$5000 Hybrid Car Generators?

What do you mean by hybrid? Are you are refering to a hybrid electric/regular gas car?

If the electricity is generated by a hydrogen fuel cell then thats probably the "generator" they are refering to.

about

They be the ones.

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Fuel cells use a lot of copper wire?

Bret Cahill

No. They use much more exotic materials than copper. In theory they only cost a little to make but they cost a lot to design. Fuel cells aren't used in large quantities yet which means to fund that research the cost of each cell must be high.

This article explains how they work...

The problem is they use Hydrogen. Nobody will buy a car that runs on Hydrogen until they can fill it up easily, and no gas station owner will invest in Hydrogen storage tanks until there are lots of Hydrogen powered cars on the road. So we are stuck. The only people who can use Hydrogen are delivery lorries and busses that have a central base they can return to in order to fill up. One day when oil is in short supply and it becomes very expensive something will change. Either governments will put in some initial investment or perhaps a car manufacturer will decide to do a deal with an oil company that owns lots of gas stations, who knows. Perhaps there will even be a war and some countries that don't have oil won't be able to buy it anymore from the countries that do? Anyway whatever happens way we need something to happen to make the change over worth doing.

The US government is already looking at building more nuclear power plants because one way to make hydrogen is to use electricity from Nuclear power to make it from water....

Although this approach isn't popular with everyone...

Colin

Most use platinum.

The next wrinkle is about designing effective mobile reformers which can take a hydrocarbon (gasoline) and generate hydrogen as you drive. Leapfrogging the hydrogen fill-up station is going to be a neat trick.

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Not such a big problem. Fleet and farm vehicles can help get H2 started. That's how diesel became available in the U.S.

Also, BMW has a two fuel vehicle. You can use H2 when possible, gas when necessary.

The real problem is getting the H2.

I understand the U. S. DoE is building a huge nuke waste facility in Washington.

Bret Cahill

In article , snipped-for-privacy@pandora.be mentioned...

The problem is nuclear power. The power plants got fuel from Hanford, Fernald, Rocky Flats, etc., which are now huge SuperFund toxic waste cleanup sites. And after TMI and Chernobyl, no private insurance company or investor wants to touch that kind of investment. And we won't even mention the mess that's already out there. They're talking about calling the old timers out of retirement to decommission the aging nukes that are going out of service. Their future doesn't look good.

In article , snipped-for-privacy@aol.com mentioned...

It's already built; it's called Hanford. That's where there's so much toxic waste, the jackrabbits glow in the dark. ;-)

Maybe the cost of development? After all, if it's run by software, it would be very, very bad if the software failed and caused some accident.