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February 15, 2008

Gas From Thin Air? Los Almos Says it's Possible

By John

Editor

It seems far-fetched, but apparently the ability to make gasoline out of Co2 extracted from the atmosphere isn’t science fiction. The process would take an enormous amount of electricity, so nuclear power would have to be used to run the systems, but that seems like a pretty good trade off. Hey, if France can generate 75% of its electricity from reactors, why can’t we build some to fuel our thirsty cars? Check out the New York Times for more info.

Gas From Thin Air? Los Almos Says it's Possible

Comments

Marcel F. Williams
Feb 21, 2008 at 8:19 am

This is an idea that I’ve been promoting for more than a decade. Using nuclear energy to produce synthetic industrial chemicals and transportation fuels such as gasoline, diesel fuel, aviation fuel, methane, methanol, and ammonia is the only solution to the world’s problem with greenhouse gases and their energy needs.

And don’t worry about building more Yucca Mt. sites, building thousands of nuclear power plants would require practically all of the plutonium from spent fuel to be reprocessed and converted into more energy. If anything, using nuclear power to replace transportation fuel would probably produce a severe shortage of plutonium.

Plug-in-hybrids cars would probably be the perfect vehicles for a nuclear economy since they would make even the most expensive nuclear gasoline affordable while also utilizing the much cheaper nuclear electicity. However, the mass production of thousands of nuclear power plants, hopefully, in remote centralized locations, should dramatically reduce the capital and labor cost of nuclear power plants which should also significantly reduce the cost of gasoline produced from nuclear power facilities.

Ted
Feb 16, 2008 at 3:17 am

The problem, of course with Nuclear… well there are many problems. First, NIMBY (not in my back yard, enough said). Spent fuel storage (I’ve heard ideas from people in the industry that neutralization may be possible someday, but I have serious doubts).
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Several years ago, there was that whole “cold fusion” thing, which panned out about as well as Firepower pills. Last I had an interest (years ago) Fusion reaction technology was a long way off from being useable (estimated 50 years at that time).
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While I do think Nuclear is quite possibly the lesser of evils when compared to the unavoidable emissions from coal plants, I’m skeptical that we’ll see a significant rise of power generation in the U.S. coming from Nuclear. It would take a mandate of public support behind it that simply isn’t there right now.
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I’ve been in the Utility Industry since 1995, working on generation, transmission and distribution.
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The idea of creating gasoline out of thin air is intriguing, but if the amount of electricity needed is extreme, that defeats the purpose because the cost to consumers would be too high, also there’s no information on the environmental impact.
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Why not take all that electricity and use that to power a portion of the cars on the road, thus lessening the demand for gas?

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