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Um righttttttttttttttt

If only that were actually the case. Currently wind and solar power production is less than 5% of the domestic production. As for nuclear, well that is a whole other can of worms that produces its own special pollution. Which still leaves most of the country's power coming from fossil fuels. And the allowable particulate and ppm's allowed to those exceed what car emmisions are allowed by factors

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91 Jetta GLI STS/DSP 111
85 Porsche 944 ASP 11
http://www.blackforestindustries.com

Doh! You're right of course. Somehow nukuler slipped my mind.

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Mike Whitney
whit32@gmail.com, 919-454-5445
V10, V8, V8t, I6, I6, V6, F4t, I4, I4, I4, I4, I2, 1, 1

Dick,

For the most part batteries are the only major component that will require regular replacement. The interval really can't be predicted. It's a factor of use and recharge. DC motors may require the brushes to be changed, whereas AC motors will not. Oil/filter changes, air filter changes would be no longer required. Standard drive train maintenance you might perform on a manual transmission vehicle could be performed if desired (but who does on a beater?). You would still have the clutch, but probably use only 2nd and 3rd gears. The mechanical brakes on the car wouldn't recieve much use because you would be braking with the motor.

Battery expense is one of the greater deterrents I encountered in my investigations regarding electric vehicles. They will represent 1/4 - 1/2 of your build budget, depending on the level of technology you invest in and performance you desire. Lead-acid batteries are the cheapest initial cost. Lithium Ion batteries are available, being the most expensive. You will get overall longer performance for your money with the Lithium Ions, but pay for it up front. I backed out on more detailed battery research since I was starting to realize the idea to be cost prohibitive.

Just as with Lead-acid battery banks, the Lithium Ion banks will require replacement, but with less frequency. So batteries must be looked at as a consumable maintenance item. There's no straight forward cost that can be applied to electric vehicle batteries because it's dependant on type and vehicle voltage (96V - 528V). I think this should be considered as an energy cost. Although battery replacement cost is subjective, it still adds to the overall energy cost, making it even longer to yield ROI.

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“I feel safer on a racetrack than I do on Houston's freeways.” - A.J. Foyt

Kevin Butler
Mobetta Autosport Spec E30 #612
2003 C5 Z06 Corvette
AFR Miata, SM2 61, '93 w/200 SC'd RWHP - soon to be resurrected
Waaaay too many other projects....

Nuclear is only a can of worms because of the same sort of irrational fears about safety that keep us from getting new autocross sites. It's as clean and safe as you can get, really.

As for fossil plants (coal and natural gas, mainly), you have to consider that they generate a lot more power per pound of CO2 and particulates released than does an automobile engine. They don't lose nearly as much of the energy of combustion to heat and noise, for instance. Current production EV's get about 4 miles/KWh. A kilowatt generated by a coal plant produces around 2.2 lbs of CO2. So, assuming a 10% transmission loss from plant to plug, you're getting 1.6 miles per pound of CO2. 1 lb. A car getting 26 mpg combined will get about 1 mile per pound of CO2 generated.

You'd still be producing less greenhouse gases even if all our electricity came from fossil fuel. When you consider that hydro, nuke, and alternative sources generate a third of our electricity while generating effectively zero CO2, you're only generating 40% of the CO2 driving an EV as driving a conventional car.

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1988 Plymouth Reliant

Not everyone shares that opinion. I don't quite think that the concerns that many people have about nuclear power is irrational. I am not totally anti-nuclear, but there continues to be items (such as long term waste storage) that need to be resolved before I personally think nuclear should become a much larger part of our national energy plan. I also think that if it becomes a priority (which it isn't today), that this can be solved.

I agree however that nuclear power it is a can of worms and that there are irrational fears that prevent us from getting new autocross sites.

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Richard Casto
1972 Porsche 914
2013 Honda Fit Sport
2015 Honda Fit EX
http://motorsport.zyyz.com
Money can't buy happiness, but somehow it's more comfortable to cry in a Porsche than a Kia.

We still must develop better, cheaper solar-to-electric conversion processes, but we have one energy source that seldom gets mentioned: Geo-thermal. Think about this:

If we can drill 3 miles deep to extract oil, we could learn to drill 10-50 miles deep to get to hot spots in the Earth's mantle. Drill a bunch of holes, pump water down, up comes enough steam to run turbines for decades. Hell, Iceland runs the whole country on geo-thermal energy. They use it to generate electricity, heat every home in the country for free and provide public mineral baths (co-ed, I'm told!!!)

In the interim, we could certainly find a way to develop solar, wind, tidal, or anti-matter power in nearly every corner of the planet to supplant our dependence on fossil OR nukes. The Enterprise runs on anti-matter, let's just teleport ol' Scotty back here to set the pilot project up (oh, I forgot, he's dead . We're all doomed!!

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Brad

Not everybody wears their seatbelts, either. Some of these folks are otherwise well-educated, rational folks who have a paralyzing fear of being trapped in a burning or sinking car. Their fear isn't entirely outside the bounds of reason--those fates befall some people every year. Nevertheless, on balance you're better off wearing your seatbelt.

So it is with nuclear power. Yes, there are risks. When you look at all the injuries, deaths, disease, and environmental contamination caused by the mining, cleaning, transport, and burning of fossil fuels, nuclear power is just about completely safe. That's not even considering the loathsome regimes oil and natural gas money funds or the possible global environmental consequences of burning so much of it.
Geothermal isn't real popular with the reactionary environmentalists for a couple of reasons. The first is that the technology is directly applicable to oil exploration, and funding geothermal puts money in the pockets of the very companies they hate. The second is that when you pump water down, and it brings some stuff up with it: heavy metals and radioisotopes. Keeping that stuff away from groundwater is tricky, and if one requires geothermal to provide the same sort of protection against introducing radioactive materials into groundwater that Yucca mountain foes want from Yucca mountain, no deep geothermal power plants will ever be built.

Iceland doesn't have to drill all that deep to get at hot spots, so they have less of a problem with pollutants. I like the technology, personally, but I'm not sure how well it scales.

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1988 Plymouth Reliant

You lost me there on that one. If anything I think it reinforces my point. You are saying that intelligent people don’t follow established logic and choose to ignore safety equipment because they are afraid it may hurt them in some other irrational way? Such as… Maybe we don’t need to worry about the “safety” aspect of Nuclear as it my “hurt” me in the wallet (i.e. if we don’t go Nuclear I might have to pay $6/gallon for gas)? So on balance wouldn't it be better to either develop another source or if you use nuclear spend the $$$ to take car of the waste problems?


I am not an anti-nuke activist (but I play one on this forum), so I don't know the numbers, but I don't doubt that when you look at the number of deaths, injuries, etc. that nuclear looks and has so far proven to be safer over the history of the technology. But, the history of nuclear power so far is extremely short over the entire expected lifespan of the waste that exists today and will be generated by plants in operation today. What I am saying is that not enough time has passed to really know if it is safe. Or better yet, we just are not really trying to make it safe tomorrow.

I will go for an extreme analogy here...

It is like trying to drive a car from hear to California. We have driven about a block and a half so far, so we say it will be smooth sailing the entire way (no problems yet!). The tank is full of gas and we have money in our pocket, but we have no plans on where to get gas along the way (we will figure it out as we go) or knowledge of the road conditions along the way. Oh, and we will die before we even cross the state line, so we have to assume that those who will continue the trip for us are going to do as good of a job as we intended (that is their problem as we are pretty sure we will make it to the state line OK. We also hope that the political and economic conditions at that time allow them do the job right.). And if something goes wrong with the car along the way, it may negatively impact a large number of people around it for a very long period of time (we don't think anything will go wrong, so stop with the negative thoughts!!).

For me it is just that the risk for nuclear is much higher as it has to all go very well for a very long time. As a species we do a crappy job of trying to plan for the future. There is very little incentive in human nature to plan for something that may affect someone generations away from us. I don't think there is going to be a nuclear accident or waste problem in my lifetime that is going to significantly affect me. But I tend to take the long view and think beyond my own lifespan when it comes to this topic.

None of this is new thinking of course and I tend to think that nuclear power is one of those polarizing issues that people are not going to change there opinions one way or the other very quickly. You can go way overboard with this as well. I think I read the other day that some European country decades ago had voted to decommission all of their nuclear power plants. Problem is they didn’t have a plan for what to use for power. Popular opinion is starting to sway back toward nuclear as they are seeing the energy crunch that they created. Again, lots of short term thinking.

My personal hope is much like Mike's in that I hope we find a way to extract more energy from the Sun. Solar cells, wind or Hydro (which ultimately is solar as well). The craziest idea I like is the one with the carbon nano tube space elevator that could be used to not only make it easy to transport items into space, but also easy to bring electricity down to Earth from giant solar arrays in orbit around the Earth. In our lifetime? Probably not, but I am glad that someone is working on it. I also hope that someone can make fusion (cold or hot) a viable solution as well.

I am also not saying that the existing dino fuel is the way for long term survival either. I am just saying that if we use the nuclear option that we have to REALLY do our best to make sure that we don't give future generations a big stinking turd to baby sit for nearly forever.

Ok, I have said what I have to say.

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Richard Casto
1972 Porsche 914
2013 Honda Fit Sport
2015 Honda Fit EX
http://motorsport.zyyz.com
Money can't buy happiness, but somehow it's more comfortable to cry in a Porsche than a Kia.

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Mike Whitney
whit32@gmail.com, 919-454-5445
V10, V8, V8t, I6, I6, V6, F4t, I4, I4, I4, I4, I2, 1, 1

Mr Fusion. Comes standard with heavily modified DeLoreans.

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“I feel safer on a racetrack than I do on Houston's freeways.” - A.J. Foyt

Kevin Butler
Mobetta Autosport Spec E30 #612
2003 C5 Z06 Corvette
AFR Miata, SM2 61, '93 w/200 SC'd RWHP - soon to be resurrected
Waaaay too many other projects....

I saw a Delorean on a car trailer on my way to Winston Friday. No Mr. Fusion, though.
If we don't understand the properties of nuclear waste, we don't understand anything. Radiochemistry and nuclear chemistry are over a century old and extremely well-understood. For instance, we can say for certain that if you take 10 grams of Plutonium 241 and sit it on a shelf for 14.4 years, you'll have 5 grams of Plutonium 241, slightly less than 5 grams of Americium 241, and trace amounts of Neptunium 237. Good thing, too, because we take that nuclear waste--Americium--and stick it in smoke detectors. You have about a fifth of a milligram in each of yours. It's got a half life of 432 years, and in the process of decaying those alpha particles and gamma rays it emits are used to check to see if there's smoke in your house.

That's the neat thing about hot radioactive waste--it doesn't stay hot for long. Radiation is only given off when it decays. Plutonium 241 is extremely hot, but if you start with 10 g, after 100 years you only have 0.08 grams.

Contrast this to the effects of dumping trillions of tons of CO2 out of the ground and into the atmosphere. We know next to nothing about the long-term effects of that, and we've only been doing that a couple of decades longer than we've been heating water by splitting atoms.
The only thing in question about nuclear waste is storage technologies, and whether they might fail after 10,000 years or 100,000 years. If we bury the waste at Yucca Mountain, the risk we face are whether in several centuries' time the ground water nearby is contaminated with heavy metals and/or nuclear waste. That waste will not cause the Sahara to take over Africa from Tanzania northward. That waste will not cause the Outer Banks or Micronesia to submerge. It won't divert the gulf stream and freeze Europe. It will not trigger algal blooms that send global temperatures back to where they were 10,000 years ago when glaciers covered the midwest. It will not cause the oceans to lose their capacity to store CO2, triggering a reversal of the sequesteration process and making our entire planet look uncomfortably like Venus for a few million years until the surviving microbes sequester it again.

All of the aforementioned bad outcomes are possible consequences of unchecked CO2 emissions, in addition to others and nothing whatsoever. How likely are they? I don't know. Nobody does. We can't even predict the destructiveness of hurricanes or figure out whether it will rain a week from now. If you're saying that the uncertainties of storing nuclear waste are enough that we should seriously reconsider the short term use of nuclear power, what does that mean for burning fossil fuels in the short term? Planning on driving to work tomorrow?

Also, if we can build a space elevator (provided carbon nanotubes don't turn out to be the next asbestos or PCB's--we know little of their effect on living organisms), nuclear waste becomes a complete nonissue because we can cheaply and safely launch it into the sun. If we can't, we'll need nuclear rockets to get off the planet.

The genie of cheap energy is out of the bottle. We need it, as we're unlikely to go back to herding yaks for a living, but fossil fuels won't stay cheap. Wind can't deliver (not cheap enough regardless of possible future technologies), hydro can't either (not enough to go around), solar and geothermal are unlikely to in the near term due to both logistics and costs.

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1988 Plymouth Reliant

Why is atomic power not on the list? Or are you considering that "not alternative"? Or would a better list be "options for energy" instead of "options for alternate energy"?

I like "nucUlar".

Anders

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Lina Racing: As Seen On Radio

I hate to use the comparison as it has been such a horrible human tragedy, but just look at the planning and money (or lack thereof) that went into the New Orleans infrastructure. Putting aside the issue of whether or not it was a smart idea to build a city in that location, there has been a lot of smart people forecasting gloom and doom for a long time. But back to the human nature thing, we just don’t want to look ahead. Why spend the money now when everything looks good now! The sun is shining what can go wrong! The problem here is that the decisions get moved away from the experts (who may very well know how to do it correctly) and gets pushed to the politicians. This is where it can go wrong. Same deal with nuclear storage.

It is the same thing with the Global Warming CO2 issue. The reason that is a problem is that in general people don’t want to pay the price now to protect the future. (Since you threw out the Global Warming CO2 issue. I will say that I totally agree with you on that one. ) And yes, I drove to work today.

So to answer your main question… No, I am not saying that we should not consider nuclear power. I am saying that we need to do as good as job as we possibly can with regards to the nuclear waste storage issue before we consider nuclear power. Have a solid approved and in the works plan (with funding) in place for storage (basically make something like Yucca Mountain a reality) before we give the go ahead to additional plants. That if we do that, then nuclear power is an option. I also didn't say that we don’t understand the problem, but that we maybe have not done as good of a job as we could. We probably COULD do it correctly. I don’t know much about Yucca Mountain, but what I have seen, sounds interesting and that it could work if done correctly. But since it always comes down to $$$, I want to know if we have put in place the correct solution or the best one that we can afford based upon today’s political and economic (mostly political) situation.

My fear is that the nuclear industry smells blood in the water. That they have been laying low for decades. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl is a distant memory for many people (Many younger people probably don’t even have a clue what either of those are anyhow.) Where we get our power is starting to become a national topic. The nuclear industry is not out to help us. They are there to make money (like everyone else and there is nothing wrong with that). I just don’t want the desperate nature of people to cause us to not be as safe as we should be. Why do you think that all of a sudden the industry is pushing for the creation of new nuclear plants? It is because they feel the time and right and that they can allay fears now that they couldn’t yesterday. That maybe potentially legitimate concerns about something like Yucca Mountain can be pushed aside or marginalized due to the political climate caused by the current real or perceived energy crisis.

As much as I sound totally anti-nuclear, we are probably closer in agreement on this issue then you think.

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Richard Casto
1972 Porsche 914
2013 Honda Fit Sport
2015 Honda Fit EX
http://motorsport.zyyz.com
Money can't buy happiness, but somehow it's more comfortable to cry in a Porsche than a Kia.

Yes, there is global warming. Because we are coming out of a frickin Ice Age ferchrissakes.

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Has no responsibility whatsoever.

I was thinking the same thing yesterday. With the existence of a space elevator still being a huge "if", the ability to take waste up and then send to the sun could work (much safer than launching large Qty via conventional rockets). It would be interesting to see how "safe" they think the trip up the elevator would be and if people would end up oppose that idea. I personally think it would be MUCH safer than long term storage on the earth.

I also have read horror stories that the collapse of a space elevator would create a large amount of local damage on the ground as the cable material came down as well as stories that say that the nonotube cable (or ribbon) would float down harmlessly and that only the elevator(s) would hit hard.

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Richard Casto
1972 Porsche 914
2013 Honda Fit Sport
2015 Honda Fit EX
http://motorsport.zyyz.com
Money can't buy happiness, but somehow it's more comfortable to cry in a Porsche than a Kia.