Electric Car Economics

[Buzzman]

Dh I think you're missing a point and labouring the wrong one re nukes failing.

It's not how *poften* it happens, but rather that it happens at all, and when it does, it does so in a spectacular manner.

Explosion, meldown, millions of hectares affected by radioactive dust, whole regions of countries uninhabitable....

Sure, we'lve learned lots since the 50's - mostly just how detrimental failed nukes can be.

Imagine if we had thousands of reactors, supplying all the power coal now does.

That 'failure rate' would unavoidably rise.

And 'we the people' don't want that, and keep voting that way whenever the question is asked.

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, all were cluster-f***s caused by humans.

That's not going to happen again...???

Probablity says otherwise, and human nature agrees.

[a64pilot]

The molten salt isn’t anything new and should not take 15 years, it’s been a long solved issue, and just changing coolant isn’t going to be ty 9u there, to get there you need a thorium based reactor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
But yes cars use pressurized water, and they fail too, often, and we have had way more than two accidents, we have had at least three that were widely publicized and many more, look to see, and that’s only what we are being told.

But coolant wise, even the Soviet’s used liquid metal in their Alpha Attach sub, lead / bismuth I think, just couldn’t let it cool though.

And we do have 15 years if that is what it takes, we have as long as it takes to bring safe nuclear on line.
That is the danger of all this running around the sky is falling rhetoric.

I don’t think it would take anywhere near 15 years myself, the Apollo program didn’t and neither did the Manhattan program.

Both molten salt and Thorium is 1960’s technology

[a64pilot]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

What massive over-regulation? What would you let them do that they are prohibited from doing now?

Best way to answer that is to say that we would have Thorium reactors now were it not for regulation, Industry wanted to change but were not allowed to.
Read this, but you can find the same answer many other sources
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the...clear-reactors

[Buzzman]

No matter what we do, in the end 'do', it requires leadership and that's what we're emphatically not getting.

The fabric merchants (deniers - see joke thread) pretend nothing's happening, like an ostrich with it's head in the sand, or a politician with their head up their cloaca...

It's like a huge game of international brinkmanship, and no-one wants to be first to blink.

I just WISH they'd get over it and move on to 'coping with it' stage.

Humans are good at 'coping with it'. That's why we have engineers.

[a64pilot]

I’m going to bed, but this gives you an idea how many nuclear accidents there have been, and I strongly suspect there have been many more unreported.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucl..._and_incidents

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Needless to say, no one here uses a three tonne pickup with an 8 liter V8 to run to the corner for a liter of milk, and that is right.

Not Finland but I've seen a surprising number of Dodge 1/2 ton trucks around Europe the last couple years. I started paying attention and most are the V8 models and yes, I'm seeing them in cities, not just out in the country.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by ssmoot

You can get a new base model Honda Ridgeline for around $28K sticker price near me (and I'd bet a few thousand cheaper after negotiation). Unlike the Rangers and S10s popular when I was younger, it has more power, more payload, more towing capacity, more interior, more cargo, better mileage, more reliability, and unlike all other less than full-size trucks I'm aware of, can carry a full sheet of plywood flat in the bed between the wheel wells.

Problem is you can get a 1/2 ton for about the same price. (F150 starts at $29k)

Started with the small trucks when younger. First 4 cyl S-15 got 28mpg and cost $6200 including taxes and everything. 2 pieces of 2x4 that fit in slots in the bed and it could carry full size plywood sheets.

The last small truck I bought got 17mpg and was almost as big as a 1/2 ton...1/2ton with a V6 can match that for mpg.

Of course, it's mostly about profit margins. A stripped out 4cyl small truck doesn't generate much profit, so little purpose in building them if it draws from selling bigger higher profit trucks.

[GordMay]

Elon Musk tweeted that there were 146,000 Cybertruck orders[*] in the first 24 hours. There were with 42% choosing dual, 41% tri and 17% single motor.
All with no advertising & no paid endorsement.
Tesla is offering three versions of the truck:
- single motor rear-wheel drive with 250 miles of range for $39,900;
- dual motor all-wheel drive with 300 miles of range for $49,900;
- and tri motor all-wheel drive with 500 miles of range for $69,900.
By Tuesday (Nov 26), he tweeted that orders were up to 250,000.
The launch comes at a time when eight American automakers are promising electric pickup trucks by 2021.[*2]
➥ @elonmusk Nov 23
➥ https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/1...ml#more-161369

*1 Customers making a “reservation” (customers are not required to put down more than a trivial amount for the car, and are under no commitment to actually order it.) for the Cybertruck will have to wait a while, before the pickup pulls into their driveways, though. Production on the single and dual-motor versions won’t begin until late 2021, while the tri-motor truck won’t roll off the assembly line until late 2022.

*2 ➥ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a...-idUSKBN1XZ1W7

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Buzzman

Dh I think you're missing a point and labouring the wrong one re nukes failing.

It's not how *poften* it happens, but rather that it happens at all, and when it does, it does so in a spectacular manner.

Explosion, meldown, millions of hectares affected by radioactive dust, whole regions of countries uninhabitable....

Sure, we'lve learned lots since the 50's - mostly just how detrimental failed nukes can be.

Imagine if we had thousands of reactors, supplying all the power coal now does.

That 'failure rate' would unavoidably rise.

And 'we the people' don't want that, and keep voting that way whenever the question is asked.

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, all were cluster-f***s caused by humans.

That's not going to happen again...???

Probablity says otherwise, and human nature agrees.

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.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

The molten salt isn’t anything new and should not take 15 years, it’s been a long solved issue, and just changing coolant isn’t going to be ty 9u there, to get there you need a thorium based reactor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
But yes cars use pressurized water, and they fail too, often, and we have had way more than two accidents, we have had at least three that were widely publicized and many more, look to see, and that’s only what we are being told.

But coolant wise, even the Soviet’s used liquid metal in their Alpha Attach sub, lead / bismuth I think, just couldn’t let it cool though.

And we do have 15 years if that is what it takes, we have as long as it takes to bring safe nuclear on line.
That is the danger of all this running around the sky is falling rhetoric.

I don’t think it would take anywhere near 15 years myself, the Apollo program didn’t and neither did the Manhattan program.

Both molten salt and Thorium is 1960’s technology

We've had two Level 7 accidents in the whole history of nuclear power. The effect of the worst one of those was less than the effect of a year of coal burning, as I said.



Three Mile Island was a Level 5 with trivial consequences, with a hysterical reaction in the media out of all proportion, which shook the nation for months afterwards.



The nuclear power industry achieved an extremely high level of safety right out of the box, despite totally new and unfamiliar technology. I think it's unprecedented. Just remember the boiler explosions when steam power was new, as one small example.


Liquid salt is fine, but the best is the enemy of the good and no reason to hesitate rolling out the next generation of pressurized water reactors, which are two orders of magnitude safer than the last generation of reactors, which were already extraordinarily safe. Every new nuclear power plant saves lives, stops immense amounts of pollution, and slows down global warming. I agree with you incidentally about global warming hysteria -- another case of people giving themselves over to emotion and refusing to be logical and systematic about policy decisions. But that doesn't mean that we should be doing nothing -- we should calmly and systematically but decisively eliminate our carbon emissions. And for a bunch of reasons besides global warming we need to transition off of fossil fuels pretty decisively now that we know the way how to do it which will not cripple the economy.



Why do you think 15 years is a long time to design the next generation after that? You've been involved in design and certification of airplanes -- you have an inkling of the engineering work involved. It takes me a couple of years of intense work involving scores of engineers just to design one biggish building; car manufacturers spend 5 to 10 years designing a new car platform. This is a whole new technology, and safety is approached with extremely deep engineering work, probabalistic risk analysis, etc etc etc. Then you have to develop the whole supply chain. It is an immense amount of work to take such a device from a demonstration prototype to production. Of course it takes a couple of decades.

[Dockhead]

Here is a NASA study on the number of deaths which could be prevented by replacing coal and gas fired power plants with nuclear:


https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/co...nuclear-power/


This is the number of deaths which have been prevented just by the old technology nuclear power plants we already have, as calculated by NASA:

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

Best way to answer that is to say that we would have Thorium reactors now were it not for regulation, Industry wanted to change but were not allowed to.
Read this, but you can find the same answer many other sources
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the...clear-reactors

Well, the article said "precedent" and politics, not regulation.

Yes, there has been 'green' opposition to nuclear, there is a lot of red tape to build reactors (and there should be), but I'm surprised you small gummint folk seem to be missing perhaps the most important impediment in the US: government is pretty much captured by the massive fossil-fuel industry. Nuclear energy research requires government support and involvement. It's far easier to just greenlight another nat. gas generator.

I have absolutely no doubt that if the US government decided that climate change was serious and more nuclear energy was necessary to displace fossil fuels, research would proceed at a rapid pace, better and safer reactors would be designed and built, the nuclear waste storage issue would be better addressed.

Ask yourself why this isn't happening.

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

What massive over-regulation? What would you let them do that they are prohibited from doing now?

Nuclear will always be a partnership between government and private industry. When there's that much at stake, and the waste product is a 10,000 year commitment... you don't want your nuclear provider in the hands of an entity that could go bankrupt.

A fine example of what happens when you allow over regulation is the nuclear waste repository in the US.

This project was supposed to provide for secure long term storage of persistent nuclear waste in the United States rather than the multitude of undefined status on site stores which now exist. However it has never made it past the approval stage.

What we have discovered in Australia is that as soon as you start writing regulations and bringing them into law you open the doors to all sorts of activists to take the approvals process out of the control of the technically competent and place it into the hands of activists and the legal industry.

When this occurs, rather than approval being a matter of step by step resolution of technical issues it becomes a political process and subject to the political whims of the time.

In Australia projects which decades ago would only have to overcome "red tape" regulation now are obliged to overcome "black tape" via the native title laws and "green tape" vie the environmental laws. The scope for mischief in the expansion of the regulatory process has been enormously increased and taken out of the hands of the technically competent and largely put under the control of lawyers, and whilst lawyers do an enormous amount of good work in the advancement of our societies they are part of the body politic with it's slow, expensive and cumbersome processes.

My own experience with regulation is that it is more often the shield of the incompetent in allowing them to avoid accountability and effective decision making rather than the supporter of the competent in making sound decisions.

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

Well, the article said "precedent" and politics, not regulation.

Yes, there has been 'green' opposition to nuclear, there is a lot of red tape to build reactors (and there should be), but I'm surprised you small gummint folk seem to be missing perhaps the most important impediment in the US: government is pretty much captured by the massive fossil-fuel industry. Nuclear energy research requires government support and involvement. It's far easier to just greenlight another nat. gas generator.

I have absolutely no doubt that if the US government decided that climate change was serious and more nuclear energy was necessary to displace fossil fuels, research would proceed at a rapid pace, better and safer reactors would be designed and built, the nuclear waste storage issue would be better addressed.


Ask yourself why this isn't happening.

The design phase of nuclear power development is happening and there are a plethora of R&D projects being carried out by the private sector however, largely because of the commercial risk dictated by the approvals process it is more likely that these projects will be strangled at birth and the US eventually be obliged to buy the nuclear technology it largely originated back from the Chinese.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

What we have discovered in Australia is that as soon as you start writing regulations and bringing them into law you open the doors to all sorts of activists to take the approvals process out of the control of the technically competent and place it into the hands of activists and the legal industry.

When this occurs, rather than approval being a matter of step by step resolution of technical issues it becomes a political process and subject to the political whims of the time.

In Australia projects which decades ago would only have to overcome "red tape" regulation now are obliged to overcome "black tape" via the native title laws and "green tape" vie the environmental laws. The scope for mischief in the expansion of the regulatory process has been enormously increased and taken out of the hands of the technically competent and largely put under the control of lawyers, and whilst lawyers do an enormous amount of good work in the advancement of our societies they are part of the body politic with it's slow, expensive and cumbersome processes.

My own experience with regulation is that it is more often the shield of the incompetent in allowing them to avoid accountability and effective decision making rather than the supporter of the competent in making sound decisions.

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.