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WSQT radio 87.9 in DC
Last Friday, protestors from DAWN and the Hirshima/nagasaki peace committee held their annual Hiroshima remembrance at the nuclear power promoting sHell hydrogen station on Benning Road in Anacostia, the poorest part of DC
We were asked by River Terrace residents to do something about this plant, which had been refused permission to locate downtown on the rounds that it was "too dangerous" to put anywhere near the White house. Yet it's considered safe for the residents of River Terrace, who already put up with disease from the coal burning PEPCO plant across the street from the sHell station.
I doubt that many of the River Terrace residents can afford to run big central air conditioning systems to keep their buildings really cool, but when it gets hot and all those condos and K st ofice buildigns are like walk in refrigerators, all the residents of River Terrace got to show for it is the heat from PEPCO's cooling towers and the coal smoke form their stacks.
The first thing on the minds of many River Terrace residents when they ehard of this project was the Hindenburg explosion, and they were not pleased about being guinea pigs for a station whose hydrogen their cars will probably NEVER use, given tha thydrogen cars cost over $100,000.
In addition, Bush plans to produce hydrogen with a massive expansion of nuclear power-the source of plutonium for all those nuclear bombs. It could be done with solar instead, but sHell's hydrogen comes from either coal or nuclear electricity.
Beyond that, the energy used to create the H2 greatly exceeds the energy you get back, so a better use of solar electricity would be to displace electicity from coal rather than gasoline.
Only when all the coal plants are shut down, or oil gets so expensive solar H2 is cheaper should this conversion be contemplated. Its main competitors would be methane from sewage/garbage in motorcycles or high performance cars, and newer generations of rewchargeable batteries competing with fuel cell cars.
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