Hydrogen under pressure is too low-density to be useful, and liquid hydrogen has a worse energy density by volume than petrol/gas apart from its difficulty of storage (–253 °C / -423 °F).
So there is still much development, but if one looks at America's consumption of kWh in vehicle fuel, they are going to need LOTS of generation of power in some form (which HAS to be nuclear just by numbers) to power vehicles alone in the future. This will reduce greenhouse gases hugely.
The pebble-bed reactor system is a joint development between Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, the U.K. and the U.S. I think we are doing the actual "pebbles" while others do the rest of the reactor. Presuming this all works (and the signs are good) we will all share in the benefit. And if the fuel-cell works out oil will be used for lubricating only and the roads will be quiet.
The biggest deposits of uranium in the world are in Canada. Others are in Australia and South Africa and Russia and a few elsewhere.
The other big factor in favor of the PB reactor is the exit temperature of the gas at 900C (pressurized-water reactors work at 300C) which can be used directly in many industrial processes like making hydrogen from water or other chemical reactions so saving the very inefficient (40%) generation of electricity or the very polluting coal-burning-for-heating.
A hydrogen-from-steam fuel-cell car would have approx 80+% overall system efficiency compared to today's best diesel engines with some 50% efficiency (and if you include the mining and transport and cracking of crude oil in the equation this is nearer 30%). Also the electric-car-from reactor-steam is a much simpler (albeit much more hi-tech) end-to-end process. Again one would have to figure in mining of uranium etc, but because of the high energy-density of nuclear energy generation, this would be lower than that of any other energy method.
When I first saw the structure of the pebble-bed (PB) reactor I felt that at last this was a real solution to the basic problems of existing reactors.
(Don't forget that CANDU, the Canadian heavy water reactors which worked on the same reaction chain as the PB but with unenriched uranium) worked absolutely reliably for many years on the shores of Lake Ontario. Their reliability was their downfall - they never garnered any publicity. But it is the next-best proven reactor to PB. )
See Scientific American Jan 2002 ( http://www.sciamdigital.com) for some good articles and comparisons between different systems. Note that there are many more than South African interests in the PB reactor (of course our propaganda suggests we did it all) which is very favorable for the outcome. And there are competitor systems which also bodes well for the technology.
Notice that the "pebbles" have pinhead chunks of mildly enriched uranium distributed in a graphite matrix coated in carbon and silicon-carbide ceramic. And that dummy pebbles (no uranium) are distributed in the mix to dilute the power as required.
I live in South Africa where we (probably) had a nuclear bomb in the 1980s and may have tested one on a small southern island (much disinformation). We gave all that up in 1994.
Now we have invented/developed the pebble-bed nuclear reactor where each billiard-ball-sized "pellet" of fuel is in its own ceramic container which is quite tough enough to contain the radioactive waste when the fuel is finally spent. And spent fuel is not hugely radioactive.
It is also inherently safe - by clever choice of materials as it gets hotter the nuclear reaction slows and thus a meltdown literally cannot happen. Rumor has it that the Chinese turned off all cooling into a 160MW reactor and it just sat there very hot. Extracting the fuel from such a faulty reactor wouldn't be very difficult because the un-melted "billiard-balls" can still be handled without scary danger. Terrorist action might result in lots of ceramic balls all over the place, but automatically mostly contained and distributed they are not very dangerous. And extracting anything nasty from the spent fuel is very difficult.
It makes enormous sense to build power-station in the middle of cities - all the inherent waste heat can be used to heat buildings almost for free thus making the whole system very efficient.
It appears that the pebble-bed reactor will be manufactured in kits making them very cheap and by combining several, as much power as you need can be had.
I have an HP pavillion ZE5600 (although I don't think that matters)
My keyboards stopped working under windows. There is no hardware problem because both the internal and external keyboards work in the BIOS edit and the windows CD boot disk for every key.
But as soon as windows loads, the keyboards both fail. The internal touch-pad and the external mouse both work.
The System/Device Manager shows a yellow "!" and the statement
"A driver (service) for this device has been disabled. An alternate driver may be providing this functionality (code 32)"
I have fiddled with the services and I might have inadvertently turned off something, but I have turned on everything again and it still doesn't work.
My question is - which driver/service provides the functionality and how can I fix this?
