Clean and Green are we ready?

For years I have confused people, recycling and badmouthing electric cars at the same time. As a fan of diesels and the idea of a positive energy fuel such as bio-diesel, I have never liked the idea of all the hazardous waste produced by the electric car.

Every electric car is filled with plastics which are difficult to recycle, heavy metals in the batteries do all kinds of wierd things to the environment and I still don’t believe that brushless motors are 100% ozone free. You can smell the car running and it smells like an electric motor.

I would maybe settle for a diesel hybrid but fuel is still so cheap in the US, all of our hybrids are gasoline powered. Of course our newest vehicle in my personal fleet is a TDI diesel. You could say I became a diesel fanatic when I bought my first German Golf Diesel in 1987. 50 MPG in 1987 was an amazing thing, especially when you consider I ran that car flat out at 84 MPH everywhere I went until my insurance threatened to drop because of all the speeding tickets.


An energy saving technology I have been looking for is the local “small gas turbine generator”. 15 years ago these were promised as grid killers, and I haven’t seen one yet. By placing the generators in the local area, the main power grid is eliminated. A notable percentage of power is lost over the power grid. Why are we wasting the power when there are better ways?

Now that I live in Texas the small gas turbine makes a ton of sense. One little turbine running natural gas that could power two neighborhoods. Put one in each neighborhood and everyone has a back up. We don’t have to wait two months after a hurricane for new power lines connecting us to the grid in Louisianna. Even better, there is a massive natural gas well just 15 miles from down town Houston. We have the fuel, the infrastructure, and no small turbine, what gives?

In the 60’s Chrysler made a turbine car. Why not a natural gas (zero polution and plenty of it) small turbine hybrid car? That looked like the best of everything and yet we don’t have one. Why? Every airport in america has one, they are called “start carts”.

There is a possibility that I found the answer and that I will change my mind on electric powered cars. Thorium might be the element I need to change my mind. If you haven’t heard of the element Thorium, I doubt that you have heard of the Thorium reactor. It is a small low radiation nuclear reactor. They use 1/50th the footprint of a traditional reactor and the output will not make weapons grade materials. The half life of the output is in the hundreds of years not thousands. Win-Win-Win in my book.

According to an article in the Jan 2010 Wired Magazine, the Obama administration has expressed an interest in pursuing Thorium. We all need to let the administration know that we all are interested in a safer, cleaner option for power.

We are due a paradigm shift in how we get electricity, this might be it. Now my question is, when is the next paradigm shift in Aviation propulsion. It has to be out there.