They did it because while canola oil-seed produces only 100 gallons of oil per acre per year and impinges on land available for growing food, algae produces up to 10,000 gallons per acre per year, and does not require arable land.

There is an easy major way to reduce net green house gas production. Britain tried biofuels until the "end of the beginning" of the industrial revolution and almost lost all of its forests.

However it must be said that organic materials do not belong in landfills where the methane produced over the years must be handled. Organic materials can be digested completely into methane. Plastics can be burnt.

Nuclear energy is the only affordable answer in general. But an instant step to take is to require the use of home, business and factory cogeneration. The price of natural gas to operate such devices must be regulated to approach the price that central power stations pay. There can be as much as 40 percent savings in CO2. The Whispergen, Honda et cetera units are now well demonstrated and there is the LION steam unit from Germany.

No new large power plant should be built that is not cogeneration. CANDU reactors can be had from Canada on short notice. They can even burn old reactor fuel directly. They can also burn thorium.

The Accelerator Driven Reactor increases the utilization of the Uranium or thorium from about one percent to a reachable 99 percent. This makes nuclear energy, renewable!, compared to wind and solar because so much CO2 and iron and copper and land et cetera goes into fabricating and installing the turbines and collectors.

There is enough uranium in the ocean alone to supply all the current energy needs for the life of the solar system if accelerator systems or breeder reactors are used. Accelerator systems might even be developed that can use lead or bismuth as a fuel. With the wide availability of thorium and uranium this will never be a necessity, but it would be easier to do than the present methods of hydrogen fusion.

The heat from some reactors can be used to produce liquid fuels by recycling CO2 from the air. This can be done at less than the present cost of oil. It is probably cheaper to build a car that captures its CO2 for recyling than to use a fuel cell. A car that recaptures CO2 could be built in a few weeks.

The wide use of ZEBRA batteries, perfected in the UK, for Plug-In-Hybrid cars would better reduce the demand for liquid automotive fuels than do biofuels. The large scale use of ZEBRA batteries is needed to get their production costs low enough to make such cars economical.

Proposed lead batteries from Atraverda, Firefly, EFFPOWER and others can reduce the weight and cost of the cheaper lead batteries. Lead batteries are already able to be used in Plug-in-hybrid vehicles with success. Infinite range is guaranteed by the fuel-electric generator. The EFFPOWER battery is the least complex battery available for hybrid cars. Atraverda may eventually demonstrate an equivalent unit.

The existing CANDU reactor with a thorium fuel cycle also burns all of its thorium after starting with a three percent mix of reactor grade plutonium. Even the plutonium from used MOX fuel can be used.

The big step to take is to build a number of small nuclear reactors to provide heat for large cities and towns as an artificial geothermal system. These can be built at much lower cost if they are not designed to produce high temperatures and high pressures. They are heat only and need not be large because there is no need for the large expensive efficient steam turbine. They can be built deep in the ground because there is no need for cooling.

They might even circulate molten hot wax so that some steam for industrial processes can be made and a bit of electricity produced by geothermal type machinery in addition to the absorbtion cooling for air-conditioning. If there is a wax leak it will just congeal for easy recovery. Even a Chernobyl like failure three hundred feet deep can almost just be ignored.

The false fears of radiation that both ignorant and informed anti nuclear energy activists and politicians try to promote should mostly vanish if people become aware that there are about 50 nuclear explosions every second in every kilogram of their body right next to the DNA without any lead shielding since the advent of lead free petrol.

Every live organism, from the start of life on earth, has ingested radioactive food that contains radio-active potassium and must do this in order to live. Humans also live in a sea of radio activity from the earth and space and other plants and animals, so it would not be worth it to obtain food without radio-active potassium at a cost of billions of dollars per kilogram. Quorn or Pruteen would be some of the easiest low radio-activity complete foods to make. Pure sugar, ethanol and starch are quite low radio-activity, but are life threatening if used alone.

The invention of the use of ethanol and its continued use as a food substance has caused more early demises than any collection of nuclear reactors and industry will. In fact the low cost energy of reactors will prevent many early demises.

The radon released from a house gas cooker would provide more radio-activity in the home than a nuclear power plant as a direct neighbor.

Everything but the atoms produced by fission can be fed back into an accelerator reactor and some other reactors. If all of the electricity, including industrial, of a average hundred year lifetime were produced by fission, the fission atoms "waste" would weigh about 200 grams. This is also the weight of uranium or thorium required to produce that energy.

There is no need to spend excessive amounts of money to shield the public from the radio-active elements that come out of a nuclear reactor. Fewer kilograms of radio-active atoms come out of nuclear reactor than went in.

No atom that comes out of a nuclear reactor is more dangerous than the uranium, thorium, radium, radon and their daughter products that exist in the soil and rocks. Uniformly distributed in a square kilometer of earth ten meters deep or less, the entire reactor load of fuel would not make the ground be more radioactive than Denver, Colorado USA. There would be about one gram of fuel for every 200 tonnes of earth, but only 1 gram of fission product for every 5,000 tonnes of earth and more than half of the fission products are not radioactive. The amount of uranium and thorium in coal plant ash far exceed this value.

Dissolving reactor fuel into large volumes of sea water and then mixing it with even larger volumes of deep sea water is sufficiently safe for both plant and animal life.

The only reason the mercury illnesses of Japan were acted upon was because there were so few and no official was addicted to methyl-mercury. Puffer fish have decreased far more life spans in Japan. Ethanol and Nicotine deserve more than this brief mention.

Plutonium is not the most dangerous element on earth. Radium is naturally much more radio active and is found everywhere where there is uranium which is almost everywhere. Uranium is contained in many fertilizers that are put on gardens and fields, but uranium was already naturally there as was radio-active potassium.

Plants concentrate many elements including radioactive ones. Oranges have more potassium than wheat kernals do.

Pierre and Marie Curie concentrated these atom and burned themseves. They were no more victims of radiation than are the people who expire of thirst in a desert or especially those who get cancer from solar exposure or on the other hand those who have ricketts because of a lack of solar exposure.

A kilogram of uranium et cetera can produce 20,000,000 kilowatt hours of heat energy. The fuel in unused bombs can produce nearly this heat value in the presently operating reactors. At the highest price of $300 a kilo for uranium, the nation wide average nuclear electricity fuel for a hundred year lifetime would cost $60. This figure must be multiplied by a factor of five to ten if there is no reprocessing, but at that price reprocessing would always be done.

The price of uranium was as low as $16 dollars a kilo within the last ten years. No new uranium would be needed for two or three years or more if all the uraniun in surplus weapons were released to the market.

There are reactors, including the self stable pebble bed reactor, that are hot enough to produce hydrogen with thermochemical processes. High temperature electrolysis is possible at all nuclear power plants and may be cheaper. If hydrogen is produced with nuclear heat to make fuels, this hydrogen can also be used as food for some fementations along with CO2. Quorn can be produced as part of this cycle and certainly ethanol. So instead of food to energy we can have nuclear produced food, but that is exactly what we eat now with the fusion energy from the sun. ..HG..

How is it that replacements for oil and gasoline have to be sustainable right off the bat?
Oil and gas useage is not sustainable! We may be forced to use way less and we won't be ready for the switch because we haven't developed the infrastructure to replace it cos we are still debating.
The status quo cannot be sustained, diversification is key or our economies (and our farms) will halt because we can't affrod oil or simply won't be able to get what we need.
Our governments have no guts, they sway in the wind with media opinion, which is accidentally or deliberately manipulated.

Spot price crude oil dropped anther $4.00 today down to $74.38 bbl. One interesting way to lower petro cost is lower the entire market. Does anyone believe this is NOT manipulated?

The UK is insane not to press forward with nonfood-based biofuels at full tilt. With .6 million hectares of arable land set-aside (unused) they could grow non-food crops for cellulosic. According to the House of Commons, UK already has crop surplus production of cereals and sugar equivalent to 5% of all petroleum used.

The food for fuel debate is the forward attack of the petroleum industry to retard biofuel expansion. Looks like Parliament and some greenies have let that argument push the UK into the back seat of alternative energy progress. In the long run it'll bite them in the as*.