hydrogen updateFollow

It's not that easy nor is it solely the blame of public perception. A nuclear power plant requires much more overhead than a coal or natural gas plant. It requires much tighter security. It has nasty waste management problems. It has many more risks associated with it which, while remote, are still potentially much more catastrophic than that of "conventional" methods of power generation.

And, for all that, coal and natural gas are still relatively cheap. Coal costs the same per kilowatt hour and it's cheaper and quicker to build a coal plant and it lacks the social baggage. Gas turbines are cheaper and quicker to build as well and the U.S. has large natural gas reserves with recent cost spikes driven by business and regulation issues rather than supply issues. Until there's massive government incentive to build a nuclear plant, massive government restrictions on fossil fuels and carbon emissions in power generation or other sources become prohibitively expensive, there's just no reason for power companies to bother. It goes way beyond angry Greenpeace protesters with signs.

You made a sock for that??

Sock or not, it's a valid point. Yes. Of course I realize the advantages. It's certainly easier to manage pollution at a single site then a thousand different sources (cars and such). But it's still a *lot* of pollution. I don't think most people realize just how much pollution in our country comes from industry and not cars. We think about cars because that's what we see directly. But those larger industrial sources (and power generation is one of the biggies) are incredibly significant in terms of pollution generation.


I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that if our goal is truely about pollution prevention and ending/reducing reliance on diminishing non-renewable sources of energy, it doesn't buy us much to go from a system where we are currently sharing the load across multiple sources (oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear), and simply reduce one and take up the slack in another. Sure. We can reduce our reliance on *oil*, but then we're more reliant on coal.


And yeah. I'm aware of the overhead costs involved with nuclear plants. However, over the lifetime of the plant, the cost per energy is much lower then any other source of power, even taking into account the increased security and waste disposal issues.

gbaji, you are one of the few who thinks b4 u tuipe; and I thank you for that, a question if you wil?

Now I am no business major, but someone chew on this idea:

The government could auction the privilege to fit homes with these "basic needs" (after someone defines what they are) among the first 5 companies to step forward with a concrete plan showing that they could fit the homes efficiently. Since money is just as much a government resource as manpower, let the government subsidize the project heavily.

Now, the company that wins this "auction" gets to charge its own rate for fitting each house, BUT: the government should place some sort of percentage-profit cap (socialismwhat?) on this company, slightly above their projected percentage-profit cap for the next X years (however long it takes the company to carry out its fitting plan).

This seems to solve some major roadblocks. First, although taxes would reflect government spending on this project, some of the price burden would be shouldered by the consumers in a market setting; i.e. paying the extra bucks that the company charges for the fitting. The benefit, though, is that I imagine the consumers will actually come out ahead because they wouldn't be paying tax dollars that represent government waste / inefficiency.

That brings up the second problem this solution solves, that of governmnet responsibility. The government seems to do better overseeing others' work than overseeing their own. Also, the potential for profit (over and above their projected profit without the government contract) should keep the company in line with quality standards.

Someone else handle the social questions. Also, I'll leave the energy debate for Jophiel and gbaji to sort out; I'm in above my head already.

You realize that it requires energy to get the hydrogen seperated from the oxygen in water, right? Less emmisions from your vehicle, more emmissions from your local coal plant.

Not sure about coal. But we've got about 3 times the reserves in terms of "time to run out based on current usage" for natural gas then we do for oil. So. Let's ignore coal and assume we're going to use gas for the moment. If we assume say a 20% increase in electricity required nationwide in order to provide power to electric cars in order to eliminate gasoline powered cars, we could cover that by doubling the current usage rate of natural gas. However, realize that this now puts the "rate of usage of reserves" much closer to parity. Also, we're currently already comsuming more natural gas then we produce, so we're importing it. Politically, what's the difference between reliance on foreign oil versus reliance on foreign natural gas? Not a whole lot.

I agree that this would improve things from an ecological impact perspective, so that's not totally bad. However, as I pointed out earlier, this may or may not significantly reduce the total numbers of barrels of crude that we import and consume. Since crude oil is multi-use, by addressing only the gasoline used by vehicles in the nation, we can only possibly reduce our overall oil consumption down to the next highest thing. Again. I don't know what that is, or how much of a reduction that represents, but it's something to be aware of when looking at the value of switching to that methodology.





Ok. But if you read that site, it mentioned that there are several factors that make the cost of the nuclear power higher then it really is. As the author points out, it takes longer to build and bring online a nuclear power plant. So initial cost of construction will appear more expensive due to inflation values. Also, given the specifics of the time frame during which we built nuclear power plants in the US, there's a couple of unique effects that exagerate this factor. All nuclear plants that were licenced prior to the 3 mile island incident, but had not been finished yet (due to the aforementioned longer time to build and bring online) were delayed for quite some time, and had to make changes to their plant designs. This also happened to occur during a period of some of the worst inflation rates in US history (so double damage in this case). These factors can (and do) significnatly skew the total "real" relative cost.

The raw cost of fuel to power output is roughly half as much for a nuclear plant compared to a coal plant. That's what I was initially looking at. The overhead costs for a nuclear plant are higher then for coal, but not *that much* higher. Not if we were operating in a normal environment and were actually building the things regularly. You're essentially looking at a comparison where one of the items recieved a significant one-time increase in cost that doesn't make for a fair comparison.

As you pointed out, France makes heavy use of nuclear power. A better comparison would be to figure out how much it costs *them* to run and maintain their nuclear power infrastructure in relation to us running a coal infrastructure. That should represent a better "best case" cost for both systems.



Oh. I'm not disputing that. There's definately an economic rationale for going with the cheaper, easier, and already available solution. But if we're assuming we should just do that, then the entire issue of switching to hydrogen powered vehicles (or some other alternative fueled vehicle) is moot, right?


Doesn't the entire point of this thread assume that we're looking for the "best" long term solution, and not just the one that's most economically feasible right now? The same factors that are holding back things like fuel cells are those that are holding back nuclear power. It's currently easier and cheaper for us to just keep doing it the way we've been doing it. My point was that the two are related in that way. Both are similar issues with similar solutions. Both require more up front costs. However, I guess my main issue specifically in this case is that we've got all these guys pushing and pushing for alternative fuels, which requires that we spend money figuring out how to make them work, then spend more money on infrastructure to suport them, then spend more time and money implementing them nationwide. Comparatively, nuclear power is already a known commodity. It's already being used around the world. It has proven cost benefits. We don't need to research anything at all. And it's a very very obvious way to produce the electrical power needed to power virtually every single one of the alternatives to oil that are on the table right now.


When you look at it as a whole system, you almost have to link the two in some way. If the goal is to reduce the relative rate of consumption of non-renewable fuels, nuclear power is the *only* viable long term solution we have available to us. While I agree that it's still cheaper and easier for us to generate power in other ways, I'm talking about the whole "what if" argument. Well, *if* we're looking at better and longer term solutions, and *if* our goal is to reduce dependancy on foreign oil and non-renewable energy sources in general, then doesn't a discussion of nuclear powers uses come into play?