Posted on 10/05/2005 5:37:27 AM PDT by OESY
,,I suppose widespread electric vehicle use would increase electrical demand which could be met with more nuclear plants. That demand could also me met with more coal-fired generation. Nuclear is not a pre-requirement to reducing oil demand. Practical electric vehicles that can compete with the internal combustion engine are."
Sadly those kind of vehicles are not aivalable today. Recently a technologie to safely store hydrogen has been created, and as hydrogen is essentially a way of storing electricity, hydrogen vehicles harnessing this new aproach could compete with it.
Maybe there can also be created the super-battery many have awaited for long time. Or even the dream energy solution of some far away future where energy is cheap and abundant, like Mr. Fusion from the film Back to the future, hopefully it will be available in 2015 like proclaimed there, although I seriously doupt it.
At least not like depicted there, but if we can create energy cheaply from every biomass, waste from agriculture and such, we should have a lot more energy than today (I am mostly talking about fuel), or if we can make solar cells more economical than they are today or something else.
Is Nuclear energy not limited somewhat? I mean, could we run out of easily aivalable uranium? If so would it not be more vise to use it sparsely, specially for maybe other kinds of usage than today´s electricity, f.e. to run our spaceships of the future? Here I am only hypothesing, but, nuclear energy is ideal for spaceships that are for long distance traveling I beliewe, maybe something we should be thinking about in advance...
But we do use a lot of natural gas for electric generation
More nukes = less need for natural gas = lower prices for natural gas relative to oil
Cheaper natural gas = more homes switching from oil heat to gas heat
Less need for heating oil = more available diesel
If we can get the cost of electricity down via nuke, to the point where it is cost effective to heat homes via electric heat, that will free up lots of #3 heating oil, which is essentially deisel
I may be wrong, but I believe the majority of the the areas that predominately heat with fuel oil are areas without Natural Gas distribution.
If you complete the nuclear fuel cycle by recycling the PU from spent fuel (killed by Carter) and employ Breeder Reactors to enrich low grade ores, (the US Breeder program was actually killed by the Reagan administration) the supply of nuclear fuel is many hundreds of years.
They're starting to be. Hybrid gas/electric cars are becoming more common. If a household gets a hybrid car for the short-distance errands, and recharges at night, that's a lot of gas potentially saved
I don't see that happening. The total cost of electricity is a lot more than just the fuel source. T&D generally makes up about 2/3 of the total cost so even if somehow Nuke got cheaper (it is already virtually tied with coal as the cheapest baseload fuel at around 2 cents/kwh) you don't change the cost equation all that much. For it to replace liquid fuels, the cost of those liquid fuels would need to be much higher than they are now.
It's more like older homes are oil heat, and newer ones are gas heat. In my old neighborhood in NYC, we had gas for stoves, but used oil boilers for heat
Where I am now, we have a mix of oil and gas heat in the neighborhood
The break-even point goes lower if I'm using a heat pump instead of pure electric heat. This becomes an even more viable solution in the more southerly states that don't experience extremely cold winters
As far as T&D is concerned, the cost of maintaining the wires would be constant, since electric consumption for winter heating would be comparable to what is spent on summer cooling, so perhaps the electric companies could offer a volume discount to those who use electric heat in winter. It would make sense once the baseline was mostly nuke
Actually hybrid cars are not to be plugged in, as the electricity is produced from the gas run engine, and from f.e. the brakesystem. Theoretically it should be possible to plug it also in, but that would need I beliewe bigger battery, plus that today´s batteries simply ain´t good enough. But that would be a good solution where electricity is cheap and in abundance, like here in my country.
Many here are betting on the hydrogen economy but that would be very good for us here in Iceland, but I myself is increasingly loosing faith in it (except when I hear good news like this: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1482297/posts) and betting on biofuels as at least very long term intermediate step towards it. Interesting articles about it were run recently in the usually far to leftwinged Newsweek:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8769619/site/newsweek/
There they point out the neccasery of biofuels to be sold in an unsubsidised, glopally free market.
je vous en remerci pour la élucidation.
je vous en remerci pour la élucidation.
In the US we have modification kits that add battery capacity and change the software so the engine doesn't start up unless the battery is more drained than regular hybrids are set for. So if you just go on a short trip to the market and plug in, you use no gas
Ah, I should have known it was only time until someone would do something like this. But yeat I agree with the spokesman from Toyota, there needs to be a breaktrhough in battery technologie to be more viable.
But is it any good doing this now, I mean, the electricity you guys spend is after all made from unrenevable resources so it does not help the environment (if you beliewe CO2 is harmful for the environment), and I seriously doupt it to be cheaper, you guys having the gas prices so incredible cheap (and getting 1% discount from the Saudis) and good batteries exspensive and shortlived.
Maybe this could though be economically viable here in Iceland, with our ,,clean" and cheap electricity, and most trips within the main city less than 3 km long.
And the reason gas is so expensive in Europe is that it's so heavily taxed
I know, been there ;). Although I loath calling Iceland part of Europe (we are in between) we have heavy taxation on gas like the mainlanders. Recently it was though lowered considerably, because of our good center-right government that had the foresight to change the tax from proportional amount of each liter, to a fixed amount, so the soaring gas prices have not affected the people as much as otherwise. I think the prises are slighly under 50 % higher than they vere when lowest shortly before they began to get higher.
Now it is only a question if they did it because oilprises were getting lower at the time (and the fixed amount was made slightly higher than they were before the change) or because they had the foresight that oil prices would sore and people would go nuts if the government would start cashing in on higher oil prises.
But how can you say that if you would use more nuclear energy you would not have to worry about oil prizes? I thought it had been said many times here that very little of electrical production comes from oil in the US, and rather little for heating and such. We do not yeat have good enough batteries or hydrogen storage technologie to use electricity straight on cars...so I do not understand your reasoning.
We use a lot of oil in heating our homes. If we switched to nuke-electric heating, that would free up more oil for transportation
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