Hydrogen Power for All Cars In America

It started out as a link to a report that analyzed how many nuclear reactors it would take to generate enough hydrogen to power the cars in the US. Turns out the conservative high-end estimate is about 1000. There are a number of real factors that could work to bring this number down maybe to as few as 250. Of course, that many nuclear reactors are politically unpalatable regardless of any sort of technical or economic feasability. However, in the comments to the article some fine folks pointed to the existence of a type of reactor design that consumes practically all the fissile material that goes into it. Today's commercial reactors typically consume maybe 5% of the fissile material with the rest left as rather nasty waste. More on the design in the next post.