Electric Cars are the future but where will all of the ‘extra’ electricity come from? Nuclear power?
Nuclear has the best health/safety record among the alternatives. Its also the most efficient and produces the zero global warming gases.
Nuclear has been unfairly attacked by uninformed, hysterical critics. Since 1946 there has only been only nuclear incident in which people died, and that was an essentially unregulated facility in Chernobyl. France derives more than half its electricity from nuclear since the 1970s without incident.
Oil and coal economic interests have funded all anti-nuclear initiatives in the US.
How do you figure nuclear has a better health/safety record that wind and solar?
Electric Cars are the future but where will all of the ‘extra’ electricity come from? Nuclear power?
Nuclear has the best health/safety record among the alternatives. Its also the most efficient and produces the zero global warming gases.
Nuclear has been unfairly attacked by uninformed, hysterical critics. Since 1946 there has only been only nuclear incident in which people died, and that was an essentially unregulated facility in Chernobyl. France derives more than half its electricity from nuclear since the 1970s without incident.
Oil and coal economic interests have funded all anti-nuclear initiatives in the US.
Japan's 2011 Fukushima incident, caused in part due to extreme weather conditions, resurfaced a lot of angst about nuclear power. Other accidents (Tokai-mura in 1999, also in Japan) have resulted in deaths from radiation poisoning, although at a far lower rate than say refining oil globally. Those concerns prompted Germany to plan out the winding down of its entire nuclear program (generating 25% of its energy).
Nuclear power is historically, statistically very safe, but there's a lot of fear involved in what one accident/malicious attack could result in. Its safety record could quickly go from really good to incredibly bad instantly.
Fukijima had a 9.0 earthquake (a 1 in a 1000 year earthquake) coupled with a historic tsunami but succombed to a simple small design decision about where to put its interface to the grid...if they had not put the powerhouse that connects to the grid in the basement instead of say 20 feet off the ground, the whole plant would have survived without a hitch. It's ironically because the plant itself could not power its own equipments that the catastrophe arrived and that would have been trivial to fix in design.
Electric Cars are the future but where will all of the ‘extra’ electricity come from? Nuclear power?
From all the electricity that is saved by not refining oil into gasoline.
Still not enough, since the power density of electric batteries is far lower than that of the fuel. And you DO NOT put that power in fuel by electricity. You simply refine the fuel, by separating lighter fractions from the heavier ones, hence a "shitty" Corolla/Camry ($20k-25k) can do 340-380 mile trip on one tank while Tesla can do only 250 tops in the same conditions...while costing 80-100k per car. And lets not get started on refining of metals for those batteries and how those battery production damages the environment.
I hadn't realized that the public was already using fully autonomous vehicles in a limited fashion and have been for a year now. Thought is was coming sometime this year from Waymo. For those interested in who uses it, why, for what, and how they feel about it there's a pretty good blog post here: https://medium.com/waymo/waymos-early-rider-program-one-year-in-3a788f995a9c
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Web search "deaths per kilowatt hour".
One of the results: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid
And you DO NOT put that power in fuel by electricity.
You simply refine the fuel, by separating lighter fractions from the heavier ones, hence a "shitty" Corolla/Camry ($20k-25k) can do 340-380 mile trip on one tank while Tesla can do only 250 tops in the same conditions...while costing 80-100k per car.
And lets not get started on refining of metals for those batteries and how those battery production damages the environment.
https://medium.com/waymo/waymos-early-rider-program-one-year-in-3a788f995a9c