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re: True of False? (ISIS thread)

Posted on 4/22/15 at 2:46 pm to
Posted by Duke
Twin Lakes, CO
Member since Jan 2008
35653 posts
Posted on 4/22/15 at 2:46 pm to
I assume he's proposing using hemp as the source of sugar.

There are other issues surrounding using ethanol though. It absorbs water from the atmosphere, and while that will reduce corrosion it also lowers the energy you get out of burning it. This also presents difficulty in transporting ethanol over long distances. In cold weather (like sub 50F), you don't get enough vapor pressure to ignite the fuel. Basically, you don't have enough evaporation to burn when it hits the spark.

You also can't achieve pure ethanol from distillation, as an azeotrope exists. While you can get around it by pumping your vapor under pressure over a bed of beads to dehydrate, that's still an energy intensive process.

Also, ethanol isn't as energy dense as the hydrocarbons that make up gasoline. Though you can run higher compression ratios and actually get better efficiency than traditional gasoline. It requires developing new engines for all autos though.

He's right that ethanol can be used as an auto fuel source. There are also the downsides I mentioned and didn't mention (corrosion, energy required to produce it, ect).

What I don't understand is how anti-nuclear he is. It produces little emissions and produces tons of energy without burning hydrocarbons. There is the waste problem, but you can bury that shite in a concrete bunker. There's also the risk of catastrophic failure. It's not very likely, as long as you aren't building a plant along a fault line, but yes something going wrong has huge costs. There are saregaurds for safegaurds of safegaurds in place at any facility because of that risk, and thus you can produce a lot of energy with a large degree of safety.
Posted by hipgnosis
Member since Mar 2015
1226 posts
Posted on 4/22/15 at 2:47 pm to
You should've learned by now to not speak for me.

Thanks but no thanks.

Preciate it.
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