StarvingLion wrote:Translation: Can't afford Nuclear Reactors and EV's. So the Nukes have to go. Can't afford Shale Gas either.
Now ask asg70 what electricity generation will charge the EV's? It doesn't exist.
Is it any surprise that the eV Fanboys don't like Nuclear?
What? Today's nuclear is already cheaper than coal if you include the fact that coal kills nearly 3 million people a year, which is about 650 Chernobyl disasters (and the west NEVER built a single Chernobyl reactor — surprise surprise, not all nuclear reactors are the same!) https://tinyurl.com/pqgdd5q
This is why George Monbiot says: “….when coal goes right it kills more people than nuclear power does when it goes wrong. It kills more people every week than nuclear power has in its entire history. And that’s before we take climate change into account.”
https://tinyurl.com/93nm9sn
The health costs nearly double the cost of coal! You pay once in your electricity bill, and again in your public health bill.
https://tinyurl.com/6m2o7c5
Dr James Hansen has calculated that by displacing coal, nuclear power has already saved 1.8 million lives.
https://tinyurl.com/ydx6mxrb
HOW TO REPLACE OIL?
The transport oil market is roughly divided in half, with light vehicles using petrol (gasoline) and heavy vehicles using diesel. America's renewable labs, NREL, have done the math and concluded we could mostly replace petrol with EV's on today's grid, without building a single new power plant! Just turn all existing power plants up to full and let them run that way all night. Most light vehicles like family cars and delivery vans could be charged by today's grid! “For the United States as a whole, 84% of US cars, pickup trucks and SUVs could be supported by the existing infrastructure.” http://tinyurl.com/y6b6s7nx
Technology Review August 2013 puts it this way: "the grid has enough excess capacity to support over 150 million battery-powered cars, or about 75 percent of the cars, pickups, and SUVs on the road in the United States." http://tinyurl.com/y3qvtv5k
That's like saying we can replace a third of the total oil market without building a single new power plant — just by buying EV's.
Heavy diesel vehicles like long haul trucking and mining and harvesters are a little more problematic. They will require new nuclear power plants to separate out hydrogen and CO2 from seawater to make a synthetic diesel or 'e-diesel'. But because CO2 is 28 times more concentrated in seawater than it is in the air, they've got that price down to almost parity with today's oil prices, and that *includes* the cost of building the nuclear reactors to power the process. They can also set it up to make airline jet fuel the same way. After all, the idea came from the US Naval fleets to make fighter fuel on nuclear powered aircraft carriers out in the ocean! https://tinyurl.com/y6oq9f3m https://tinyurl.com/yytd3k7s
Dr James Hansen has a colleague at his Science Council for Global Initiatives by the name of Tom Blees. Tom makes a compelling case in his free book "Prescription for the planet" that we should just nationalise the energy market and get our governments provide cheap affordable clean electricity from nuclear, and various renewable replacements to oil from this abundant power source as well. See Chapter 9 "Cui Bono" at this link. https://tinyurl.com/yxef25veBut whatever the mix of government and private sector, one thing is clear. The sooner we start building modern safe breeder reactors that eat nuclear waste, the better.