US DOE EIA: Three Mile Island

My whole point is that electricity has to come from somewhere and for the foreseeable future increased demand is going to be largely dependent on fossil fuels. That means that electric cars don’t get the free pass some people want to believe. Yes they have some advantages but on whole I think the concept is over hyped as far as being a solution to pollution. If the government is going to subsidize electricity for transportation money on overhead wires for transit is a much better investment. I’d even go so far as to say government incentives for the railroads to (re)electrify some routes would make more sense than giving out tax breaks to Prius owners.

I know the thermal capacity is larger, but most US nuclear plants still have a large electrical generation capacity. In the same range as large coal plants. 1000 MWe plus plants aren’t uncommon.

While we will eventually run out of uranium for nuclear plants that day is still a ways off (the 100 year figure is extremely conservative).

In any case I’d much rather see new nuclear plants built than new fossil fuel plants. This doesn’t mean wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass shouldn’t be built as well. It isn’t an either/or it is about getting rid of the coal plants and eventually the natural gas plants.

True actual power production depends on the uptime of the plant and some do much better than others.

Three Mile Island unit 1 has a capacity of 802 MW. Trojan had a capacity of 1130 MW. Columbia (WNP-2) has a capacity of 1131 MW. Diablo Canyon 1 is 1122 MW, unit 2 is 1118 MW.

Though it seems hybrids are what has mass market acceptance. The Toyota approach of adding a couple extra battery packs and an external charger likely will be what pans out for plug-in hybrids. The volt is likely to be like the EV1 and not terribly practical due to the high cost.

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Solar_radiation

Second, australia is 3 million square miles.

One of those physics things again. Since batteries are energy storage the faster you try to fill them the larger the power draw.

The practical limit is probably whatever size power feed is the maximum you want an untrained individual handling the connection.

Still good point that a 1000 Mw nuclear reactor complex isn’t exactly small though.

1. Power plants generally have much higher efficiency than internal combustion engines of vehicles, even taking into account transmission losses. Petroleum extraction, refining, delivery, and finally combustion is a very energy-intensive and inefficient process of its own.

2. There’s a good deal of surplus supply of electricity during off-peak hours which could charge a fairly significant number of plug-in vehicles. A study from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory estimated that “off-peak electricity production and transmission capacity could fuel 70% percent of the U.S. light-duty vehicle (LDV) fleet, if they were plug-in hybrid electrics.”

3. Improvements in emissions can come about much more quickly with electric vehicles. It takes a long time for MPG regulations to have any appreciable impact on the U.S. vehicle fleet. On the other hand, improvements to the electric grid would have an immediate impact. As we move toward renewable energy the entire vehicle fleet effectively becomes cleaner without individual users having to change anything.

4. Here in Washington we’re blessed with a mostly renewable energy portfolio already (if you count hydro as a renewable).

5. Even if all of that was not true, a point source of pollution outside of a population center might still be preferable to all the emissions from vehicles right within our cities.

That said, people need to get out of their cars and on public transit. That’s not practical for everyone though, so electric cars are a nice complement.

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/IRRADIANCE/irrad.html
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Solar_radiation

Even at 100% efficiency if you covered the entire area of the Hanford reservation (mostly empty space and not on the equator where these maximums come from) you’d get enough power to equal about four nuclear reactors (assuming full output 12 hours a day, it’s actually much less). There’s about a 1/2 dozen reactors at Hanford which is a weapons facility not a power plant. Take your physics teachers claim of 10,000 times the power and your covering an area almost the size of Australia to match a single 1000 megawatt nuclear power plant.

The last paragraph does state one potential problem:

“A battery that’s sufficient to run an electric vehicle could be fully charged in five minutes—which would make electric vehicles incredibly practical—but doing so would pull 180kW, which is most certainly not practical.”