Why don't we have more ICE vehicles with a similar factory installed unit? Could be a very low cost way to reduce fuel and imported crude oil consumption.

Many new cars introduced on the market in the EU have start-stop already now. In a few years, most cars will have the second generation of start-stop. Some even demand a legislation that require such technology to be fitted. Small incremental improvements like this will "eat" the advantage of a full hybrid at a greater pace than these hybrids improve and at a low incremental cost. Thus, I am somewhat pessimistic regarding a quick market penetration of full hybrids in the near future.

HarveyD
In the MIT stucy I cited in a prevous thread, they found that the PHEV had higher energy use and higher CO2 than the HEV. Your statement of "...2 to 3 times less fuel..." is nonsens.

In my experience, studies which "show" that PHEVs have much higher energy use or emissions than normal vehicles assume one or more of:

1. Very short vehicle life.
2. Very high embodied energy in batteries, with no recovery/recycling.
3. All electricity sourced from coal.
4. No allowance for displacement from petroleum to other energy supplies.

The most cost effective way to reduce importing of fuel for automobiles right now is to use coal in various ways including generating electricity for electric cars. Methanol is now made in large volumes in China from coal and can be burned in cars, and a recent report concerns the production of ethanol via gasification of biomass and fermentation. This ethanol would have enough radio-activity to pass as grain ethanol, and in any case, it is a food.

Some researcher in Australia has developed a very small unit to generate hydrogen from natural gas, and the present corn ethanol producers would be well advised to feed the CO2 presently being produced by the fementation process back into the fermenting vats along with hydrogen or buy the necessary organisms to use in a separate vat. Perhaps CO is also produced as well by the small methane converter and this is also a good food for organisms to produce ethanol.

Electric cars use cheaper fuel in most cases and the pollution is not concentrated on the roadway. It cannot be proved that electricity made from coal puts any more CO2 into the air than imported petroleum does because the flaring of gas, the spilling of oil that is converted into CO2 by organisms and the operation of pumps on oil or gas to pump the oil out of the ground and through the pipeline in the producing countries and into the ships and across the oceans and for refining, cannot be measured by the US government or any other group. Refineries alone use 135 units of input energy and associated CO2 release to produce 100 units of usable fuel energy. The internal combustion engine, ICE, in automobiles is a very inefficient source of motion, and it would be much better energy and CO2 efficiency, on the average to burn all gasoline in combined cycle powerplants and use THINK or even Tesla cars. It could even be burned along with coal in ordinary powerplants with great advantage. Coal is obviously much cheaper. The equivalent of two barrels or more of crude oil may be needed to get a barrel of gasoline into your tank.

It is far more than worth it for oil producers to spend two or three barrels or the CO2 equivalent of crude oil at a cost of less than five dollar each to send a barrel to the US because the US people have been trained by propaganda to be willing to pay a hundred dollars a barrel rather than making a barrel of gasoline from coal at a coal cost of ten dollars or less and factory capital and operating costs of 25 dollars or less.

Government officials of the US will Crucify the Population of the World on a Cross of Carbon just to get reelected or elected.

The current economic crisis of the world was likely triggered by the very high price of oil and has been continued by the same reason. Much of the high price of oil is caused by governmental regulations that are prohibiting the use of alternatives. Do we want to starve millions of people this year because we fear a rise of the Ocean that would inconvenience very rich cities in ten or fifteen years or more.

It is well known how to quickly reduce CO2 releases in a major way at sufficiently low costs: Install CANDU reactors in all countries that use coal for electricity or import oil or coal. Other standardized smaller reactors can be better. CANDU reactors can and should be made with one forth the power as should most other types of reactors.

Heavy water should also be used in light water reactors at times to increase their fuel efficiency and reduce the use of uranium and the production of depleted uranium. Or used to decrease their size. There is enough cheap heat and waste heat from nuclear power plants to separate heavy water at low costs.

Some calculations show that heavy water reactors can operate on thorium inputs alone with only the occassional removal of fission products from the recycled fuel. These reactors must be started with a small percentage of the waste plutonium isotope mix from used reactor fuel or much less mixed decommissioned bomb plutonium or unused bomb uranium added to the thorium but need no additional uranium or plutonium in the future. They can however destroy any plutonium or fissionable uranium of any kind and get energy from it.

Fast neutron reactor systems can be made to use all of natural uranium. Rubbia Reactors are fast neutron reactors that intend to use thorium for lower construction and operating costs than are available with the use of uranium.

CANDU reactors are now being tested in China to operate on light water fuel "wastes" with the fission products removed but after being diluted with depleted uranium, that is called depleted because about half or more of its U235 has been removed along with the naturally produced radioactive decay products.

Depleted uranium does get slightly more radioactive as the decay products build up again, but it never gets as radioactive as ordinary undepleted natural chemically purefied uranium. Uranium is delivered to your lawn in the form of many balanced fertilizers but much more is already there.

You have about 4000 nuclear potassium explosions in your body every second or about 57 per kilogram or 25 per pound. These explosions happen in all live things and live things have processes to deal with the produced nuclear rays and the many more that come from the earth and sky.

The safe storage of nuclear wastes is a religeous issue with the many churches of thought ignoring the fact that humans and all life are radioactive and therefore nuclear waste which is able to survive itself. Almost all minerals are also radioactive.

Bathtubs kill far more people than if the most highly active nuclear wastes from reactors were uniformly spread directly under the concrete or asphalt of all the US freeways. Even uniformly sprayed upon the surface of all US Freeways this waste would cause no clearly attributable deaths. People and all life have always had built in radioactivity and get even more from the earth and space and even more from x-rays. Which ray caused the rouge cancer cell in the US resident? The one from the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, of course, not the billions from the potassium right inside the cells. Or ones from the uranium in the nut the resident ate.

Since uranium is in almost all soils as is potassium there would be no major increase in the radio-activity or the land or the water under it. Natural uranium fissions all the time and leaves fission products in the soil.

These active wastes are the fission products, and even some of them or all of them can be used for useful very highly safe energy production and the purification of water.

There is an officialy operated nuclear waste repository already operating and it is far more than safe enough, but it is waste of money because its cost is thousands of times more than necessary to reduce the chance of a single death in thousand of years from nuclear waste. The money would be far better spent to eliminate the use of tobacco or texting in automobiles.

Most churches believe that man made nuclear waste is more dangerous than natural nuclear ray producing materials but this is obviously false. Nature puts more radioactive elements in the soil of farms and yards and in the ocean than man can possibly do and the rays produced are identical.

Get rid of your granite counter top and your spouse and all airline travel if you believe that any radioactivity is un-acceptable because you have forced laws to be passed by people which say that it is.

Life is not safe; it never was; and it never will be, but the use of fossil energy has obviously made it more safe because there are more humans now on the earth. Nuclear energy, used in large amounts everywhere will allow the population of the earth to be even larger, so it is obviously more safe.

Life is more safe in France because there is electricity available for air conditioning during heat waves and heating during cold spells and less CO in the air and less CO2 in the air and less radon in the air because "clean" natural gas is not being burned. Life is not nearly as safe in Haiti because no nearby earthquake proof nuclear power plant is producing electricity to cook food and light the nights.

Fifty watts of power delivered to every house(or tent or shanty) is enough to cook all the food needed in Dewar flasks(Thermos)or hay insulated kettles and extend many lives and save many trees.

Take note! Bill Gates and start a fifty watt program somewhere in the world. You have enough money to build several CANDU reactors and selling power to industry, large and tiny, would more than make up for fifty watts to each family in Haiti and many other places even in the US.

"Edison visited a Native American area and installed a light in an outhouse thus becomming the first person to wire a Head for a Reservation." ..HG..