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Old 29-11-2019, 14:16   #526
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Re: Electric Car Economics

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I believe that blaming regulation is mostly a smokescreen - some convenient cover for not taking action against CC and for not pushing or facilitating nuclear development. Despite all such regulation and protests, it's still been relatively easy to keep increasing Australian coal exports. Not a problem there, is it?

If the US or Australia was at all serious about displacing fossil-fuel with nuclear power... it would be happening, regulations or not. Both countries are too invested in, and controlled by fossil-fuel interests.
The Indian company Adani has been trying to get approval for a new mine for about fifteen or so years now. They were blocked by serial applications to the courts and then having battled their way through these processes could not get approval from the relevant state government. A disastrous federal government election, where the parties of the left suffered a blood bath perceived to have been largely due to their anti coal position, resulted in a sudden change of heart and the approval was rapidly forthcoming.

In most of the world the biggest beneficiaries of mineral extraction are governments who, making no investment or taking any commercial risks whatsoever, impose royalties, taxes and expropriations upon the private sector, generally after the exploration risks have been suffered by the private sector. Having had a goodly portion of their revenue streams pillaged the commercial organizations then are required to pay taxes on any profits they may make. Big oil tends to take another hit in most of the world in that fuel taxes, being most readily imposed, are then levied on the products they sell.

Australia has also become a giant laboratory for the shut-them-down AGW/CC zealots because it has had a very high level of the so called "renewables" and a number of left wing state governments have allowed demolition of coal fired power stations. Each summer the power shortages grow worse as the system becomes more stressed because of the shortage of base load power caused by the shut downs.

Hopefully we will have a serious enough system collapse to where the public realizes the consequences of a zealot driven shut-down of coal fired power and punishes it's protagonists at the ballot box sufficiently to bring them to accepting a sensible transition to non coal and hydrocarbon generated power in the future.

The worse thing which could happen in the Australian context is for there to be a large take up of electric vehicles with an already over stressed generation system. However a couple of the better things would be nuclear power, which is presently against the law, and sufficient electrical storage to allow full exploitation of the high penetration of solar, a technology which Australians have taken up with great enthusiasm.
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Old 29-11-2019, 14:46   #527
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Re: Electric Car Economics

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EV’s should be massively less expensive, there isn’t even really a transmission, it can’t get any simpler, and of course there are no pollution controls and no where near the sophisticated electronic monitoring and controls an ICE engine has to have to pass emissions.
No fuel system, no exhaust system, no catalytic converters, heck the lack of a transmission alone has to save a bundle.

It’s why I keep saying when the real auto manufacturers get involved in any real way, you will see changes.

But it may be that the public will demand 6,000 lb SUV’s and the prices with all the Luxury items will keep the costs high.

Average person the best furniture they own is in the car, the best stereo is in the car etc.

For example what happened to the cheap little pickups, no one makes them anymore, why?


No pollution controls? Really? Where do you think the electrify comes from?
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Old 29-11-2019, 15:02   #528
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Re: Electric Car Economics

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In most of the world the biggest beneficiaries of mineral extraction are governments who, making no investment or taking any commercial risks whatsoever, impose royalties, taxes and expropriations upon the private sector, generally after the exploration risks have been suffered by the private sector. Having had a goodly portion of their revenue streams pillaged the commercial organizations then are required to pay taxes on any profits they may make. Big oil tends to take another hit in most of the world in that fuel taxes, being most readily imposed, are then levied on the products they sell.
Mineral extraction is the removal of a non-renewable resource. When it's gone, it's gone. So, hell yeah, the country should get a significant return from the sale of its assets.

I can't get that worked up about fossil-fuel industries only making large profits instead of stupendous profits. Nor, at this point in time, should it be a growth industry.

Quote:
Australia has also become a giant laboratory for the shut-them-down AGW/CC zealots because it has had a very high level of the so called "renewables" and a number of left wing state governments have allowed demolition of coal fired power stations. Each summer the power shortages grow worse as the system becomes more stressed because of the shortage of base load power caused by the shut downs.

Hopefully we will have a serious enough system collapse to where the public realizes the consequences of a zealot driven shut-down of coal fired power and punishes it's protagonists at the ballot box sufficiently to bring them to accepting a sensible transition to non coal and hydrocarbon generated power in the future.

The worse thing which could happen in the Australian context is for there to be a large take up of electric vehicles with an already over stressed generation system. However a couple of the better things would be nuclear power, which is presently against the law, and sufficient electrical storage to allow full exploitation of the high penetration of solar, a technology which Australians have taken up with great enthusiasm.
There may be light at the end of that tunnel...
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Old 29-11-2019, 15:07   #529
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Re: Electric Car Economics

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No pollution controls? Really? Where do you think the electrify comes from?


The vehicle has no emissions controls as none are needed. Arguing where the electricity comes for, a counter argument could be made about fracking and drilling, refining etc.
But from a vehicle’s perspective it’s irrelevant.
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Old 29-11-2019, 15:36   #530
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Electric Car Economics

Make me Emperor of the Earth and I’d not allow another Uranium reactor built, and further more I’d require them all to be dismantled within 10 years or so.
Why?
First a Uranium reactor operates by having a critical mass of uranium, if left alone it will run away and generate so much heat it will melt down or worse. So you have to regulate the reaction with control rods, but left alone it goes critical.

A thorium reactor isn’t fissil if I use the word correctly. Meaning that all the thorium in the reactor won’t do anything if left alone, to get it to go into fusion, you have to bombard it with neutrons, anything that can happen power failure, earth quake, floods, Zombie apocalypse whatever and it just stops fusion all by itself, it can’t melt down.
It also generates a very small fraction of the radiative by products and many of those are usable in medical technology etc.

But the REAL reason is that a by product of an Uranium reactor is bomb grade Plutonium, and God knows the last thing we need is little bomb grade Plutonium factories scattered all over the Earth.

Possible implications of that should be obvious
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Old 29-11-2019, 15:40   #531
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Re: Electric Car Economics

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Spectacular manner? Can you put numbers to that, and compare it to the worldwide damage caused by other energy sources?


Three Mile Island was horrible devastation, right? How many thousands of people died? How many millions of hectares of land were made uninhabitable?


And Chernobyl -- probably millions of people died, right? The whole country of Ukraine is uninhabitable, right?


Emotion vs logic.
In 1986 in north east Alabama our class conducted experiments outside measuring radiation. I can assure you the difference in radiation levels pointing towards Chernobyl (by the compass bearings) and practically any other direction were not caused by "emotion".
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Old 29-11-2019, 17:48   #532
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Re: Electric Car Economics

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No pollution controls? Really? Where do you think the electrify comes from?
There is no need for the fancy electronic fuel controls such as those which caused Volkswagon such a large problem.
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Old 29-11-2019, 17:58   #533
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Re: Electric Car Economics

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In 1986 in north east Alabama our class conducted experiments outside measuring radiation. I can assure you the difference in radiation levels pointing towards Chernobyl (by the compass bearings) and practically any other direction were not caused by "emotion".

And your point is?



Suppose you can measure it -- an entirely different question is whether it is harmful.



This kind of logic -- I can measure radiation -- eek -- we're all going to die. That is emotion. There is radiation all around us. How much of it is harmful is well known to science. Did your teacher quantify the radiation measured, and look it up against a table of harmful effects?



But another question is whether you actually measured anything from NE Alabama. I seriously doubt it. The prevailing winds in Northern Ukraine are W and SW. You couldn't measure any gamma rays from Chernobyl in NE Alabama -- the earth is in the way. The fallout blew E or NE -- the opposite direction from Alabama. None of it would land in Alabama. So what were you measuring? A heated fantasy, I guess.
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Old 29-11-2019, 18:01   #534
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Re: Electric Car Economics

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Mineral extraction is the removal of a non-renewable resource. When it's gone, it's gone. So, hell yeah, the country should get a significant return from the sale of its assets.

I can't get that worked up about fossil-fuel industries only making large profits instead of stupendous profits. Nor, at this point in time, should it be a growth industry.



There may be light at the end of that tunnel...
Nah, not really. Trees, grass, and shrubbery turn carbon dioxide back into carbon and oxygen just look upon the burning of carbon and hydrocarbons as a form of beneficial recycling and the world will appear a better place.

Swords and Plowshares.

The private sector turns their profits into investments to make more ploughshares to sell and make more profit. The governments turn the taxes into swords to slay their neighbors with. Wherein lies the true evil?

All the nuclear powers got into nuclear forging swords. What would the industry look like today and what would be the dominant technology if they had gotten into it to forge ploughshares ie. produce electricity??
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Old 29-11-2019, 18:10   #535
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Re: Electric Car Economics

Interesting story from the early days of nuclear.

A nuclear facility was commissioning their detection apparatus on the entry to the facility when it went crazy. Turned out it had been set off by a truck load of the cinder blocks being used to construct many of the buildings in the installation. Radiation from the coal powered power station they were sourcing the cinder to make the blocks from far exceeded that escaping from the nuclear facility.
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Old 29-11-2019, 18:12   #536
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Re: Electric Car Economics

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All the nuclear powers got into nuclear forging swords. What would the industry look like today and what would be the dominant technology if they had gotten into it to forge ploughshares ie. produce electricity??
Why aren't we moving faster on developing those nuclear ploughshares?
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Old 29-11-2019, 18:21   #537
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Re: Electric Car Economics

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There is no need for the fancy electronic fuel controls such as those which caused Volkswagon such a large problem.


Volkswagen, and many, many others simply just cheated, by what is known as a defeat device.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeat_device
First time that it was done to my knowledge was by GM in a Cadillac good Lord, maybe 40 yrs ago? Not being idiots they read the rules for the then new EPA testing protocol and noticed that in all the tests the HVAC system was off. So they built the car so that anytime the heater or air conditioner was on the pollution controls were off, that made the car run smoother and no rattling when going uphill and no continuing to run after being shut off.

A more modern way to cheat for Diesels is the manufacturer is allowed to disable the emissions controls to prevent damage to the engine, and they are allowed to decide under what circumstances they are allowed to turn them off, one manufacturer decided that operating at the normal operating temperature the emissions controls needed to be disabled.
I don’t know how they passed testing though.
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Old 29-11-2019, 18:23   #538
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Re: Electric Car Economics

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. . . .But the REAL reason is that a by product of an Uranium reactor is bomb grade Plutonium, and God knows the last thing we need is little bomb grade Plutonium factories scattered all over the Earth.

Possible implications of that should be obvious

This is simply false. Where did you get this idea? You cannot make a bomb from the type of plutonium which is formed in civil nuclear power plants. "Bomb grade Plutonium"? Nonsense!



"It takes about 10 kilograms of nearly pure Pu-239 to make a bomb (though the Nagasaki bomb in 1945 used less). Producing this requires 30 megawatt-years of reactor operation, with frequent fuel changes and reprocessing of the 'hot' fuel. Hence 'weapons-grade' plutonium is made in special production reactors by burning natural uranium fuel to the extent of only about 100 MWd/t (effectively three months), instead of the 45,000 MWd/t typical of LWR power reactors. Allowing the fuel to stay longer in the reactor increases the concentration of the higher isotopes of plutonium, in particular the Pu-240 isotope, as can be seen in the Table above. For weapons use, Pu-240 is considered a serious contaminant, due to higher neutron emission and higher heat production. It is not feasible to separate Pu-240 from Pu-239. The operational requirements of power reactors and plutonium production reactors are quite different, and so therefore is their design. No weapons material has ever been produced from PWR, BWR, or PHWR power reactors (98% of the worldwide fleet). An explosive device could be made from plutonium extracted from low burn-up reactor fuel (i.e. if the fuel had only been used for a short time), but any significant proportions of Pu-240 in it would make it hazardous to the bomb makers, as well as probably unreliable and unpredictable. Typical 'reactor-grade' plutonium recovered from reprocessing used power reactor fuel has about one-third non-fissile isotopes (mainly Pu-240)d."

https://world-nuclear.org/informatio...plutonium.aspx

That is not to say, that preventing the theft of nuclear fuel or waste is a trivial problem. Any of these products could be used to produce a devastating "dirty bomb" by bad actors. So as we expand the world's nuclear power base, we have to be really careful about this.


Another potential issue is that what makes reactor-grade plutonium useless as a weapon, that is, the admixture of Pu-240, is mitigated over time because the half life of Pu-240 is much shorter than that of weapons-grade Pu-239. So a nuclear waste repository of 2020 might become a "plutonium mine", by say 2220. This is certainly something to think about.
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Old 30-11-2019, 00:07   #539
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Re: Electric Car Economics

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Yeah, so I read the article and I'm still calling BS.

I get the nukes radiation issue.

I get the coal dust and CO2 issue.

But how *exactly and precisely* does a solar panel "kill" any one or any thing.

That bit has not been examined or explained.



Probably workers falling off the roofs while installing them.
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Old 30-11-2019, 01:42   #540
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Re: Electric Car Economics

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Probably workers falling off the roofs while installing them.
Or electrocution, you get enough of those things connected in series they can give you a nasty shock.
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