Until renewable energy sources mature and gain public acceptence (solar is relativly inefficient and expensive, and Americans seem fond of complaining about "ugly" windmills), nuclear power is the best option we have.
Yeah, maybe. I'll agree IF we can actually get nuclear plants built for what the cost estimates are. My local utility, Progress Energy, is estimating $17 billion to build a two reactor plant. The last round of reactors built in the USA saw cost overruns of 2-4 times the original cost. Push the cost of the plant up to $64 billion, and solar (with astonishingly large battery banks for night time) is actually cheaper.
We should surely be building some nuclear plants, but I very much worry about the cost. I'd love to see a breakdown of why these nuclear plants cost so much. I honestly don't understand that at all.
I'll expand your idea to my local utility, Progress Energy in Florida. Progress Energy estimates that a two reactor plant is going to cost $17 billion (http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/993686.html)
At an 8% cost of capital, that is 1.36 billion a year. With a 35 useful lifetime of the plant, there is an additional.5 billion a year to repay the capital. Throw in some of the other costs you mention (fuel, labor, property taxes, etc) and let's say the plant needs to earn 2 billion a year with no profit for the owners.
The reactors are two Westinghouse AP1000 which produce 1154Megawatts each (http://www.ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/). If I recall correctly, nuclear plants are running about 90% of the time these days. That means the plants will produce in the ballpark of 2 reactors * 1154 MW * 1000Kw/Mw * 365 Days / Year * 24 hours/Day *.90 (availability derating) or 18.1 billion kilowatt hours per year. Given our cost estimate of $2 billion dollars per year, that works out to 11.04 cents per kilowatt hour.
Your 10 cent per kilowatt cost estimate is very close!
The scary thing is that I'm old enough to have lived through the last wave of nuclear plants being built. They almost all came in at two to four times the original cost estimates. If that happened again, we are talking wholesale electric rates of 22 to 44 cents per kilowatt. Solar PV (being stored in banks of lead acid batteries for night use) is already cheaper than 44 cents per kilowatt.
Indeed, you are very correct. Specifically, you wrote "What's next: kitchen knives banned from culinary schools?"
Unfortunately, some of the knives in kitchens are far superior weapons than the knives scouts are generally using. What's next? Licenses to have kitchen knives with blades longer than 4"? A ban on steak knives perhaps?
This all started out by someone saying that knocking down the radio tower was not violence, and now you are saying that knocking down the tower is not an official crime of violence.
You wrote "Or not. Man, this industry moves at a snails pace in a lot of areas. Why do we still live with the x86 instruction set. Is "the year of UNIX" here yet?"
Actually, when you are in 64-bit mode, you are most certainly not using anything like the classic x86 instruction set. There are many more registers, and the limitations on specific register uses are mostly gone. x86-64 very much changed things for the better.
It's called Galvanic corrosion and I think the project will have a very very short life since it looks like the rebar is actually in contact with the copper. I wouldn't be surprised if it only lasted a year or two before it starts leaking.
BTW, this idea of wrapping some tape on the copper when it gets near to the rebar could make the problem about 100 times less severe. IOW, a very good idea.
Someone else mentioned that copper is corroded by the concrete, but this article (http://www.copper.org/applications/plumbing/techcorner/problem_embedding_copper_concrete.html) disagrees.
I am _now_ asking people to hate religions, including but not limited to christianity, judaism, and islam. By doing that I am breaking the law. That law is wrong on so many levels.
Strangely enough, I believe you would be OK if you label this as your religion.
You wrote "Seriously, do EVs not have mechanical parts? Just because they don't have a muffler means the brake rotors will never need replaced?"
The maintenance of EVs is WAY lower than typical cars today. Your example of brake pads is a perfect example. Yes, EVs have brake pads. Since the EV uses regenerative braking, a huge percentage of the energy of stopping is recovered electrically and there is little wear on the brake pad. With the right driving habits, the original brake pads on an EV could easily last the life of the vehicle.
Yes, there are mechanical parts, but there are fewer of them, they are much simpler, and they have proven to be far more reliable. This clear superiority led some of the original car makers 100 years ago to build electric cars. Those all quickly went away because of the one real huge problem with EVs, those darn batteries.
Solve the battery problem (which modern technology may actually be doing), and no one will want an IC car anymore.
I've been reading Slashdot for many years, but never registered. This one got me.
IMHO, you can summarize the whole article with this:
1) Heavier cars have worse fuel economy.
2) Batteries are much heavier than gasoline per joule.
3) Carrying around batteries on a trip that you aren't going to use wastes energy.
That's pretty much it. The only conclusion you could draw for the Volt is that in the opinion of the paper's authors, the Volt's battery should be smaller. GM disagrees. Personally, I think the ideal solution would be to offer 3 versions of the Volt with batteries that will take the car 10, 20, or 40 miles depending on how much you paid for the battery. I believe that would make the authors of the paper happy. The problem from GM's POV is that the Volt is a very low volume car. Adding options like that is probably something they would like to do when the volume is higher.
What the paper authors are missing is that electric vehicles are much cheaper to operate than gas vehicles. Tesla estimates it costs about a penny a mile to operate the Roadster. If the cost of operation is 10% higher because of the extra batteries being carried around, I don't really care. 1.1 cents per mile is not a problem.
The authors just glance at what, IMHO, the real problem with pretty much all electric cars is. The cost of the batteries is HUGE. The cost has almost nothing to do with the materials in the batteries. This is an assembly problem. The only way I know of to solve that is volume.
That means that, IMHO, the government tax credits to subsidize the PHEV vehicles based on battery size are a good solution. If mass production can dramatically lower the price of the batteries, then the subsidies won't be needed in a few years, and the batteries will be cheap. If they can't figure out how to make the batteries cheap, well then we are screwed. But the government subsidies do have caps on them so after the experiment, the government money turns off automatically.
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Until renewable energy sources mature and gain public acceptence (solar is relativly inefficient and expensive, and Americans seem fond of complaining about "ugly" windmills), nuclear power is the best option we have.
Yeah, maybe. I'll agree IF we can actually get nuclear plants built for what the cost estimates are. My local utility, Progress Energy, is estimating $17 billion to build a two reactor plant. The last round of reactors built in the USA saw cost overruns of 2-4 times the original cost. Push the cost of the plant up to $64 billion, and solar (with astonishingly large battery banks for night time) is actually cheaper.
We should surely be building some nuclear plants, but I very much worry about the cost. I'd love to see a breakdown of why these nuclear plants cost so much. I honestly don't understand that at all.
You were questioning the 8% cost of capital, here is a recent example of a utility paying 6.7% for 30 year bonds.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601203&sid=a8gdNh70aH5k
Since my example had no profit for the utility, we can assume the 1.3% between the 6.7% and the 8% used in the example is the profit for the utility.
8% seems spot on to me. Am I missing something here?
I'll expand your idea to my local utility, Progress Energy in Florida. Progress Energy estimates that a two reactor plant is going to cost $17 billion (http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/993686.html)
At an 8% cost of capital, that is 1.36 billion a year. With a 35 useful lifetime of the plant, there is an additional .5 billion a year to repay the capital. Throw in some of the other costs you mention (fuel, labor, property taxes, etc) and let's say the plant needs to earn 2 billion a year with no profit for the owners.
The reactors are two Westinghouse AP1000 which produce 1154Megawatts each (http://www.ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/). If I recall correctly, nuclear plants are running about 90% of the time these days. That means the plants will produce in the ballpark of 2 reactors * 1154 MW * 1000Kw/Mw * 365 Days / Year * 24 hours /Day * .90 (availability derating) or 18.1 billion kilowatt hours per year. Given our cost estimate of $2 billion dollars per year, that works out to 11.04 cents per kilowatt hour.
Your 10 cent per kilowatt cost estimate is very close!
The scary thing is that I'm old enough to have lived through the last wave of nuclear plants being built. They almost all came in at two to four times the original cost estimates. If that happened again, we are talking wholesale electric rates of 22 to 44 cents per kilowatt. Solar PV (being stored in banks of lead acid batteries for night use) is already cheaper than 44 cents per kilowatt.
Indeed, you are very correct. Specifically, you wrote "What's next: kitchen knives banned from culinary schools?"
Unfortunately, some of the knives in kitchens are far superior weapons than the knives scouts are generally using. What's next? Licenses to have kitchen knives with blades longer than 4"? A ban on steak knives perhaps?
This all started out by someone saying that knocking down the radio tower was not violence, and now you are saying that knocking down the tower is not an official crime of violence.
If one looks at what is defined as a crime of violence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_crime, you are correct.
However, the OP is quite wrong. The word "violence" in and of itself most certainly covers this act (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/violence).
You wrote "Or not. Man, this industry moves at a snails pace in a lot of areas. Why do we still live with the x86 instruction set. Is "the year of UNIX" here yet?"
Actually, when you are in 64-bit mode, you are most certainly not using anything like the classic x86 instruction set. There are many more registers, and the limitations on specific register uses are mostly gone. x86-64 very much changed things for the better.
Isn't is customary not to have the steel and copper in direct contact?
It's called Galvanic corrosion and I think the project will have a very very short life since it looks like the rebar is actually in contact with the copper. I wouldn't be surprised if it only lasted a year or two before it starts leaking.
A good article on this is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_corrosion
BTW, this idea of wrapping some tape on the copper when it gets near to the rebar could make the problem about 100 times less severe. IOW, a very good idea.
Someone else mentioned that copper is corroded by the concrete, but this article (http://www.copper.org/applications/plumbing/techcorner/problem_embedding_copper_concrete.html) disagrees.
I am _now_ asking people to hate religions, including but not limited to christianity, judaism, and islam. By doing that I am breaking the law. That law is wrong on so many levels.
Strangely enough, I believe you would be OK if you label this as your religion.
You wrote "Seriously, do EVs not have mechanical parts? Just because they don't have a muffler means the brake rotors will never need replaced?"
The maintenance of EVs is WAY lower than typical cars today. Your example of brake pads is a perfect example. Yes, EVs have brake pads. Since the EV uses regenerative braking, a huge percentage of the energy of stopping is recovered electrically and there is little wear on the brake pad. With the right driving habits, the original brake pads on an EV could easily last the life of the vehicle.
Yes, there are mechanical parts, but there are fewer of them, they are much simpler, and they have proven to be far more reliable. This clear superiority led some of the original car makers 100 years ago to build electric cars. Those all quickly went away because of the one real huge problem with EVs, those darn batteries.
Solve the battery problem (which modern technology may actually be doing), and no one will want an IC car anymore.
I've been reading Slashdot for many years, but never registered. This one got me.
IMHO, you can summarize the whole article with this:
1) Heavier cars have worse fuel economy.
2) Batteries are much heavier than gasoline per joule.
3) Carrying around batteries on a trip that you aren't going to use wastes energy.
That's pretty much it. The only conclusion you could draw for the Volt is that in the opinion of the paper's authors, the Volt's battery should be smaller. GM disagrees. Personally, I think the ideal solution would be to offer 3 versions of the Volt with batteries that will take the car 10, 20, or 40 miles depending on how much you paid for the battery. I believe that would make the authors of the paper happy. The problem from GM's POV is that the Volt is a very low volume car. Adding options like that is probably something they would like to do when the volume is higher.
What the paper authors are missing is that electric vehicles are much cheaper to operate than gas vehicles. Tesla estimates it costs about a penny a mile to operate the Roadster. If the cost of operation is 10% higher because of the extra batteries being carried around, I don't really care. 1.1 cents per mile is not a problem.
The authors just glance at what, IMHO, the real problem with pretty much all electric cars is. The cost of the batteries is HUGE. The cost has almost nothing to do with the materials in the batteries. This is an assembly problem. The only way I know of to solve that is volume.
That means that, IMHO, the government tax credits to subsidize the PHEV vehicles based on battery size are a good solution. If mass production can dramatically lower the price of the batteries, then the subsidies won't be needed in a few years, and the batteries will be cheap. If they can't figure out how to make the batteries cheap, well then we are screwed. But the government subsidies do have caps on them so after the experiment, the government money turns off automatically.