Posted on 12/01/2020 5:15:01 PM PST by george76
Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday that electricity consumption will double if the world’s car fleets are electrified, increasing the need to expand nuclear, solar, geothermal and wind energy generating sources.
Increasing the availability of sustainable energy is a major challenge as cars move from combustion engines to battery-driven electric motors, a shift which will take two decades, Musk said in a talk hosted by Berlin-based publisher Axel Springer.
There’s no unicorn energy source or free lunch. Currently, electric cars are primarily powered by coal, natural gas, and nuclear. Those are the sources we use to generate electricity, after all, according to the Energy Information Agency. Renewables are growing but still account for less than 20% of U.S. electricity.
There’s no free lunch when it comes to renewable energy source, which may not even be all that renewable. Wind and sun are free, but the means of generating power from them are not.
They require batteries, which requires extensive mining and the use of toxic chemicals.
Mining is a dirty business.
...
Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years.
...
the blades can’t easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed. That’s created an urgent search for alternatives in places that lack wide-open prairies. In the U.S., they go to the handful of landfills that accept them, in Lake Mills, Iowa; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and Casper, where they will be interred in stacks that reach 30 feet ..
Removing them and transporting them to landfills increases windmills’ energy footprint over time.
...
more electric cars will require more electric generation.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
I don’t want a Tesla to save the earth.
I want one because they haul their rear-ends in a manner that has to be experienced, rather than told about.
I also am tired of changing fluids, lubes, and the occasional replacement of a leaking gasket. It’s a waste of my time.
In a tesla, I think you have coolant (which doesn’t age as fast), brake fluid (actually not exactly sure on this one), and the differential/motor gear case.
And as noted for coolant, none of these age, because they aren’t near the searing temps of the raging gasoline fire contained in the cylinders of your car.
As for grid capacity... I don’t mine running a generator off nat gas to charge my chariot :)
I don’t own one yet. But I want one. But it requires a lot of debt or wiping out non-retirement savings. It’s on the 5 year plan, if we don’t communist over this screwed up election.
In the mean time, I still love my V8. But there is always that thought of that time in the Model S.... no shifts, no noise, no tire slip, just an insane amount of acceleration.
He might try it if he thought he could do it.
I take a long view - if we continue to learn and grow, we will need energy and someone will go out and get it.
That's if we don't blow ourselves back into the stone age, of course.
Nuclear or Nothing, the Global Warmists and enviro’s need to put up or shut up.
To be clear:
“unenriched natural U238”
should be...
“unenriched uranium metal”
Which means, they did chemical/physical processes to extract the metal from the ore.
They did not boost the amount of U235 (called enrichment).
They just used graphite to moderate the neutrons from the very small amount of neutrons generated from the natural decay of U235 atoms in the metal.
A quarter to one-half kWh per mile is in the ballpark for level roadway at 60 mph or less. A ten percent grade requires four times that power expenditure. The limitations of regenerative systems will not allow full recovery of that expenditure, while going down the other side of the hill.
The Model 3 Tesla takes one fourth the energy to move down the road of a comparable in size and weight car. The Model 3 takes 250 watt hours per mile or put in kilowatts it goes 4 miles for each kilowatt hour consumed. Gasoline the E10 that urban areas must use is 114,000 btu HHV per gallon one kilowatt hour is 3414 btus so a gallon of gas contains 33.39 kwh of energy a model 3 Tesla will travel 133.56 miles on the equivalent energy. NO COMMERCIAL ICE vehicle can touch that efficiency not a single one. Electric motors are second law of thermodynamics machines , internal combustion are third law and can NEVER approach the efficiency of a electric motor for energy conversion into physical motion. Note that the 250 watt hours per mile is gross energy usage as in from plug to charger to batteries to inverter to motor to wheels. Which means the electric motor is even more efficient taking into account the round trip to and from the battery pack sorry EVs are the future it’s only a matter of time till the cost per kwh of storage drops below $100 at that point no internal combustion engine can complete on a cost per mile at even 15+ cents per kwh retail. Tesla is at $125 and falling once they get there new Austin gigafactory open they will be dang close to $100
RBMK graphite reactors can run on natural uranium but the Doppler coefficient with natural uranium makes them dangerously unstable as they have not only a positive coolant void coefficient they also have a positive power coefficient as well. This means that as the coolant voids and that positive feed back drives Keff farther past one the increase in fuel temperature effect on the neutron Doppler coefficient is also positive as fuel temp goes up so does the Keff in a never ending feed back loop until the fuel metal melts and attains a noncritical geometry. CANDU heavy water have a slightly positive void coefficient but a negative temperature Doppler coefficient even with natural uranium. The solution for RBMK was to use 1_2% enrichment which lowers the thermal Doppler coefficient to slightly negative but this means that the fuel must be enriched and also means that harvesting weapons grade PU is no longer an option since the burnup needed to justify enrichment would taint the the PU with 240. Put simply the RBMK was the cheapest reactor possible that could use no enrichment not heavy water enrichment while using graphite and light water without a pressure vessel or containment structure and have a burnup low enough to create copious amounts of weapons grade PU
There are some overlooked issues though. The charging issue will still be a thing. It will work for most of the places I go, even the longer trips, with a enclosed (read: hard to pull fast, uphill) trailer. Though my route will have to be accurate in this case (Eastern NC has sparse charging -— though I will probably always have access to a 240V plug somewhere out there, legally, without any opposition).
But for others, there is still going to be sparse areas.
Then there is battery capacity for higher towing loads. Cost per kilowatt hour won’t help if you can’t store enough of them on board.
To get the bigger truck market (assuming the commies don’t take them from us), Tesla will have to improve the amount of charge the batteries will hold for a given weight. I don’t see people buying trailers with batteries, but I have been wrong before...
Jimmy’s push to move electrical generation to coal succeeded for three decades without complaint. Thank those 70’s oil embargoes for that move.
He also buried prospects for reprocess of nuclear fuel. Those fuel assemblies in the storage ponds still retain ninety-five percent unburned fuel content. A treasure trove awaiting use in the molten salt reactors yet to be built.
It’s been a while since I read Midnight in Chernobyl, but I think that Chernobyl was running natural metal on the night of the explosion.
But a previous experiment with RBMK had proven that natural metal should never have been a operational state in the first place (it was in the trial), as this problem had reared its head before, just not so violently.
CANDU can do it, and not even sweat... but the heavy water is PRICEY!
I wonder if good fuel is cheaper than heavy water? I don’t keep up with those markets.
Really?
This was your plan. Years into your drive to swap out ICE
cars, this is where you wind up?
Wow, this verges on illiteracy.
The article also discusses the extensive mining and chemical processing requirements to make all those batteries. He says there’s no free lunch.
How about a laser receiver on top of the electric car for an orbital power plant to fire upon and deliver a recharge. At one time this concept was floated for commercial aircraft as a means to reduce fuel consumption during cruise at high altitude. ;^)
Gee, if only we could figure out how to run them on gasoline.
Batteries are not the future.
The grid is not there.
Thorium breeds Uranium 233.
Mentioned that :)
“But U-233 works pretty well for making “Big Boom”.
And Thorium reactors make it, just like Uranium reactors make Plutonium.”
“Neighborhood power supplies are not set up to handle even half of the people having only electric vehicles.”
Yep. Equipping every home with an additional 220 volt feed and then hitting all of them at roughly the same time is going to add a hell of a lot of demand to the grid.
At night. When there’s no sun.
L
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