Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to We should be pouring footings for nuclear reactors today.

Nuclear does nothing for transportation.

Not unless we can use electricity to synthsize hydrocarbons. But what raw material could we use? Maybe water and coal. Make ethanol, or octane, or something. I'm not a chemist, but I'm sure there is a synthetic fuel that's better than hydrogen.

Of course there is always hope that electric cars can compete someday. Basically we need an electric car that can go 60 mph for 200 miles on a single charge (over 3 hours highway driving), recharge in less than 10 minutes, and cost less than $15,000 for a base model. Tough standard. Maybe supercapacitors could achieve this. I'd go with synthetic hydrocarbons and bioethanol in the near term, and invest heavily in mobile electric storage devices.

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