Wednesday, February 02, 2005

The hydrogen economy: It's really a nuclear economy

For those who maintain visions of a hydrogen economy delivering us from the evils of petroleum, there is one currently available solution: nuclear power. As you've been reminded over and over again on this blog, hydrogen is not an energy source; it is an energy carrier. That means it has to be extracted from somewhere else (probably water) using a genuine energy source, a process that requires considerably more energy input than the hydrogen will yield. This piece outlines what it would take to do it with nuclear power and why other avenues are simply not feasible. The writer admits that he is not even going to attempt to deal with the nuclear waste problem. But, that comes as no surprise. Nobody wants to deal with it.

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