This is what football stadium
flyovers look like in other countries.

I live in a town that is home to one of the best college football teams in the country. Although I’m not a huge football fan, I still guess that’s kind of cool. Although sometimes I think the local university may have its priorities screwed up; whenever I look at the largest college football stadium in the country, I remember the time a few years ago when a friend of mine was tutoring one of the team’s star players, and he broke down crying in the second session, because he literally couldn’t read.

But that’s not what I really want to talk about. I want to talk about jet fighters. For at least the last two years, the university has commissioned US military jet flyovers for games. I guess it’s really invigorating to have these thunderous machines of destruction fly over the stadium at halftime. That must be why the Israeli military does nightly machbusting flyovers of Palestine. They just want to INVIGORATE the families and children that live there. But what does all this invigoration COST, I wondered. So I did a little research. It appears that a conservative estimate of the operating cost per hour of an F-16 (the jets in question) is about $3,000-$5,000 (source, PDF). So today, when those four jets “invigorate” the entire town, the base cost could easily be about $12,000-$20,000.

This made me curious about two other things. The first was, how far could a typical gas-guzzling SUV drive on the amount of fuel these jets consume? There is of course no scientific source for this kind of comparison, but we did our best. GM cleverly doesn’t have to rate the mileage of its H2 Hummer because of its GVWR, but if you average the figures here, you come up with exactly 10 miles per gallon. Likewise with the F-16′s fuel consumption, the figures are highly technical, not broadly advertised, and are influenced by things like altitude, airspeed, and whether or not the craft is in afterburner mode or not. The range of consumption though is 55,000-90,000lb/hour, so we averaged that to 72,500. One pound of standard F-16 fuel is about 6.85 gallons, so in an hour, the jet could use 10,583 gallons. That of course means the fuel the F-16 uses in one hour could take a Hummer 105,830 miles, which is about five times around the Earth, or half way to the moon. Your choice. Your results with the Toyota Prius will be a little different, you’d be able to go 582,065 miles, so you could go to the moon and BACK, and still have enough gas to drive around the Earth almost six times.

The second question was WHO THE HELL PAYS for this? We have an inquiry in with the university, and local news sources say it’s all part of a “military appreciation event”, which includes a pregame tailgate for Michigan “Gold Star” families, university staff, and student veterans. But we suspect in the end it’s your tax dollars.

The nuclear reactor catastrophe that is adding to all the other terrible tragedies in the wake of Japan’s quake and tsunami this week serves to highlight a question that hasn’t been asked much for a while: does nuclear power make sense at all? If you want a quick refresher on the topic, this Discovery “10 Pros and Cons” list seems even-handed and apolitical in its assessment. While some of the virtues of nuclear power are remarkable – i.e., the low cost and clean process during actual energy production – I’ve personally never thought they outweighed the impact of mining the necessary materials, the short term risk, or the necessity to store thousands of tons of radioactive waste annually for literally tens of thousands of years. The process only has a low environmental impact while producing the energy, and really only in comparison to the horrific waste and destruction wrought by fossil fuels. Although legislation has put on hold the use of the Yucca Mountains as America’s dumping grounds for radioactive waste, there has been no commitment to stop creating the stuff, so I don’t know what we call that. Progress? Poor planning? In any case the event in Japan will of course politicize the topic again; Joe Lieberman, for instance, didn’t miss a beat to do some bandstanding on Face The Nation, and I have to admit I experienced a little queasiness when today’s headlines commonly said things like Japan radiation unlikely to reach US , and pointed out that the only fallout here in the states would be legislative. The irony of a US-made reactor failing in Japan of all places is of course both a sad and painful irony. For insight into what actually is happening in the Japanese reactors, see this Scientific American piece. If there has been any positive news, it is that the reactor problems in Japan so far are not full meltdowns, and even if they were, the results would be nothing like the Chernobyl disaster in the eighties. By the way, if you’ve never seen the Kid of Speed website created by Elena Filatova back in 2004, you should. It captures the weird vibe of an area hundreds of miles wide that humans won’t occupy safely for decades, thanks to a single nuclear accident. And although a tremendous increase in the wildlife population around Chernobyl has occurred, mutations are in fact common. Maybe the three-eyed fish of the Simpsons cartoons aren’t so funny after all.

The only car quieter than a Rolls-Royce is
an electric Rolls-Royce. Batteries included.

If you’re the sort of driver that has been repelled by the idea of an electric car because of the stereotypical image of the tree-hugging socialist making a stop at Trader Joe’s to pick up some tofu snacks as they drive their Prius to an Obama rally, you may have to finally give up your Luddite stance and accept the future of electric. You’ve almost certainly seen the Tesla and the Fisker , two of the more remarkable electric vehicles in production. But even the more adventurous buyer with the funds available to purchase a car like that would probably balk simply due to the fact that both companies are highly speculative startup ventures. Well, things are starting to take a serious turn in the EV market, a turn that may make it hard to argue against an electric as soon as 2013. High-end carmakers were already making some bold moves in the green car market; Porsche’s hybrid Panamera is just one of several examples, and Porsche also quietly rolled out the Boxster E prototype recently. But now three major luxury carmakers – BMW, Rolls-Royce, and Mercedes-Benz – are all making serious commitments to EV’s. And not just as quirky, awkward looking concept cars. Even the combustion engine addicts over at Car & Driver gave the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG E-Cell high marks – not as an electric, but as an “actual car”. BMW is also rolling out their ActiveE, and probably the most mind-blowing development is the Rolls-Royce 102EX. When a company that embodies a commitment to perfection in engineering and owner experience in the way that Rolls does is making a commitment, you know the electric car is truly arriving. Visit ElectricLuxury.com to learn more. Or watch the introductory video below. The abundance of umlauts in CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös’ name is exceeded only by the clarity and confidence with which he expresses his vision for making the Rolls-Royce 102EX a year-long global R&D adventure. Does someone have a bib? I keep drooling as I edit the photos of this thing.