Diesel cars might be phased out.

They're only not practical yet because very basic technology is being held back because as I said, the will isn't there. Why would it be? The oil companies lose out, the government loses out (tax revenue) and the car manufacturers lose out (an electric motor has a much longer life expectancy than an internal combustion engine and all its many, many supporting systems).

 

We have one bus company around here that is running buses that are over 20 yrs old.
And I bet that goes on in a lot of places.

When you burn off soot, what chemicals do you create, bearing in mind we can only alter matter, not destroy it.
I'm thinking burning off soot is just a way of removing it from the filter and making it invisible but at the same time putting those chemicals into the air.

 

But the batteries dont.
And as you say, until the government can start taxing them its a no go, but the government cant tax them because they would get jumped on by the Greens, or even the EU.

 

ok;
CO2 is far nastier than NO2. Soot too causes disease, but is basically at its highest at idle when both types of engine are less efficient. Soot is only public enemy no.1 as it now represents a greater percentage of nasties in the much cleaner air. It is significantly lower now than it was twenty years ago.
Also, all figures are for engines at full operating temperature (max efficiency). However, a petrol engine takes twice as long (about 5 to 6 miles depending on various factors) to reach full operating temperature.
Hydrocarbons. The real nasties! So nasty that they can cause liver disease. Modern petrol engines produce about a fifth of the HCs from pre-cat days. Diesel has always been just a couple of percent of that figure.

Sorry, but they do. However, they also fail/wear out. As it is a monitored system though, most engine management systems pick it up and switch to a limp mode.

They can't if they want an MOT certificate (as of February this year).

However - I personally would not own a modern diesel. Despite the fact that they are basically cleaner it has come at the expense of reliability, higher maintenance costs and borderline ability of transmission components to handle the extreme torque. The only reason I ended up with the Smart is that it owes me naff all as it came by way of a part exchange.

 

Electric! We can barely supply enough of the stuff for our homes and factories! And if we had the capacity it will still need to be generated somehow anyway which will cause emissions. Green energy is pie in the sky until we embrace nuclear. Sorry.

 

Yup!

Yup! Rather bloody good though!

BMW and Mercs are also diesel mad. Shame the BeEmms grenade so often though!

Least of all Vauxhall!

Only the out and out exotica! Mind you, it's been a long time since a petrol powered car won the Le Mans 24hours.

 

Its about where the power is generated. One way or another, the power to make a (almost) 2 tonne object start moving, and keep moving against resistance, has to be generated somewhere. Currently it is all generated in the car. The internal combustion engine is the generator for the kinetic energy. That also means the emissions travel with the vehicle, everywhere it goes.

With electric, and some inductors under the road (this has already been proposed several times by scientists and engineers), you can transfer power to the car as it travels along. Doing that has many advantages. The most obvious being that you can get away with a much smaller battery. The battery only has to store enough charge to keep you going til the next inductive charge point (which wirelessly tops up the charge as you pass over it). It also means you can centralise the power generation. It means that you always know where the emissions are going to emerge, so you can have effective facilities in place to capture those emissions.

The down side to this, and unfortunately it is the killer, is that it requires two things. 1) Lots of new infrastructure, and 2) Some actual common sense at the top. What we have (in the UK at least) is lots of government departments that only think about their little bit of the picture, and never look at the big picture as a whole. That means for example that when planning a new power station and thinking about the emissions, nobody will actually consider that some of those emissions can be sold and put to use in a situation where those emissions are actually useful. CO2 for example is of value to fizzy drinks companies and commercial growers (I know this because one of the chemical plants I did some work at used to sell their emissions for this very purpose). Waste heat, stored in hot water and then pumped out to sea or into a cooling tower, can be pumped under houses to reduce the heating burden, as happens in parts of Germany.

The trouble is, we have a government whose strategy it is to simply throw money away, preferably to foreign companies, that will do they least they can get away with for the most money they can get, without looking at the bigger picture, and this is why Britain is, despite being 'wealthy', seriously falling behind other countries when it comes to moving with the times. Its also why, as per my original point, I maintain that the technology exists, but the will does not.

Again, that's not a technical challenge, its a challenge of political will. Most of Britain's money when it comes to energy is going to france and Russia and who knows where else, rather than actually being put to use in modernising our own infrastructure.

 

Just to clarify - Chernobyl happened because the head honcho that came in for the night ran a test that he shouldn't've done and took too many control rods out thus blowing the lid off reactor 4. Human error on that one!

Apparently we have 'hybrid' buses here, still see huge plumes of blackness every day though.

http://www.eyms.co.uk/documents/pdfupload/[77]hybrid buses - the facts publisher.pdf

 

i am rubbish with anything like this! i drive a deisel car just because thats what hubby got me. im hopeless! lol didnt even know what a warning light was on the car ooooppppps!

 

Human error plus very, very outdated design. Modern reactors have a fail safe. To bring a fission reaction under control, you insert rods made of boron into the spaces between the rods of uranium. The boron absorbs the neutrons that are flying about, so that they don't go on to smash other U235 atoms, thus stopping the reaction.

In a modern reactor, the boron rods are suspended above the uranium, so that if everything else fails, heat will destroy the power supply to the electromagnets that hold the control rods, and then once that happens, the rods (in their harness) will fall under gravity, thus stopping the reaction.

In Chernobyl, the reactor didn't work like that. That one required power to physically push the rods into place. Once the reactor overheated, the power supply to the control mechanism failed, and the heat also seized the mechanism so they were stuffed.

Fukishima is the other example (as mentioned by FC). Fukishima is built right on the coast in a part of the world that is notorious for frequent and significant (and sometimes massive) earthquakes. Even despite a tsunami smashing it open, the impact was minimal. There was talk of some radioactive sea water being detected and everyone runs around screaming. Nobody runs around screaming at the news of some of the filth that 'conventional' industry pumps into the sea ever single day of every year.

 

Try driving an ageing Volvo, notorious for their suspect dash electrics. I get a different warning light every day. I just ignore them

 

hehhehhe so i am not alone!

 

Yeah that as well, it was still his fault overall I'd say.

Tipped with graphite in Chernobyl's case, which actually made the temperature rise at first when inserted!

 

Not sure about buses, but in cars/vans there are several factors.
At idle exhaust gas velocity is low, so when the vehicle pulls away the loose particles that accumulate on the internal fittings of modern exhaust system are picked up and emitted as the exhaust gas speed suddenly multiplies.
Faulty/dirty EGR systems.
Induction leaks on the charge pressure side.
Failed/inaccurate sensors.
Cheapskate/technically ignorant owners using the wrong engine oil.
Just plain shagged out!