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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 851766" data-attributes="member: 177">Okay, we seem to have some misinformation about carbon...The problem with fossil fuels is not that they release carbon.  The problem is that they release carbon that had been taken out of the system.  The carbon in fossil fuels has been out of circulation for millions of years - as far as the current atmosphere is concerned, it is a "new" source.Burning currently active biological stuff (like this "turkey oil") doesn't have that problem, as they are part of the current carbon cycle.  The carbon in the turkey comes from grain.  The carbon in the grain comes from the atmosphere.  So, carbon goes from the atmosphere, into the grain, into the oil.  You burn the oil, putting the carbon back into the atmosphere.  And the next generation of grain takes it right back out again.  So long as you ultimately get the carbon from currently living plants, the net release of carbon is zero.  This is a good thing, greenhouse-wise.About fuel cells:Standard electrolysis of water is not the only way to get hydrogen.  Recently, I read (I believe in Scientific American, I'll see if I can find the reference) a report about a new process - you take a sugar solution, heat it slightly, and pass it over a catalyst, and you get hydrogen and oxygen coming off.  Note that this is a catalyic reaction.  Rather than take electical energy (from a fossil or nuclear fuel) and storing it as chemical energy (in the form of hydrogen and oxygen), you are taking the energy in the sugar, and converting it into energy in hydrogen and oxygen.  The energy for this process comes from the sun, via sugar cane.  So long as it doesn't take too much energy to isolate the sugar from the plant, we effectively have solar-powered cars <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />DM_Matt:  Where do your numbers on Uranium reserves come from?  They sound very, very short to me.  I think there's a lot more Uranium energy liying around than your numbers suggest.Fission power does bring up the issue of nuclear waste.  As DM_Matt said, the spent fuel of our current reactors can be recycled.  Much more energy can be extracted, and the final products are not radioactive for nearly as long.  Why don't we recycle, then?  Because back in the Carter Administration, when nuclear energy was just starting to take off, someone asked the question - what happens if a terrorist or aggressive nation gets a hold of the spent fuel?  Boom!  So, in order to decrease this risk, they decresed the number of hands the Uranium passes through by making the recycling illegal.  This leaves us with an ugly waste issue.  This part of the thing can be solved by simple legislation.There's another waste problem, though, that isn't easy to solve - the reactor itself becomes radioactive.  At the moment, there's no "good" solution for this problem.  The reactor is typically carted off piecemeal into a landfill.Nuclear fusion has no fuel-waste issue.  A fusion reactor takes in hydrogen, and puts out non-radioactive helium.  Heluim has no known nasty environmental effects of which I'm aware (other than making people talk like a duck).  You do still have some problem with the reactor becoming radioactive, but to a much lesser extent than with fission reactors.  The only problem being that nobody yet knows how to control a fusion reaction on a scale large enough to be useful.</blockquote>

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