Dung is the thing!!

Recent newspaper reports say that Sakae Shibusawa, an agriculture-engineering professor in Tokyo University has successfully extracted .042 ounces of gasoline from 3.5 ounces of cow dung by applying high pressure and heat. The new technology will be a boon for livestock breeders for disposing of large amounts of waste.

In India the annual production of cow dung is about 125 million tons. Over 1.5 million tons of gasoline can be produced from this quantity of dung! But this figure is nothing compared to the quantity of methane gas that 125 million tons of cow dung can produce!

Power from nuclear reactors makes no sense!

Arvind Kalra writes in Times of India of 24th March ’06 that India’s euphoria over our nuclear deal with the US is puzzling; that the US hasn’t built a single nuclear plant in 10 years. Most of the western European nations are phasing out nuclear power. The tide largely is against nuclear power, the world over.
Though 20 per cent of Britain’s electricity is nuclear, it has decommissioned nearly half its nuclear reactors and debates if new nuclear plants should replace ones whose life is ending.
Building nuclear plants takes 10-15 years. Nuclear electricity proves 60 per cent more costly than power from gas-fired or coal-fired plants. And even America doesn’t order new nuclear reactors, though it’s the world’s largest producer of nuclear generated electricity.
“ Nuclear energy provides 20 per cent of America’s electricity and 16 per cent of the world’s power supply. If nuclear electricity is expensive even for western nations, why is India going for it? The reason lies in a mix of state secrecy and patriotism. The economics of nuclear power is not publicly discussed in India by unspoken consent. The reason is that the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), which runs our nuclear plants, also produces our nuclear bombs. It’s considered unpatriotic to question the department’s advocacy of nuclear-generated electricity.”

For more on the subject of strategies for energy read in this blog “More thoughts on energy crisis” and “Beat the energy crisis” – click on “biogas”, “methane ” tags.