If you're making synthetic diesel then your plan works.
The reason that everybody uses gasoline now is because when you refine oil you get a lot more gasoline than diesel and there's not really anything that can be done about it that doesn't waste a bunch of energy.
You can do it with any source of electricity, water and air.
It's much more efficient when you use a high temperature nuclear reactor as your energy source because you can substitute heat for electricity for a portion of the required input energy, avoiding some of the conversion losses.
There's enormous amount of infrastructure that uses gasoline and there's currently no portable source of energy storage that can match hydrocarbons when it comes to joules/unit volume.
Wind appears to be much cheaper than nuclear power on or offshore.
Translation: State-of-the-art wind power looks to be cheaper than nuclear power (after a lot of handwaving about subsidies) so long as you don't consider any nuclear technology invented after 1955.
Extracting carbon dioxide from air required a negligible amount of energy compared to electrolysis and that process is known to be anywhere from 25% to 70% efficient.
The point is that if we were going to create a huge bill for our grandchildren to pay off, we should at least have spent them money on something of value.
And that's really the problem with central planning.
It's not that it's impossible for government to do the right thing - it's that when you give that much money and power to a bunch of politicians they make decisions based on politics rather than objective technical criteria.
Everyone thinks they could do a job of it if only they had absolute power but in reality the process you need to go through to get that kind of power forces you to become a politician.
Not really - if you are using the LFTR design it would be much easier due to the unpressurized design. Adding thermal capacity is basically just a matter of using bigger piping.
Don't forget that even nuclear power do produce a large amount of emissions and waste.
So stop building the stone-age reactors than we've been building since the 50s and step it up to ultra-modern mid-1960s technology that produces 97% less waste.
You'd actually be able to solve the energy problem if you built nuclear reactors that output most of their energy as hydrocarbons.
You could get some better economies of scale with larger reactors than we build now but it's hard to transmit and distribute electricity from anything much larger then what we build now.
Imagine that instead of building 1-2 GW reactors you built a 25-30 GW reactor that produce 1-2 GW of electricity for the grid and about 20,000 gallons of gasoline every hour.
LFTR would be an excellent way to do this since it runs at such a high temperature and could supply a large fraction of the energy required to synthesize gasoline in the form of heat instead of electricity.
A person could always go with a carrier that actually treats its customers decently and allows you to purchase a no-contract, no-subsidy plan at a discount.
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If you're making synthetic diesel then your plan works.
The reason that everybody uses gasoline now is because when you refine oil you get a lot more gasoline than diesel and there's not really anything that can be done about it that doesn't waste a bunch of energy.
I also left out the part of actually unvarnished criminality in the government as well.
Red tape necessary to build and operate a new power plant.
You can do it with any source of electricity, water and air.
It's much more efficient when you use a high temperature nuclear reactor as your energy source because you can substitute heat for electricity for a portion of the required input energy, avoiding some of the conversion losses.
There's enormous amount of infrastructure that uses gasoline and there's currently no portable source of energy storage that can match hydrocarbons when it comes to joules/unit volume.
If Toshiba isn't working on liquid fuel reactors we'd be better off dusting off the MSRE design and start building larger versions of it (LFTR).
Just because some politicians and monopolists spin something as "deregulation" doesn't mean that they actually did any such thing.
True deregulation means that there is no artificial barriers to entry. Without that "deregulation" is simply a bailout of a protected monopoly.
Actually they just don't care if electricity is so expensive that the peasants can't afford to use it.
Why? Did they buy Oak Ridge or something?
Why not?
Translation: State-of-the-art wind power looks to be cheaper than nuclear power (after a lot of handwaving about subsidies) so long as you don't consider any nuclear technology invented after 1955.
Every Final Fantasy protagonist has a tale but not all of them have tails.
The best thing about coal is that the ashes contain enough thorium to produce 12 times as much nuclear energy as you got from burning it.
Isn't it awesome that we get all the environmental benefits of burning coal and throw away 92% of the available energy in the process?
Wind farms that only produce, on average, 10% of their rated capacity and are only viable with enormous subsidies would better fit that description.
Such as?
What laws of thermodynamics are being violated?
Extracting carbon dioxide from air required a negligible amount of energy compared to electrolysis and that process is known to be anywhere from 25% to 70% efficient.
And that's really the problem with central planning.
It's not that it's impossible for government to do the right thing - it's that when you give that much money and power to a bunch of politicians they make decisions based on politics rather than objective technical criteria.
Everyone thinks they could do a job of it if only they had absolute power but in reality the process you need to go through to get that kind of power forces you to become a politician.
Jimmy Carter banned them by executive order.
Regan overturned the order but no one has tried to build one since then regardless.
Not true for LFTR. There is no fuel production - you just dump pure thorium powder directly into the reactor.
Thorium is a waste product produced my other forms of mining so there's no extra waste generated to use it. It just gets thrown away otherwise.
Where you pulling those numbers from?
In the application Grumman claimed efficiency between 25 and 37 percent without even using high-temperature electrolysis.
Not really - if you are using the LFTR design it would be much easier due to the unpressurized design. Adding thermal capacity is basically just a matter of using bigger piping.
So stop building the stone-age reactors than we've been building since the 50s and step it up to ultra-modern mid-1960s technology that produces 97% less waste.
You'd actually be able to solve the energy problem if you built nuclear reactors that output most of their energy as hydrocarbons.
You could get some better economies of scale with larger reactors than we build now but it's hard to transmit and distribute electricity from anything much larger then what we build now.
Imagine that instead of building 1-2 GW reactors you built a 25-30 GW reactor that produce 1-2 GW of electricity for the grid and about 20,000 gallons of gasoline every hour.
LFTR would be an excellent way to do this since it runs at such a high temperature and could supply a large fraction of the energy required to synthesize gasoline in the form of heat instead of electricity.
That's how I bought mine. I guess I need to call and get the unlock code then try to root it and see what happens.
A person could always go with a carrier that actually treats its customers decently and allows you to purchase a no-contract, no-subsidy plan at a discount.