I'm giving a speech on alternative fuels,

[kitkatrose]

concentrating on nuclear, solar, and something else to be determined. I'm doing my own searches through the university library system, but if anybody has any recommendations on scientific journals to search through or any books that I should check out, or helpful links, all of that would be much appreciated. I don't have access to the search function, since we're on level 2 now, so I can't search for particular threads of information.

I only ask, because I check here everyday and it seems like most of the posters know what they're talking about, unlike some other forums I frequent. Thanks so much. :hi:

[Massacure]

1. Biodiesel would be a biggy.

[Reciprocity]

5. Yep Willie Nelson Biodiesel link

http://www.loves.com/

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. Don't forget hydrogen fuel cells

Shrub likes them a lot.

[skids]

15. Well, really it's the PEM that's good, hydrogen or no.

PEM (Proton Exchange Membranes) is a milestone development in power storage/fuel diversification/energy conversion technology. Not so much an alternative energy source, but an important enabling technology that should be mentioned in any alternative fuels lecture.

[Why Syzygy]

3. Hemp

http://www.artistictreasure.com/learnmorecleanair.html

Hemp for Fuel
Biodiesel can be made from domestically produced, renewable oilseed crops such as hemp. With over 30 million successful U.S. road miles hemp boidiesel could be the answer to our cry for cheaper fuel. We have spent the last century polluting our beautiful country with our petroleum based fuels that could have easily been replaced with fuels derived from hemp. It would only take 6% of our U.S. land to produce enough hemp, for hemp fuel, to make us energy independent from the rest of the world. Help us teach America the truth. Make yourself a human billboard that speaks only of the truth because the only thing standing between hemp being illegally and legal is ignorance.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-01,GGLD:en&q=hemp+for+fuel

[BlueEyedSon]

4. I would cover the topics of 1) concept of renewable vs non-renewable

(BTW, nuke is non-renewable and we will experience "peak uranium" soon)

2) full lifecycle costs (CO2 production for hydrocarbons, waste disposal for nuke)

3) ethics of using farmland to feed cars vs feeding people (biodee/ethanol)

my links: http://www.doomsdayreport.com/links.html

[kitkatrose]

7. That's on my list of pros and cons for each fuel.

I'm also looking for how much energy each produces and what they'd be best for (power grids for a city, or just personal usage, or transportation, etc). This is strictly informative, so I can't interject any commentary into it. Thanks for the links, I'll check them out.

[BlueEyedSon]

8. Good work & good luck!

[NNadir]

10. Peak uranium?

And your basis for this contention is what exactly?

And peak Thorium?

Why don't you offer us a calculation showing the world uranium reserves, the world thorium reserves, and the fuel cycles for which you are making these claims.

Or is this the usual pull it out of a hat and say it's true because you heard it somewhere on the internet.

World energy demand is now about 500 exajoules. Please show us the basis of your claim.

While you're at it, maybe you can give us the technical details on why this report from the MIT nuclear engineering groups is full of shit. It's somewhat dated, and, though not up on the latest, it reads:

" Mining Uranium from Seawater Seawater uranium at an affordable price is the ultimate guarantee of uranium availability for any nation with access to the ocean. Because of the very large
amounts of uranium in the oceans—about four billion tonnes, or about 800 times more than the terrestrial resources recoverable at a price of $130/kg or less— the possibility of recovering uranium from seawater has received considerable attention over the past four decades. The major drawback is the fact that the uranium concentration is very low, about 3 ppb. This implies that the extraction cost will be high unless the uranium recovery efficiency from seawater is high and adequate seawater flows can be established without active pumping. Ongoing R&D efforts in Japan over the last decade on uranium adsorbents and seawater processing schemes have met this challenge; both the technical feasibility and economic viability of the process have been established. For example, the most recent (1993) cost estimate was about 40,000 yen per kg of recovered uranium, equivalent to about $100/lb U3O8 (U.S.$1D125 yen).28 Although this is about 10X the current market price of uranium, it would increase the busbar cost of LWR electricity by only 10%, and that of more efficient reactors by even less. The resulting electricity cost would be highly competitive with the cost of electricity from a breeder reactor even under the most optimistic estimates of the capital cost differential between the breeder and the conventional LWR..."

http://www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publications/pdf/10_2%20127%20150%20Lidsky.pdf

Speaking of current technology, please tell us to, what percentage of uranium is consumed in each pass through a reactor.

Maybe you'd like to give us a considered opinion of how much energy 4 billion tons of uranium represents. Also tell us what it means that the sea is saturated with respect to uranium.

I will note that I disagree with the authors of this report in many areas, most seriously about the advisability of the once through cycle, but I concur very much with the notion that the 1950's prediction of the depletion of world uranium reserves by 1990 - which lead to our less than optimal, but still successful, choice of our current technology - was somewhat exaggerated.

Uranium is not a particularly rare element at all. This graph, with the atomic number of the elements on the abscissa and the log crustal abundance on the ordinate.



Looking at this graph we see that both thorium and uranium have crustal abundances comparable to elements like tin, like bromine, is in much greater abundance than tungsten, bismuth, silver, is roughly as abundant as molybdenum, about 5 times as available as cadmium.

Finally, the world has accumulated 1000 metric tons of plutonium, representing 80 exajoules of energy, or 11 years worth of fueling for the 361 GW of electricity now being produced by nuclear means. Generally this plutonium is considered too expensive to recover because uranium is so cheap, the equivalent of gasoline at 0.007 cents per gallon whereas the plutonium would be 20X more expensive, the equivalent of gasoline at 0.01 cents a gallon. People have to be dragged kicking and screaming into spending extra money to burn this plutonium, because nobody needs it, as fissionable resources are so plentiful and so inexpensive. (This contrasts considerably with the predictions of people in the 1950's who thought we must have fast breeder reactors because uranium was so rare. They had no idea that the element was about as common as tin.)

Finally we have thorium, an element that is so cheap that people generally throw it away rather than recover it from the Monzanite ores from which it is produced. (Monzanite is worked to recover the lanthanides to make television sets and other items.) Given that all we have to do to recover this thorium is to walk over to the monzanite tailings pile, how do you claim that nuclear resources are about to be depleted?

Fully cycled, from the sea alone, uranium resources can last many hundreds of thousands of year, even if the sea were not replenished by exposure and weather of crustal rock - which would tend to replenish depleted waters. Thorium can extend those resources for hundreds of thousands of years further.

Depending on the rate or recharge of uranium from crustal rock to the sea, it is possible to consider uranium resources as nearly inexhaustible.

[BlueEyedSon]

11. Yeah, you're right.... the supply of fissile materials is infinite.

Peak Oil is probably a hoax too.....

[jpak]

19. That statement is based on a single non-peer-reviewed

paper presented at a symposium in 1993.

It is nonsense.

read reference #4 in that pdf file...

The Japanese have NOT demonstrated the ability to recover industrial quantities of uranium from seawater.

The nuclear industry, however, IS greatly concerned that uranium supply will outstrip demand in the next decade.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9069-1735134,00.html

Global uranium production peaked in 2001 - and no amount of hocus pocus pseudoscience is going to change that...

[marbuc]

6. Liquid Coal (Low Sulfur Diesel Fuel) is growing in popularity. eom

Diesel engines will be running on coal in the near future.

[starmaker]

9. wood fired steam generator

check out
www.realgoods.com/renew/shop/product.cfm/dp/1800/sd/1804/ts/3224159
a lot of stuff for small scale home applications.

[phantom power]

16. How many people can burn wood, before we run out?

[philb]

12. check out amory lovins

www.rmi.org
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid171.php#20H2Myths Hydrogen as fuel

More Profit with Less Carbon
http://www.sciam.com/media/pdf/Lovinsforweb.pdf

[FreeMason]

13. Sources

What are your sources that alternative fuels (not only directed to you but especially others here) can produce the energy you state.

Basically, someone here stated that 6% of the landmass is all that's needed for producing enough fuel to be independent of foriegn oil.

1) Where'd you get that figure from...thin air?

2) What happens when the soil is depleted?

[IDemo]

14. Biodiesel and solar-thermal

Biodiesel from algae, a look at producing biodiesel large-scale with microalgae.

Solar thermal, a technology with higher efficiency (currently) than solar photovoltaic. The Stirling motor gensets have the additional benefit of being able to operate during nightime or on cloudy days because they can be heated with any source of fuel, including landfill methane.

[dcfirefighter]

17. Linked from above

"That 15,000 square miles works out to roughly 9.5 million acres - far less than the 450 million acres currently used for crop farming in the US, and the over 500 million acres used as grazing land for farm animals."

9.5/500 = 1.9% of the grazing area
9.5/950 = 1% of the agricultural area

and it could use non-agricultural areas.

[skids]

18. Here's some leads (some of my older threads)

Don't forget deep geothermal:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x31147

(...also there's the mostly untapped hydrokinetic potential of waves and tides.)

Important storage technologies to watch:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x28245
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x29575

Status of photovoltaic progress:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x30896

Power/water economic interaction:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x29658

Automotive waste heat recovery (and solid state thermoelectrics in general):

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x30634

(And I second the other comment: biodiesel and solar thermal are the technologies that are immediately economically feasible for large-scale market-driven deployment, without any further technical advances, but I would add household geothermal ground source pumps for heating and air conditioning, which is what most of our power gets used for after all.)

[Sequoia]

20. Here's a few from my bookmarks

http://www.webdirectory.com/

http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel.html

http://www.masstech.org/

http://www.ace.mmu.ac.uk/esd/index.html

http://www.envirolink.org/

http://sc.ises.org/

[kitkatrose]

21. Thanks you guys.

I gave my speech about 4 hours ago, and it went pretty well. I really appreciate all the information.