Gasoline is $8.00 a gallon in the UK now and they haven't even started
to switch to Hydrogen. I wonder what it will take here.. $20.00 a gallon??
Bryan
joseph lance wrote:
> 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
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