Word: hydrogenics
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...goes according to plan, the U.S. Senate in the next few weeks will follow the House and approve the latest in a long line of national energy policies. This one incorporates a favorite initiative of President George W. Bush's--the hydrogen-powered car. In his State of the Union address in January, the President proposed "$1.2 billion in research funding so that America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles." As the President explained, his goal was "to promote energy independence ... in ways that generations before us could not have imagined...
Democrats joined euphoric Republicans in signing on to the proposal. "The supply of hydrogen is inexhaustible," Senator Byron Dorgan, North Dakota Democrat, told his colleagues. "Hydrogen is in water. You can take the energy from the wind and use the electricity in the process of electrolysis, separate the hydrogen from the oxygen and store the hydrogen and use it in vehicles. The fact is, hydrogen is ubiquitous. It is everywhere...
...time of the first energy crisis, in 1974, President Richard M. Nixon put forth Project Independence to end American reliance on foreign oil through a series of energy programs, among them "hydrogen-fueled vehicles" that could be developed "to enable a shift away from oil." Takeoff date for the new technology: 1990. Members of Congress were enthusiastic about the hydrogen car then too. "Hydrogen offers us great potential as a fuel for the future," said Representative Charles Vanik, Ohio Democrat. Representative Robert Wilson, a California Republican, was equally excited: "We can now look forward to running our automobiles on water...
...hydrogen power went nowhere then, just as it went nowhere when it was trumpeted nearly a century ago. It will probably go nowhere today, for many reasons, most notably a chronic case of short attention span among American politicians when it comes to energy policy. With great fanfare, lawmakers and Presidents--both Democrats and Republicans--announce sweeping plans to end or ease American dependence on foreign oil and find other stable sources of energy. When the headlines and television sound bites fade away, however, they scrap the programs, which then are often reintroduced to an unsuspecting public...
...quickly emerged that CIA analysts were sharply divided over the conclusion that the labs had a WMD function, and this time the transatlantic connection produced worse news: The official British intelligence inquiry found that the labs couldn't be used in a WMD program, and were intended to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons sold to Iraq by a British company in the 1980s...