The article asks the question “how many people want to live near the hundreds and hundreds of nuclear power plants that would be required to fuel the nation's vehicles?” The answer may lie in liquid-salt reactors fueled with other power metals, as well as waste from existing fission reactors. The concept is that the reactors can be built in factories and trucked to neighborhood sites, so the cost would be nominal (and MUCH cheaper than traditional fission reactors). Also, no need for huge plots of land near rivers and such.
I believe the article's author may be a bit shortsighted about the energy storage part. I remember when NiCad battery packs were the only rechargables. To think that lithium packs are the ultimate ignores the number of graduate students looking at other chemistries. Also, supercapacitors anyone?
Banking of some future invention of components for batteries large enough to store and power wind or solar energy is a fool's errand. How about we wait until these futures breakthroughs happen and are proven before mandating conversion to electric cars that we won't be able to deliver on?
Experts say that even maxing out our capacity for creating wind and solar energy will result in only satisfying 25-30% of our power needs. Where is the rest of the energy coming from? For now and the foreseeable future, fossil fuels.
So for now, electric cars are essentially coal-powered cars. Because that is where the electricity currently comes from to charge their batteries. Coal.
It will take decades and decades and decades before we can switch to more electric cars or other forms of transportation, because of the battery problems alone. This is not even taking into consideration all of the fossil fuels that will be required to manufacture wind and solar equipment and the production of the electric cars themselves.
The eco-wackos are so enamored with clean energy that they don't think ahead of their noses. The unintended consequences of switching an entire nation's transportation fleet to electric cars without thinking the problem through to the end result, is criminal.
Biden is falling for this electric car thing to pander to and appease his Left wing base. Before mandating that the entire fleet of government vehicles will be electric by a certain date, maybe a little research is in order, to find out how difficult, nigh on impossible, it will be to accomplish.
my daughter got her PhD in battery chemistry. She would tell you that you're too optimistic that any battery solution will occur in the near term. The reason there is an upper limit what you can do and keep batteries safe for commecial use. Quote “The more energy you put into those chemical bonds the more volatile the bonds.”