Not only is distillation of ethanol from weak solutions very energy-intensive, from the appearance of this unit the heat comes from an electric resistance element.

If the energy balance of corn ethanol made in a large-scale distillery is only 1.3:1, ethanol made in one of this is going to be a long way sub-unity.  Such wastefulness is greenwashing, pure and simple.  Both the supplier and buyers should be ashamed.

What is really needed is an electrochemical cell that produces pentane from natural gas; a reverse fuel cell. A methane generator coupled with a compressor for natural gas vehicles would be more fuel efficient. It is now time to start using nuclear reactors to produce liquid fuels, and we can start by using them to provide steam for fuel refining and synthesis gas production and tar sand extraction. Oil shale processing is also useful.

US style power reactors cannot make both electricity and bomb plutonium. The plutonium in standard used fuel rods cannot be used for effective bombs because it has the wrong mix of isotopes. With the invention of the Uranium centrifuge, there is a much easier way of making, much easier to make, uranium bombs. More people were killed by malaria last year alone than all the people killed in both war bomb blasts. Every live thing has always had built in radio-activity so there is no really good reason to worry about a little bit more.

If any of you think that you should be worried about a little bit more, then move immediately to sea level or below where there is less natural nuclear radiation. Also living on a boat will keep you further away from soil radiation and radon. Try a houseboat on the Salton Sea or the Dead Sea. None of this will stop you from getting additional radiation from all the food that you eat.

We also know and use far more than adequate methods to protect people from radio-active materials used in nuclear power plants. These are similar to those that are used to protect people from being killed by the sun. There is even an approved operating repository adequate for used fuel rods in the US; it is called WIPP. There is far more than enough room for it to be expanded to enough area for all of the spent rods for hundreds of years. The radio-active materials for a thousand years of nuclear power could be safely reduced to a cube 100 feet on a side or less.

Fission power plants actually reduce the amount of radio-active materials on the earth, but fusion power plants can increase them unlimitedly, and would be the cheapest source of neutrons for making plutonium 239 out of uranium 238. Some proposed types of fusion reactors are far less bomb proliferation resistant than most operating fission reactors.

There is no chance that enough money could be spent to make automobiles and cigarettes and alcohol safer than nuclear power. In Finland, the high alcohol consumption actually prevents death from arterial disease whilst increasing those from liver disease.

Nuclear electricity can be and is generated for less than $0.05 per kilowatt hour capital costs and all. This means that hydrogen with all the heat energy in a gallon of gasoline can be made for $3.50 if the process is only half efficient. But electric cars now go 350 miles on the same amount of electricity. ..HG..

Waiting for fusion (which has been 20 years from commercial use for the last 50 years) is pointless.  We already have the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, which is what fusion wanted to be; just blow off the dust from 40 years of neglect.