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Berkeley on Road to Getting Hybrids

The city is gearing up to log another entry on the ever-growing "Berkeley firsts" list. And this Earth-friendly move is aimed to save taxpayers some money. A plan to add a handful of City CarShare communal hybrid cars to the city's fleet for part-time use is gaining traction. City CarShare is the three-year-old, nonprofit program — featuring neon-green Volkswagen Beetles — to get people out of their cars by offering communal vehicles by the hour. If the City Council gives the proposal a green light next week, the city will spend up to $413,000 over the next three years, a savings of roughly $400,000, to replace 15 gas-guzzling fleet cars with up to six City CarShare hybrids. Employees on city business — planners, building inspectors, code inspectors — will check out the cars through a computerized reservation system on work days. On weeknights and on weekends the cars will be parked at City Hall and behind the police station for use by CarShare members. More communal cars theoretically means more parking spaces, fewer emissions and less gas use, City CarShare and Berkeley officials said. "People (using the service) are selling their cars, they are driving less after joining, and a […]

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DaimlerChrysler Aims To Mass-Market Hydrogen-Fueled Cars in 10 Years

SINGAPORE (AP) – Car giant DaimlerChrysler said Monday it hopes to sell pollution-free, fuel-cell cars to the public within a decade but acknowledges that making them cheap enough will be its toughest challenge. “We can expect to see a commercialization of fuel-cell cars in ten years,'' DaimlerChrysler's Head of Technology and Environmental Communications Edith Meissner said in Singapore as the company delivered five cars for road testing in the Southeast Asian city-state. Since 1994, DaimlerChrysler has invested US$1 billion in the technology, which powers vehicles with compressed hydrogen. The engines emit no pollutants as the only waste material is pure water. Prototype hydrogen-fueled vehicles typically cost US$1 million to US$2 million each, including the US$200,000 cost of making the fuel cell itself, according to industry estimates. “At the moment, the cost is the biggest challenge we face. We are sure that with the economies of scale and the development of the techniques we will reach the goal,'' she added. DaimlerChrysler is loaning five Mercedes-Benz A-class “F-Cell'' cars to companies and a government department in Singapore for two years of road testing. It did not say what each model cost. Worldwide there'll be 60 such DaimlerChrysler vehicles in cities like San […]

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Demolition of Most Dangerous Building in America Begins

DENVER, Colorado, July 16, 2004 (ENS) – On Thursday, workers began demolishing Building 771 at Rocky Flats, a former nuclear weapons production plant 16 miles northwest of Denver. Building 771 is the first plutonium process building of its size and complexity to be demolished in the United States. In 1995, the Department of Energy (DOE) concluded that Building 771 was its greatest vulnerability and the building was called the "most dangerous building in America," in media reports. "The demolition of one the most contaminated buildings in the country, once thought impossible, demonstrates the nation's commitment to accelerated cleanup and closure of Rocky Flats," said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. Rocky Flats is now classed as a DOE owned cleanup and closure site operated by Kaiser-Hill Company under an accelerated closure contract. As part of that contract, dismantlement of Building 771 is expected to take six to eight weeks, with completion scheduled for September 2004. When this historic cleanup is complete," Abraham said, "it will show that the U.S. government can clean up the legacy of the Cold War and turn the 6,000 plus acre reserve from a perceived public liability into a true public asset, a National Wildlife Refuge managed by […]

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