Quote:
I can't imagine if there were tens of thousands of cars plugged in. Are hydrogen fuel cell cars the answer? Or does production of hydrogen produce pollution as well?


I imagine the power you get back from chemically combining the hydrogen is just slightly less than the amount you expended earlier tearing the hydrogen atom off of some {water,petrochemical} molecule when you built the fuel cell.
(Oh wait, I seem to remember that the hydrogen fuel cells work through some kind of membrane osmosis method rather than chemical bonding. Well, in any case, you have to pump energy back in later to "de-osmosify" the hydrogen atoms. And the laws of thermodynamics say that you're going to lose that game every time.)

So in that sense, it must be just like the electric cars. It's "clean" because you have hidden the big dirty energy generation factory in someone else's back yard....

(I know that they're looking at using living plantlife to generate the hydrogen from solar energy biologically, but it boggles the mind to think of the sunny acreage required if that becomes our primary method of energy production. And this pessimism is coming from a guy that uses a solar hot water heater (namely me).)

It seems to me that the right answer would be:
cars driven from
electricity
generated from
nuclear power
made in reverse-breeding reactors.

With the only bad waste products being:
  • excess heat from the reactors, and
  • eventual radioactivity of the some of the tubing/components/etc. of the plant.

I guess it depends how much of a fantasy these "reverse-breeding reactors" are in order to avoid the usual nuclear waste disposal issues from conventional fission reactors.

A lot of people don't realize that already today more than 20% of U.S. electricity generation comes from nuclear plants, despite the fact that we haven't opened a single new nuclear plant in over 25 years.