The nice thing about natural gas is that most people have gas lines in their house, so you wouldn't need special fueling stations. You could just hook a compressor to your gas line and use that to fill your car. Say what you will, but it's more realistic than ethanol.

That is kind of devious, saying you're all about alternative energy then buying stock in all the companies that would benefit from your plan.

True, we may run out of natural gas in a century or so, but I'm sure technology will be a lot better then. Also, natural gas can be made from hydrogen easily, and a lot of the technology for using natural gas as a fuel could be used to use hydrogen as a fuel.

Personally, I like the plug-in hybrid concept best, provided we can improve our battery technology a lot. For a typical commute, you wouldn't use gas at all, since the battery alone would have a range of about 40 miles. You wouldn't need the gas unless you went on a road trip. And if we confined our gas usage to road trips, that'd cut it a lot.

Well, Pickens himself, in his commercials, points out that the natural gas thing is to buy us time, while we work on other ways to reduce our reliance on enemy oil. (I don't want to say 'foreign oil', because I've got no real probs buying oil from Mexico, Canada, and Britain, at least in the short term.)

We should build about 500 new nuclear plants, and store our nuclear waste in Alaska, and convert our cars to primarily electric, and upgrade our electrical grid. If we hadn't just blown three or four trillion dollars racking up debt over Bush's two terms, we'd probably be able to afford to do all that. Alas, bad voter choices in the last two elections has probably doomed us to oil addiction for the foreseeable future, simply because we're now too broke to do much to help our situation.

Wind and solar are unreliable. Wind only works when it's windy, and sun only works when it's sunny. Plus solar is 5x the cost of coal and wind is 2x the cost of coal. Hybrid cars are simply more efficient gasoline-powered cars.

Nuclear energy has the most potential though. We just need to convince people that living in the same state as a nuclear waste repository isn't dangerous.

Indeed. We also need to work on bringing down the cost of breeder reactors, which could turn nuclear waste into nuclear fuel, and then commercialize nuclear pyroprocessing. Pyroprocessing is an advanced nuclear waste reprocessing technology that has been demonstrated to work a lot better than the current ones they use. One of the main problems with current nuclear waste processing technology is the fact that it produces pure plutonium, which can be used by terrorists for nuclear warheads. Thus, the security costs are enormous. Pyroprocessing just spits out a bunch of mixed actinides, which are absolutely worthless for warhead use. Of course, I doubt there's a politician out there who even knows what pyroprocessing is, so I don't expect the government to take notice.

It's better than having nuclear waste next door to your house.

Does no one remember 20 short years ago? chernobyl

And I'm sure Palin won't mind us storing all our nuclear waste in her state. It's not like they're trying to protect the wildlife anyway. If they end up with some twelve-ton flying wolves with tentacles, well, that'll make the helicopter hunting a little more challenging and the trophies much more interesting.

Palin can take the waste and float it across the bearing straights to Russia.

Chernobyl was such an anomaly that I honestly don't think it's a good example of typical nuclear energy production or the problems to be found with nuclear energy. I want to send the nuclear waste to Nevada, Las Vegas to be specific.

I am very pro-nuclear, and this pyro-processing mentioned sounds interesting. But, nuclear, wind, and solar ONLY alleviate electricity production issues. How about getting us mobile, eh? Hydrogen, as an overall technology, does not seem to be there, as from what little I've read on it recently still shows it to be very high cost, using more energy to produce that hydrogen than is returned in making a mobile vehicle.

No one energy source will solve our problems. We must begin a multi-tiered approach. If natural gas prices are doing anything like propane/lp prices (we're on propane up here, and well, phone and electricity are the only utilities delivered to us on demand) then it's not going to be all that cost-effective nor will it realize much of a savings at the dispenser for us. Along with being just as finite a resource as oil, I am incredulous as to its utility for anything other than clean(er) energy.

And either way, Dank just helped me figure out what it was I didn't trust about that elderly gentleman with the smooth Texas drawl.

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I want to send the nuclear waste to Nevada, Las Vegas to be specific.

Hmmmm..............I wonder why that is? If you can't outsmart them, just kill them, eh? Don't worry, There are enough armed citizens in Vegas to stop any transport of nuclear waste through out city. And BTW the local politicians would back us all the way. They are already trying to take over a railroad line going through central Nv. for transport purposes. Actually, I'm for storing the waste at Yucca Mountain, Charge an arm and a leg for storage fees, and distribute it to all citizens of Nv, kinda like the oil revenues in Alaska. If you want to burden us with 20,000 years of radio active waste, then pay us the citizens to accept it. If I'm gonna glow in the dark, I want to get paid.

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

The Soviet Union designed their power plants after their reactors that were initially designed for plutonium production, for making warheads. Their reactor designs were terrible, and had very few safety features. Plus, when that incident happened, they were running a test but they had far too few people to be doing that test. It was like a perfect storm of incompetence.

In the early days of aviation, commercial airliner crashes were fairly common. There'd be a couple of them per year anyway. Imagine if we had completely stopped commercial flights after the first crash? These days, there has not been a single commercial airliner crash by an American airline since September 11th, 2001. Before that, I think there were maybe two in the nineties. Mostly this is because we understand aircraft safety much better now, and the same is true for nuclear power plant safety. The new reactor designs have hundreds of failsafes, and even if they all fail they are designed such that they can't reach critical mass.

All of the proposed sites for nuclear waste repositories are like 100 miles from any populations centers and at least 10 miles from any residences, so there wouldn't be nuclear waste stored next door to anyone. Unless you're talking about on-site storage, in which case nuclear waste is stored near major population centers. That's what they do now.