mayf;
Only a very small % of electric utility plants have ever been fired with
oil.
Natural gas fired plants got very popular because environmental regs made
new coal plants expensive and NG plants in the combined-cycle config are
very efficient and clean by comparison and NG was relatively cheap and
plentiful--that's changing, we're now importing NG.
Electricity demand keeps growing (all those computer servers,etc) and old
plants have to be retired, so a lot of new coal and NG plants are being
built and some new nuclear plants will be ordered soon.
Nuclear spent fuel storage and Yucca Mountain problems are more political
than technical. We could greatly reduce the volume of spent fuel and its
radiation (lot of energy still in it) by reprocessing but that's also
political and the economics aren't favorable right now. I wouldn't fear
living next door to Yucca even if it gets filled up--the radiation dose will
be non-existent or negligible. In contrast, I'll bet you get a measureable
increase in your annual radiation dose when you go to the higher altitude
Bonneville salt flats.
Electricity is never going to get cheap again, the economy of scale benefits
from larger and larger plant sizes isn't there any more.
It's all driven by economics, so oil (and gasoline) is going to have to get
significantly more expensive before any one will make the capital
investments needed to replace it with Hydrogen or anything else.
Lance
----- Original Message -----
From: "drmayf" <drmayf@mayfco.com>
To: "joseph lance" <jolylance@earthlink.net>
Cc: "Wester Potter" <wester6935@comcast.net>; "list LSR"
<land-speed@autox.team.net>
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2006 11:11 PM
Subject: Re: Car of your future?
>
> So, we have no oil fired power plants? None at all? That surprises me, but
> I guess most have been converted to natural gas. And yes, Nuclear is clean
> at th eplant..where it gets messy if storage of all that hard radiation in
> the form of spent fuel. I spent any numbe rof years with Boeing trying to
> figure out how storage would work out for th eentire planet if nukes
> increased in number as they were doing in the 70's. And now I have my own
> storgae facility in my back yard...Yucca Mountain... What a mess...ANd
> yes, electricity has to get really cheap to move onto a hydrogen economy.
>
>
> mayf, out in Pahrump
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