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'Electric Buses Now Cheaper Than Their Diesel or CNG Counterpart, Could Dominate the Market Within 10 Years' (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Transit vehicles today are mostly powered by gasoline, diesel, and CNG, while batteries only represent about 1 percent of the market. It is currently a small part of the industry, but it's also the fastest growing fuel source in the sector and it's starting to become highly competitive. Electric bus maker Proterra is ramping up production and currently claims to be cheaper than diesel and CNG. It leads CEO Ryan Popple to make a bold prediction that battery-powered buses will dominate the transit bus market within 10 years. More specifically, he says that the majority of new bus sales will be electric by 2025 and all new bus sales to transit agencies will be electric by 2030. Proterra has so far only delivered a few hundred all-electric buses, but they have been announcing several major deals lately, like 73 buses from King County's Metro Transit, that seem to indicate there's a shift in the transit industry.
Too much gets said about how great electrically powered vehicles are, but they're only zero emission at point o suse. Not enough gets said about where the electricity to charge those batteries comes from - unless it's wind/solar/wave, then it's actually quite a lot of emissions in the overall system.
As a local boy, King County (Seattle, WA) makes sense for this. The downtown bus routes have overhead wiring. The city already has a vast network of electric buses running, so adding battery operated buses to transition on/off the connected wired network makes sense. They're probably one of the easiest metros to make such a transition.
This isn't possible. God simply will not allow electric-powered vehicles to gain that market share. Everyone knows Jesus wants humanity burning fossil fuels, the safe energy that He would never allow to harm us.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Electric scooters and cars, and now busses, are very quiet. Great, until you a walk in front of one while looking down at your phone, or talking with someone.
Will they add an engine sound?
Buses are communist already and now you want to make them run on sunshine? Stupid libs!
Of course electric busses are cheaper. So are electric taxis and other high mileage commercial vehicles. Busses are an even more obvious target for electrification because they are big enough to encompass large battery packs, follow predictable routes and timetables, tend to taxed heavily due to creating a lot of pollution, and cost a lot to start with so the extra for a battery pack is a lower proportion of the overall price.
China is really leading the way here, on track for near 100% EV bus sales by 2020.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Sorry to be daft, but shouldn't you describe this acronym at least once in the posted article?
I'm always dubious of claims like this. There's an XKCD out there conveying exactly why we shouldn't put much stock into this CEO.
However, I will say that I am deeply impressed with the electric buses that run off of an overhead catenary wire. Cities should seriously look into electrifying heavily used bus routes. Easy way to save fuel cash and cut pollution down too.
I can't imagine the batteries can last all day, do they have swappable battery packs?
Steve Bannon puts electric bus manufacturers on National Security Council drone strike list.
Going from one electric bus to two electric buses doubles the market share.
Really? I know a good size brand new diesel engine can cost upwards of $50,000, but the rest of the bus remains around the same price. This bus includes 660 kWh of batteries, giving 350 miles of range. Last I checked, $750 was the going price per kWh of Lithium Ion batteries. That's $495,000 in batteries alone.
Perhaps they're including long term use of fuel costs, in which case it might be cheaper somewhere. Here in Ontario that 660 kWh would cost $100 - $200 (depending on when they charge the buses). Propane sells at 46 cents a litre here, and an LPG bus gets about 4 mpg... or $152 for a 350 mile fillup. I hear electricity costs even more in California and some other US states.
Sooooo... how are they figuring on cheaper? I want to see the numbers.
With how global infrastructure & battery tech these days, there is NO EXCUSE to doubt we will be 100% clean energy in a matter of a few years. There are a lot of scholarly papers out there to prove my point. Go out, exercise your brain, do some research. Our great world will be clean of nasty smoggy pollutants, and Renewable Energy will be king unless Donald Trump's collusions with the oil producing Russians breaks the great things we have going for ourselves.
Spend less money building walls and more money employing undocumented immigrants building solar walls to give them a start, get where Im going with this?
Busses drive all day long every day. When are they supposed to recharge the batteries? At night? Are they going to lug around enough battery to keep a big heavy bus running all day long on its stop and go route? Even with regenerative breaking that's a huge ask for current and near term foreseeable battery technology.
I can't see cities jumping on the idea of busses that have to come back to the depot to be swapped out every 4 hours. It's also not clear to me how a vehicle carrying literally tons of high capacity batteries will be cheaper than a diesel/CNG vehicle of similar design.
I read the internet for the articles.
It's well known for homes that electrical heat is the most expensive form of heat, by far. Cars have relatively small cabins but even in places like Finland they add (aftermarket?) kerosene heaters in the engine compartment so the driver doesn't kill the battery range in the cold heating himself. Otoh, heat is just a excess byproduct in a normal engine.
How're these buses going to do it?
They have been tried. The experiment failed miserably. This was typically 2 or 3 years ago. Now, I know technology improves but not that fast. It's going to be another 10 years at least before reality catches up to marketing hype.
Bullshit. Electric busses do not have the range necessary to replace gas or diesel, except on very short routes. That's why the tree-huggers in Los Angeles are only buying a few, for selected short routes. Battery technology is just not there. 185 pounds of gasoline (30 US gallons) will take my work van about 570 miles (at 65 miles per hour), and can be "recharged" in less than 10 minutes. Make a 185 pound battery that will go the same distance, at the same speed, and "recharge" in the same time; THEN you've got something. I know, I know, they're working on it. Some people have been working on anti-gravity propulsion and perpetual motion for a long time, too. With as much success.
Someone needs to google "fuel source"
batteries going to come from? Metals are actually rarer than oil and gas and mining them is environmentally way more destructive than oil drilling. Lithium is going to run out way before coal. How are electric vehicle fleets that burn through our lithium reserves at 5000% the current rate going to be sustainable? Anyone have any stats on this?
I had to look it up, thought I'd post it here for anyone else who was wondering what the heck CNG is.
I have seen the mess of cables necessary to support electric trolleys in Seattle and elsewhere. With batteries, you could reduce the overhead wiring to straight streets and above bus stops,where it is cheap to install and power, allowing charging during normal operation. At stops, the bus stops for a while to take on and let off passengers, and buses have stops for a few minutes at the beginning and end of routs at terminals to allow the drivers to get up and use the facilities. All are good opportunities for high rate charging.
Some buses run on batteries, but I've seen several systems now for buses that get power from overhead lines (similar to trains). The summary seems to be overlooking these vehicles.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Too much gets said about how great electrically powered vehicles are, but they're only zero emission at point o suse.
And what is your point? Electric vehicles can be powered by both/either fossil fuels or non-emitting sources of power. Nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, etc are all potential sources of generation, none of which emit substantial carbon during normal operation. Roughly 1/3 of power in the US comes from non-fossil fuel sources so right off the bat your emissions drop by up to 1/3 per vehicle. And it's a lot easier to control emissions from 1 power plant than millions of little engines. Electric vehicles give you a choice of power sources and make it easier to control your pollution. Internal combustion vehicles do not.
Due to efficiencies of scale the worst coal power plants to EV systems are still likely to be twice a pollutant efficient as a ICE vehicle.
Citation needed. That also isn't a particularly meaningful comparison since only about 1/3 of US power comes from coal. It's quite possible to power an EV entirely with non-fossil fuel sources.
Yes I am using hyperbole and I would welcome someone with enough time to disprove me.
No thanks. You made the claim. Cite your source and prove your case. Don't ask us to do your homework for you.
Public transport and electric vehicles are un-American and socialist.
I'll drive my gas fuelled freedom truck!
I can't imagine the batteries can last all day, do they have swappable battery packs?
They could be swappable. However they also are big enough to have very large battery packs which should last a good long time presuming the power to weight ratio make sense. Also remember that electric does not necessarily mean battery powered. You can draw power from a tap like many light rail systems do and it's still electric.
Never forget the General Motors streetcar conspiracy
Don't let history repeat itself.
As a frequent pedestrian and also motorcyclist, I really hope this catches on, will beat choking on diesel fumes whenever a bus goes by, or am stopped behind one.
So why are coal powered buses and cars so popular with the environmental crowd. I dont get it.
I wish the article had a little more analysis and technical detail. Anyone know what drives the competitiveness of electric buses vs other vehicles? What technology changes are changing this cost equation and how do they impact other vehicle markets?
Why are buses more competitive but cars aren't?
Is this about the ability to recapture energy when braking on electric vehicles? For buses used in cities stopping regularly, I could see this being a big deal.
Do form factor differences allowing better engineering decisions?
Does the high usage of buses make the fuel cost difference more dominant in the equation, making up for the higher capital costs? Would that mean that electric vehicles will come to dominate the taxi market too (until the taxi market is overwhelmed by self-driving vehicles)?
I am not a green Nazi.
However IMHO school buses should be hybrids or electric. The kids are standing at a bus stop when the bus pulls up in a cloud of gas.
Then when it pulls away, the kids, waiting for the next bus, get gassed.
Putting a bunch of batteries in a little vehicle may make a BIG mileage number for someone's ego, but does not make cents.
Adding $10k to go from 40mph to 50mph does not pay off for years. and it raised the price of an econo box by a third.
Add $10k of batteries to a school bus it is a small percentage of cost and going from 8 to 9 mpg on a vehicle that goes 100k miles a year, pays off quick.
BAM 2 good reasons, the left and the right can agree on.
re-introduction of nuclear power, in the form of redesigned, safer fission reactors, is also something we need to embrace, rather than succumbing to the 'nuclear boogieman' of the past.
You talk about human nature wanting personal vehicles and then take exactly the opposite argument here. Human nature doesn't change just because its convenient for your argument. People are afraid of nuclear fission whether or not those fears are justified. That is human nature and it is unlikely to change. And their fears are not without some rational basis in many cases. The problem with fission as a power source is simply that when it goes wrong it can go REALLY wrong. Given that humans are imperfect sooner or later you are going to have a major catastrophe if we rely on nuclear fission. We've already had two good sized disaster and they are unlikely to be the last. There has been no breakthrough that eliminates the problems and risks associated with it. Are modern reactors safer? Probably. Does it matter? Not really. Should we use more fission? Perhaps but it probably won't happen.
I think fossil fuels are a clear and present danger to us as a species but thinking that we are just going to switch over to fission to replace fossil fuels is mostly just wishful thinking. Nuclear fission simply has become to big of a boogey man and a political hot potato to be a realistic alternative any time soon.
Power plants have been switching to cheap natural gas for years now - even when they are not legally required to do so. It's all about cutting costs - regardless of the lies told by Mitch McConnell and other Republicans that say there is a "war on coal."
Power is mostly natural gas in the USA now - thanks to mostly fracking. And as China continues with her breakthroughs in solar, we'll be seeing even more of that in the future. Thank the gods for that! But due to our shortsightedness and resistance from the uninformed and ignorant half of our electorate, China and the rest of the World is leading the World into the future; while we the USA sit around and bicker with people who insist on believing the lies of people who are heavily invested in old outdated technologies and bribe Republicans to convince their moronic base that they are right.
EVs are the future and so is green energy It's going to happen and all the global climate change deniers, sketpics, conservatives, etc... are just irrelevant.
Green energy and renewables are better, more efficient, cleaner, and will allow for the economic growth that we desperately need.
Fossil fuels are dirty, old, inefficient, and obsolete. Besides, we'll be needing them for the raw materials for polymers and whatnot.
It's simple economics.
As is usually the case, conservatives are on the wrong side of progress into the future. They want to keep things the same but that is an impossibility. Life is change and therefore will always be at odds with conservative values.
Ten years? Just in time for the return of disco, flying cars, a cure for Alzheimer's and unlimited free nuclear power.
Lithium is more common in Earth's crust than lead. Plus unlike coal and oil, you use it over and over again and can be reclaimed after batteries are no longer rechargeable (or obsoleted by newer technology). Any shortages are just because we haven't ramped up mining/recovery of it. Once demand is really there we will probably extract it from sea water where it is in relative abundance (and fare less destructive than your apocalyptic mining hyperbole would be).
Letter To Iran
Electric busses may make a lot of sense in city traffic. How do the long "refuel" cycles impact fleet availability?
"Fastest Growing" is a meaningless term without context...
Yeah, but thing is....it is still a BUS.
Doesn't matter what you do to the engine or externals of it...who wants to ride a public transportation bus around sitting next to some smelly bums?!?
In Toronto, Canada, about 2.75M people per day. The entire city basically shuts down if the TTC is not running, and there's major chaos if the subway has issues.
For some deranged reason you think only poor people who cannot afford bathing ride public transit. In Toronto at least, every aspect of society uses it. There are professional sports players (Blue Jays, Raptors) that take transit to work and practice. There are Bay Street (think WallStreet.ca) high rollers that take the TTC (and GO, the regional rail system) to work.
Perhaps if you lived in an area that has infrastructure that is non-third world quality you'd have a different opinion. The TTC has many problems with it, but Toronto probably has better transportation options that 90% of American cities.
Buses will be replaced by autonomous vehicles on tracks the vehicles will take you to your final destination without ever having to stop. They will travel 10 times faster and use one-tenth the amount of energy. Our current system is unsustainable, which means it will end in the extinction of our species.
This is not the time to buy new buses. Don't buy capital items that will soon be made obsolete by self-driving vehicles. Some combination of self-driving cars, buses and passenger drones will soon be the way to go. Save the $ for that.
As long as the wheels on the bus go round and round, I think we will be fine. Now all we need are 99 bottles of beer on the wall.
this is what you are talking about. https://cleantechnica.com/2017...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Right now a tesla battery would cost around $190/kWh and gm $145/kWh. One kWh can power a one horsepower electric motor for just over an hour. A horsepower is 746 watts, and despite common misconceptions not nearly 100% efficient - they tend to be 50% at peak power, near 10% efficient at peak torque at low speed and 90% at low torque high speed. This is true for pmdc and induction motors. City busses get about 4mpg average and often run for long periods. A electric pack for a bus would easily run 10-20x the size for a ev like a car. So we are talking about costs of up to half a million dollars for a good lithium pack before subsidies and sold at a reasonable profit margin.
Since a large chunk of emissions comes from manufacture simply throwing busses away after 10 years because of a half million dollar battery would be disasterous. The cost to subsidize them would be significant. The real push needs to be lowering the cost of the battery to a much more manageable up front cost.
Even if all electricity were to come directly from coal, which do you think would add more pollutants to the atmosphere? A million cars, each with a little dinky catalytic converter on them, or a few coal plants with gigantic industrial scrubbers that are not limited by size/space/weight constraints?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Getting smog out of the valley I live in is a huge benefit of electrical vehicles. There is something about certain cities where air pollution tends to accumulate. Most big power plants, even coal, tend to be in locations where there are not many people and where there air currents and climate don't cause a huge lingering cloud to form.
California gets 7% of their power from hydroelectric. While a conventional automobile gets 100% of it's power from combustion of fuel and that means emissions.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Under the new EU and other nations (e.g. Canada/Mexico/Japan/China) requirements, all-electric busses are required in all markets for all fleets.
The average cost to fuel (electricity) such fleets is 1/10th to 1/20th the cost of an equivalent diesel bus. The maintenance is, on average, about half that of a diesel bus.
There are some deviations from this: very rural areas need to set up either battery swap or rapid charge stations, which are easily fueled with wind and solar. However, almost all fleet bus lines operate in urban centers, where this is not a problem.
One drawback: this cuts pollution in urban centers dramatically. In some places in the Western US, pollution from trucks, bus, and cars is up to 40 percent of all pollution.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Here in Winnipeg the city Transit service has been testing electric buses for a local coachbuilder for quite a few years with what I have heard to be good results.
http://winnipegtransit.com/en/...
King County is also already a large customer for their hybrid diesel-electric buses.
https://www.newflyer.com/buses...
If they can work well here in our cold winters and hot summers they can probably work well in most places in North America.
Really, is it a huge surprise that the CEO of a company claims their product is cheaper to buy, cheaper to maintain, carries more passengers, looks better, and an angel gets their wings each time one is sold?
Here's the thing. The value proposition of a fleet purchase is the responsibility of the customers, not the vendor. The vendor is always going to be biased towards their own product! Even if that product is a flaming turd (and I'm not saying that Proterra's is), the CEO is going to defend it and put the best light on it. They sorta have to, it's called a "fiduciary responsibility".
Which is exactly why you don't give the vendors the last word on their own products.
Batteries can easily hold a charge for a day. The question is how much work is that battery doing in a day? Winnipeg says its buses travel 50K kilometers/year, which works out to 85 miles day. Bump that to 100 to account for days off due to maintenance, and that's still within the range of most EVs these days. And that's city driving, so they'll be using regenerative braking to recharge frequently.
Lower fuel costs, less maintenance, I can't see any reason e-buses won't work.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
They take all night to charge at the fastest charge speed. which means you need to bring in some rather beefy power distribution to your maintenance site. It also means that if you run a 24 hour bus schedule that you'll have to have to have extra buses and rotate them through charging.
Pumping 100 gallons of diesel likely only took about 10 minutes per bus. If a city had a feel of 50 buses, that's still an estimated 8 hours spend on refueling them. (honestly there are usually more than 1 pump, but it's hard for one person to keep an eye on filling up more than 4 at a time).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
We need carbon based fuel in the now.
Don't know about you, but gas is under $2/gallon where I'm at. Natural gas is holding steady over the last 5 years. Hard to justify any desperate we-need-it-right-now measure.
Let's produce it here. Make jobs here.
The Keystone pipeline takes oil from Alberta, Canada and moves it to Port Arthur for sale and shipment. Apart from building the thing, how would this make jobs here?
Global warming is a far more pressing problem. We don't need more oil, we need less. Any money put to this pipeline would pay far greater dividends in renewable energy sources. Wind, solar, tidal, hydroelectric. Oil was great in its day, but just like coal - it's rapidly becoming unnecessary.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Super-Caps are far superior to batteries for a city bus system.
Batteries may hit the price point a year or two sooner, but
Super-Caps are positioned to win the race.
Save your money.
They don't immediately respond to the accelerator pedal and they momentarily speed up when the brake is pressed, both of which probably have something to do with flywheel energy storage. I wouldn't be surprised if they are involved in more accidents. Increased stress on the operator's nerves and brake foot couldn't be healthy either.
All buses in the US bought by Federal Government or are heavily subsidized. All buses are replaced every 8-10 years. At 4 years all buses get brand new drive trains. Proterra uses its own fast DC chargers on the roof of the bus. Proterra will be a big company soon. Thomson Energy is a start-up that sells electric drive trains for the mid life overhaul. yeah!
From which orifice did you pull that misinformation?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
if you are going to count the ecological costs of producing electricity, the study should also take into account the ecological costs of producing fossil fuels, and the costs of fighting wars to keep energy flowing. How many wars have we fought for solar or wind power recently?
Ohm's law and arithmetic.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Also, I did not include partial charging. It tends to reduce battery life. It's a big marketing point from EV manufactures, but ultimately it's pretty useless to charge 10 minutes every few hours of travel (how ever long it takes to go 40 miles on your route). The ideal is to load up that 100kWh battery to max by the morning, and have most of your buses out all day long.
My math says 1250 A @ 480V to fully charge 100kWh pack in 10 minutes, of course like I said nobody is charging them to the top in 10 minutes and the charge currents for these batteries is not linear.
Medium commercial sites have 800A to 1200A service, a large commercial site can have one or two 4000A services. You'll need that 4000A service if you want to charge more than one bus at a time. I used to work in an iron foundry, and it took over 500kWh per ton of steel, unfortunately I don't recall the size of our service but it was 3-phase for our industrial motors and probably quite substantial.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I live in Clemson SC where Proterra has a small fleet of electric buses used for the CATBus system.
The buses may be cheap, but only if you don't include the cost of installing charging pods at every stop. Seneca and Clemson taxpayers were on the hook for millions of dollars in subsidies to Proterra to pay for the charging stations.
But then, as has been mentioned in another post, the taxpayer ends up paying for the buses too through Federal subsidies. So, really it's just a big shell game.
If it takes 10 minutes to charge one battery, then you can charge lot of busses during the night, one after the other. You don't need to charge them all at the same time.
Your claim about partial charging doesn't seem to be accurate either. In general, what seems to kill today's Lithium Ion batteries appears to be topping them up to fully charged. It's probably better for battery life to max out at 90% charge.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Autonomous vehicles will make buses obsolete. Seems like smaller autonomous ride sharing vans would be more practical to group people going to similar destinations.
My math says 1250 A @ 480V to fully charge 100kWh pack in 10 minutes
722 Amps since, at 480V, it's probably going to be three phase.
However, in the scenario you're suggesting, it would be more prudent to do battery swapping.
=Smidge=
Just from the summary (because I didn't read TFA):
. . . claims to be cheaper . . .
. . . only delivered a few hundred all-electric buses . . .
. . . make a bold prediction . . .
. . . seem to indicate there's a shift . . .
It's fairly safe to assume that this is just CEO Ryan Popple's dream and he's actually begging for money from investors.
If they care about battery longevity, they'll keep them between 20% and 80% SoC. (30:80 would last even longer. 80% DoD is still a decade of cycles) Getting to 80% SoC can, indeed, be done in 15-30min -- if you have nuclear power plant in your back yard. (we're talking many MW to charge a fleet of buses. One bus at a time... Just. No.)
The smallest office building I've been in was fed with 6000A 600V (3ph) service. (I don't know about the current office. We didn't have to build anything in it.)
I'm in Indialantic, FL. I have a 0.9 mile walk to work, going from a 4-bedroom home on a half-acre lot (about $350,000) to a tech job that pays six figures.
Across the water is the city of Melbourne, and Palm Bay is just south of that. Over there is more of the same, but with cheaper houses. If you don't want something fancy or big, you could buy a house for less than a year of salary. You would likely commute less than 10 miles, with "traffic" meaning a few cars in front of you at a stop light. There are lots of jobs: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Embraer, Harris, Thales, DRS, GE, a bunch of cyberwar startups, some little NASA contractors, etc.
So my commute is kind of free right now. I pay for food, but not a gym, and the 20 minutes is time I don't need to exercise. Driven, it would be about a dollar (fuel plus car wear) and would take 3 minutes. The worst case for the area would be 10 miles with slightly faster roads, so $10 of fuel and wear done in 15 to 20 minutes of driving.
Oh, and no state income tax.
I would be stressed and angry in your situation. You should reconsider the commute possibilities.
Toronto has had hybrid electric buses and they disabled the electric part because it would fail constantly.
It's no longer 1946. Modern fear of nuclear fission is due to media sensationalism.
Three problems with that argument. 1) Even if you are right and the fears are purely out of media hype, the fears still are real and they still matter. In politics perception is reality and politics matter here. If people are afraid of something they are going to fight it even if those fears are completely unjustified in the face of objective facts. 2) Even the most advanced reactors we have today are still not fail-safe with zero risk. They still depend on substantial amounts of human intervention to operate safely and any time humans are required there are risks. 3) Engineers still make design mistakes. Fukashima happened in large part because of engineering mistakes. There is no way to prove that the engineers have build a perfectly safe fission reactor given the state of the art in technology. Engineering mistakes are the most dangerous types of mistakes because they are the ones you are least likely to know about ahead of time and the hardest to mitigate against.
There also still is the waste disposal problem which hasn't been solved but that's a separate issue from safe operation.
Immediately after the end of World War II, the Greatest Generation was absolutely convinced that they were entering the Atomic Age and that it was going to be the best thing since sliced bread.
That's because they didn't know much/anything of the problems/risks with nuclear power plants. Nuclear power did seem like this amazing new technology straight off the pages of a science fiction novel and it had ended the war. Of course they were interested. There was a substantial lag between learning about it and what it could do and then figuring out what the risks and problems with it were. Over time we learned that there were significant practical problems with fission as a power source and some very real risks and it took a while for the public to absorb this argument.
People are by nature bad at evaluating risk (we tend to be risk averse) so it's hardly surprising that eventually public opinion in many places swung against nuclear power over time. Public opinion of the risk of nuclear power demonstrably is at odds with the real objective risk but if you want to build more nuclear fission plants then you need to deal with that very real fear in the political arena.
Then Green Peace set themselves against it. They spent the '60s and '70s telling the world how dangerous nuclear power was...
Greenpeace was a small player in a much bigger drama and I think you hugely overestimate their influence in this debate. But even if we stipulate to what you are saying, it is absolutely true that nuclear fission as a power source does carry substantial risks. To pretend that these risks don't exist would be foolish. You cannot argue that fission is 100% safe or that catastrophes cannot happen and remain credible. There isn't a fission power plant we've ever made that doesn't carry real risks and doesn't required oversight and maintenance from humans. Even simple designs like RTGs carry meaningful risks.
Then in 1986, the Chernobyl disaster happened, the greatest gift to anti-nuclear forces since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The reason Chernobyl was/is scary is that there is currently no way to prove that a similar disaster couldn't happen again elsewhere. It was confirmation of an already existing fear. There is not a single fission plant in operation today that does not have failure modes with potentially severe consequences. The failures are mostly remote but potentially very severe and that is the sort of risk we as humans are worst at evaluating. Use airplanes as an example - they are objectively very safe and yet many people are absolutely terrified of them because some of the failure modes are potentially quite severe and out of their control. Until you can trot out a scientist that can show that a meltdown or radiation release or similar disaster is provably impossible you're going to have a hard time getting public opinion back in favor of nuclear fission in many parts of the world. And even then a lot of people won't believe the evidence. I probably find that as disappointing as you do but it's the reality we live in thanks to human nature.
Human nature is to be scared of the things we're told to be scared of
And we've been told (with some justification and evidence) to be scared of fission for decades now. That's already done and reversing it is going to be really hard thanks to human nature. Getting people to accept something new is a lot easier than getting them to stop fearing something familiar that they think (rightly or wrongly) is dangerous.
For the record, I'm actually in favor of increased use of fission to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But to pretend that it is without risk or that it will be politically easy is just foolish naivety.
Regardless of the technology driving them, the fact remains that public transportation is inconvenient for many.
As an example, I would need to drive nearly half an hour just to get TO the bus terminal, only to find out it doesn't even have a route to get to my office at all.
Whereas my personal drive to the office takes twenty minutes one way.
I gladly bear the costs of a personal vehicle for several reasons:
I don't have to endure the lady / guy wearing a gallon of perfume / cologne.
Same folks who smell like they smoked two packs before they got on.
Folks on cell phones and those who think I want to listen to their music outloud.
I come and go when and why I want. I'm not beholden to the bus schedule.
I don't get exposed to whatever illness the person next to me has because their employer doesnt believe in paid sick time.
I trust my driving skills and awareness far more than anyone else's.
Bottom line: The personal vehicle allows you the freedom to go where, when and why you want. I have no intentions on giving that up.
There are new reactor designs that haven't even been built yet
Which means they are nothing more than an unproven idea whose flaws have yet to be uncovered.
that are inherently safer than the current generation, and that are much less complex designs
I'm sure they are safer. But marginal gains in safety unfortunately aren't enough. They still have a meaningful chance of catastrophic radiation release and that is even assuming they work perfectly as designed. If there is a manufacturing flaw or an engineering flaw then the risk is multi-fold worse. We have no reactor design that solves this problem even in principle much less in practice. So far it is a problem with fission that has proven to be irreducible.
Then there's using Thorium instead of Uranium. All would be better than the current generation of reactors.
Thorium is fine but it doesn't solve the fundamental problems with using fission as a power source. The problem is that we have no way to be completely certain that catastrophic failure and accompanying radiation release is impossible. We have no known reactor design that can safeguard against this possibility. It's the fatal flaw in the technology. Add on the fact that fission also creates a pretty nasty waste disposal problem and it's pretty easy to see why the technology hasn't progressed further.