@art_of_shred said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:
Does anyone realize that every energy conversion suffers loss? It's so ridiculously laughable to me every time people fire up the electric vs. gas vehicle debate. It generally requires fossil fuels to generate electricity (on a large scale), and then you get another potential drop when converting from AC to battery DC potential electricity. There is no magical "save the planet" clause that kicks in and gives you a conversion bonus for being "green", and when you're all done wasting energy to look like you've done the planet some great service, you throw your massive used-up lead-acid batteries in a landfill. Sure, technology keeps getting better, and there may come a point when we can produce all of our electricity w/o the use of fossil fuels, but until that actually happens in the real world, physics renders the argument invalid. I'll accept that using solar panels to generate the power to charge your car is a step in the right direction, but now you've added another layer of toxic batteries to the chain. And my 3 cars average about 350-400 miles per tank of gas, at roughly 25-30 mpg.
You went and got me started, here we go.
We should be 100% nuclear power generation right now. Most of the current reactors in the US are so old it's not even funny. Yet we keep operating the old, known to be dangerous, designs a la Fukushima. We have abundant fuel, safe reactors that can not melt down, and can recycle around 99% of the fuel. Yet we do NONE of this... excuse me, I need to go collect the duct tape because my head just exploded.
