Boy, I missed all the excitement here yesterday... Put me in the camp that says until you can have a reliable grid to prevent rolling blackouts, they shouldn't be promoting the electrification of our transportation system. All the money spent subsidizing (state and federal rebates/tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles) the electrification of the transportation system should have been utilized to improve the grid. Kind of like putting the cart in front of the horse. Horses can pull extremely well, but they don't push worth a darn.
i don't think anybody expected the technology to move so rapidly to a usable vehicle. Gotta think ahead...yes....but the old adage of if it aint broke ...don't fix it...Not enough folks think our COUNTRY's primary infrastructure is BROKE!!!!...yet. but if they could!!!
When I read "home nuclear" I got real scared. I pictured some kid street racing his Challenger (or his Tesla in "ludicrous mode") and smashing into a home nuclear plant and turning the neighborhood into a "home Chernobyl". Hippies will hippie. That's a given. If you get stoned enough, problems just work themselves out. I call it the "The Heroin Principle". I do not see us anywhere near giving up on fossil fuel powered vehicles. Not as long as those in power, and our economy, are deeply entrenched financially in oil. I wonder when the poisons in the batteries to power all this stuff will become recognized as an issue. How many will be in service before they become a perceived threat?
BP actually released a report recently how they believe oil demand might have peaked in 2019 and the oil industry may start to slowly decline over the next 30 years https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/b...p-peak-oil-demand-and-long-run-oil-prices.pdf That link is a PDF so when you click it, it will start a download.
Mark me down as in the nuclear(fission) camp(we've been 20 years away from controlled fusion for what, 60 years now?). The new passive cooling plants I've read about seem promising; the major problem with fission plants seems to be the loss of cooling pumps. Reactor waste is an issue, but France seems to deal with it. I don't think wind and solar are going to provide enough electricity, in our lifetime at least, to support a fully electric fleet. Even with battery storage and a nationwide connected grid. If they really want to get to 0 net global warming gas emissions by 2050, I see only two ways they do that: Nuclear electric plants, or commercial scale CO2 sequestration.
at the rate we're going (which is slow) I think it's more likely we'll have farms to suck c02 out of the sky
Yes. The newer, smaller fission plants dont depend on coolant pumps. Basically convection to move coolant and can sit completely self-contained without melting down even if in complete emergency shutdown. That's where my money is. Every town with a small nuke plant that has the ability to link up with others to make a grid if needed.
I'm not anti-nuclear at all (LOL that would be funny actually). The cost is one that we must reckon with. Vogtle in NE GA is hardly hippy country, and the cost overruns have hit 50%+. And even with these very favorable conditions, it's been 11 years since they got approval and it still has another 1-3 years to go. This is the norm in the nuclear plant construction business, not the exception. How to fix that... don't know. You certainly can't do it by cutting any corners. There's the small matter of waste storage as well. All spent fuel at all nuclear plants is 100% the property of the US government (non-proliferation rules set in place from the beginning). Yucca Mountain was the right place, yet here we are with all this stuff sitting about. I'd like to hear how we increase nuclear base load substantially without greatly increasing our electricity rates. Bill Gates has been a huge proponent of increasing nuclear power for nearly two decades, and even with his money behind it, they're not figuring it out. Now, take that cost and line it up against the absolute GLUT of natural gas we have. Combined-cycle gas turbine plants can be permitted, built, and brought online in under three years, and their LCOE are in the neighborhood of 1/3 of nuclear. There's my hippy BS. We should push as fast as we can on electrification. Grid modernization and transportation electrification can happen concurrently- I daresay that in a capitalist society, that's really the only way it can and will happen. It's going to take a LONG time even under the most optimistic scenarios, we should get going, and accelerate it. LOTS of jobs await.
Well said Todd, I am all for nuclear, yes the down side is the waste, no doubt. But with the increase in electric vehicles where is the increase in energy demand going to come from to keep all of the batteries charged? Solar, Wind, anyone who thinks that is the answer is only fooling themselves. We go electric in our vehicles to get rid of fossil fuel, yet we will probably have to increase our dependence on coal, oil, natural gas, fracking or whatever it takes to keep the electricity moving so we can charge those batteries. Also has anyone figured out what to do with all of those batteries once they reach end of life? Now we have another disposal problem along with the nuclear waste. You cant have it both ways. Seems like all the tree huggers don't want to face facts. Electric vehicles are cool, I want a Tesla, but I am going to be contributing to the demise of the environment by demanding more electricity. RickM
Where is the majority of the cost in building a nuclear plant? We built them in the '50s and '60s, and I never read about cost concerns. I've wondered why they are so expensive now. I like natural gas, too, at least as long as we have a lot of it, and fracking isn't banned. It heats my house during the winter. But burning natural gas still emits CO2. Natural gas electric plants aren't going to get us to 0 emissions by 2050. Solar and wind seem to increase electric rates, too. Witness Germany's Energiewende program.
