OT Hydrogen economy, not?

I worked on a building-control system in Moscow. They have municipal steam pipes to heat all the buildings, nearly all unmetered. You regulate room temperature in the winter by how much you open the windows.

John

Count your blessings, buddy. 120 miles north-northeast of you it is 94°F even WITH a little cloud cover.

Jim

-- "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle

"> John Lark>

We've got slow cars up here, too, John {;-)

Actually, the real surprise for a lot of folks when I take them in the 182 is how much ISN'T covered with houses or concrete.

Jim

-- "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle

Driving Interstate

All of the military bases in Alaska used steam heat. All the utilities were underground in concrete trenches with 1/2" steel plate covers so repairs could be done without digging in the permafrost. Each room had a thermostat, but the 8" thick concrete walls left plenty of room to store frozen food. A can of pop would freeze and split in a little over five minutes.

I flew from Cincinnati, to St. Louis, to Seattle, then to Fairbanks in he '70s. The return flight went through Chicago instead of St. Louis and you are right. Vast areas with no roads, homes or power lines. America ranges from sub tropical to arctic weather in different regions and people who grew up in crowded urban areas have no concept that there are vacant are bigger than their entire country.

Snooort.

Well good for them... but... aren't they sitting on a pile of oil and natural gas?

Man, imagine if all the flared (wasted) methane in Saudi Arabia were used to make synthetic fertilizer via the Haber-Bosch process... (that process requires methane to get the hydrogen)

Michael

Jalapenos? You wimp, try habaneros.

I was talking about plugging up a mile long borehole with concrete. Most of that mile will not be surrounded by salt.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Even if it gets below freezing at the surface there, temperature gets very even yearround once one gets something like a hundred or two feet underground.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

snipped-for-privacy@manx.misty.com (Don Klipstein) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@manx.misty.com:

plugging a mile-long borehole with anything will suffice;it would be hard to dig thru all that without notice.Especially if there were a few sections of granite boulders in concrete spaced thru the mile.

BTW,many northern highways use a salt-resistant concrete to increase roadway life. it does cost more...

as insurance rates.

Acetylene is worse - 2.5 to 80 %.

Acetylene is much worse in that area.

Blue flames in general are mostly faintly visible to invisible in daylight. One classic example is the particular race cars fueled by methanol crashing with fuel fires, with most visible sign of the fire being "heat ripples" seen where viewing conditions favor visibility of that effect.

Propane torch flames are very faint in areas illuminated by direct sunlight. A natural gas stove flame is dimmer than a propane torch flame, so a similar natural gas flame in a bright sunlit environment has a fair chance of being invisible.

Ethylene is similar in this area, and acetylene is much worse than both ethylene and hydrogen!

The bulk of released hydrogen, whether burning or not, will still go upwards because hydrogen is lighter than air. Increasing optical density of the flame means the flame changing from a dim blue one to a more ordinary whitish-orange-yellow one that is easy to see in daylight.

I see the more legitimate arguments against hydrogen being on other grounds - such as how much can be practically stored on a personal hydrogen-fueled vehicle, and after that arguments as to fuel cells requiring (or not necessarily requiring) expensive materials with low available tonnage worldwide or else figure out how usefully (or not) we can burn it in an IC engine, a steam engine, or a Stirling engine, etc. where gasoline and diesel finds IC engines practical.

Delivering/generating hydrogen from "whatever energy source" to a fuel pumping station (whether it's a neighborhood or town "fuel station" or a smaller device for most homeowners having garages to have) and compressing the hydrogen into a car's fuel tank (or otherwise storing a useful amount into the vehicle) are also significant arguments against mass-market hydrogen-fueled vehicles.

If it can ever be be practical to use hydrogen to fuel cars, it's not "a tall order" to make such a thing having reasonable safety along the lines of safety of using gasoline as a fuel for cars. So I expect hydrogen fueled cars to not have safety issues to be the tallest hurdles that stand in their way!

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Not that this is "health food", but I am easily "rubbed the wrong way" by anyone and everyone saying, implying, hinting, whatever that HFCS is outright poison but sucrose or even raw cane sugar or "brown sugar" is "wholesome" or something along those lines. Most "high fructose corn syrup" is HFCS-55, meaning sugar content breaking down to 55% fructose and the other 45% glucose. Latter are all generally 48-51% glucose 48-51% fructose as far as calorie content goes.

Along with this, I see all-too-much the anti-carbers saying how carbs in general and glucose make people overeat by being remaining hungry by stimulating production of insulin, while also saying that fructose causes people to overeat due to being remaining hungry from lack of insulin production stimulus! That makes me think along lines of one having one's cake after eating it?

The low-carb advocates still advocate sausage! Not that I advocate sausage due to high calorie density, mostly from fat, and due to sausage usually having little other than fat and water!

Not that I favor processed foods!

Certainly I think that if there was a way to put sausage (more realistically fats in general) usefully into a car's fuel tank as opposed to into human gigestion systems, then the world would be a better place!

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

I have found a slight difference between Canadian Cokes and American ones, in favor of usage of "Real Sugar"! Canada gets sugar from Cuba. Why does USA need to put a wall between itself and Cuba while trading with China as "most favored nation"?

Make that "partially hydrogenated" - fully hydrogenated (less common) is 100% saturated (bad enough) but "trans" is much worse while being a type of unsaturated, found mainly in "partially hydrogenated" vegetable oils (especially of soybean).

I say good riddance to that poison, in the few cities of USA where that poison has recently been banned. I find "partially hydrogenated" vegetable oils to be the main poisoning in processed foods - and after that high salt content, low fiber content and low content of antioxidants - even the more notable ones.

So I munch a lot of veggies and also more than "my fair share" of berries and fruit.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

How can you conclude that? It's entirely untrue.

I don't bake bread any more. It's a lot of work and mess, and mine never tastes as good as the stuff I can buy here. But pies, cobblers, custards, bread pudding, brownies, cookies, muffins, cornbread, quiche, all still worth the effort.

John

Let's see, we reform it into essentially the same material that we mined, but at a lower activity level. Then put it back from where we got it. Global effect: reducing background radioactivity. What is the problem?

No, the next swearing in January.

Optimist.

more

Considering the fall involved, that should be impressive.