You hit the nail on the head.... most of this discoveries are energy, not an energy source (container).
I have this discussion with the green crowd at work. They want electric cars and buses to end the strangle hold oil has on us. But when I ask them how will they produce all the electricity in the quantity needed they fall silent. There are a lot of interesting things on a small scale but when applied to large scale usage they fall apart.
“They want electric cars and buses to end the strangle hold oil has on us. But when I ask them how will they produce all the electricity in the quantity needed they fall silent. There are a lot of interesting things on a small scale but when applied to large scale usage they fall apart.”
The last I heard, in order to recharge car batteries in a reasonable amount of time (1 hour?) you’d have to empty an entire power grid to recharge a few cars.
Worse yet, no one talks about the eco problems when you have massive heavy metal mines in places like China, with the corresponding smelting factories in places that don’t care about the environment.
They don’t want to talk about the whole issue of disposal of such batteries.
They don’t want to talk about the problems associated with making cars that will probably only last as long as the batteries, instead of cars that run 300k miles (diesel).
And, they don’t want to talk about the safety issues of a person being involved in an accident when there are 500 pounds of batteries involved.
“I have this discussion with the green crowd at work. They want electric cars and buses to end the strangle hold oil has on us. But when I ask them how will they produce all the electricity in the quantity needed they fall silent. There are a lot of interesting things on a small scale but when applied to large scale usage they fall apart.”
I believe the answer is nukes, nukes and more nukes!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk4SZfnRufo
Be warned, there is profanity in this vid.