Reply To: Boron availability

[Brian H]

AaronB wrote: In my ideal world, we would shift from gasoline/diesel to ammonia (NH3). It’s carbon-free, powerful, relatively safe, and there’s already a distribution network established. There’s a guy named John Holbrook at NHThree who has developed a solid-state, reverse fuel cell for making ammonia. If you have heat and electricity and add water and air, you get ammonia and oxygen out of the other side. It just so happens that if our fusion generator works, it would produce heat and electricity. If you strap these two technologies together, you’d have an instant gas station that could produce tons of liquid fuel for very little cost.

Ammonia will burn pretty well in standard car engines, but if you had a super-efficient ammonia-burning fuel cell in your car (with a small capacitor for acceleration and regenerative braking), you could have all of the advantages of electric motors, ammonia fuel, and carbon-free power. That’s my vision anyway.

Yoiks! A small fuel spill of chemically pure ammonia would make the air unbreathable for a 100-yd diameter. A big one would clear city blocks! Mass anosmia would be the probable result. 😉

I prefer the 10X higher energy density batteries that nano-electrode and other near-term technologies promise. Electrons don’t stink!