemists enhanced the traditional technique by improving precision and control of temperature measurements and adding the capability to analyze the chemical composition of each boiling fraction using a variety of advanced methods.

NIST researchers analyzed the graphite-like char remaining after the distillation by bombarding it with neutrons, a non-destructive way of identifying the types and amounts of elements present. Two complementary neutron methods detected the heavy metals listed above.

Bruno and colleagues currently spend much of their time analyzing military jet fuels and are not planning a major foray into pig manure. But Bruno concedes that the effort may have a payoff. “Who knows, it might help decrease the nuisance of manure piles.”

For more on the process of making pig waste crude, see “Converting Manure to Oil: U of I Lays Groundwork for One-of-a-Kind Pilot Plant.