My quick summary of the 3 links below:
* Boron can be a metal powder or pellet. It only burns in a very high-oxygen environment, and so oxygen tanks or miniaturised concentrators would be attached to car engines.
* With oxygen, boron is 4 times as energy dense as gasoline . It “takes a quart of boron to match the energy in a gallon of gasoline.” (Dr James Hansen, below).
* Without concentrated oxygen, boron is safe and inert to store for years, and does not corrode storage tanks or leak like hydrogen does.
* Boron is an effective energy carrier, not an energy source. Nuclear power would be the energy source that drove the ‘boron economy’.
* Boron can be recycled by melting it down and stripping the rust off. (Suburbs around a really large boron recycling plant might notice very fresh air as all the oxygen is stripped off the boron molecules!)
* Nuclear power could provide all the primary energy to recycle boron so it can be burned again and again. Your first ‘tank’ of boron would cost around a few hundred dollars, but after recycling it for a few months it will pay for itself.
* Unlike hydrogen, boron will not leak out into the atmosphere or explode.
* Boron solves the chicken and egg problem of a hydrogen economy. All it takes is one boron recycling centre in the country, and then people can mail used boron to it for recycling. It is so safe and cheap to mail that even with the cost of mail and recycling, it would still be cheaper than oil.
* Initially you would buy 2 or 3 tanks worth of boron, and then just recycle those forever.
* Eventually as the boron economy grew you would swap old for new at your local garage or shops.
* Boron is inert and only burns in a high oxygen environment. This means it is safe to store for years.
* Your car could operate as a backup power station during blackouts. This is not that big a deal here in Australia but in North America could be the difference between life and death in a snowstorm. * Nuclear power and boron would solve energy security, climate change, air pollution and associated health costs, and deliver clean driving in clean cities with a far safer fuel.
Boron to replace oil is discussed in Prescription for the Planet, a book Dr James Hansen recommends. See Chapter 5 “The fifth element” on page 155.
http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/prescr ... lanet.html
James Hansen has summarised it here. (Page
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/ ... Report.pdf
More technical specifications by Graham Cowan, who calls them ‘ash ingots’ or pellets
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/235_248.pdf