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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

In science fiction they were talking about nuclear powered trains. Its kind of a shame that never happened. Alas, the real world is more complicated than our beautiful stories.

Also, in a way, there are nuclear powered trains, just the power is delivered via electrical lines.

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There were actually plans for nuclear powered locomotives in the 1950'ies. E.g. the X-12 by Lyle Borst. See e.g. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bVMEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA78&ot...

If you read the Donald Duck/Uncle Scrooge comics from the early 50s everything is "atomic" or "uranium" - clearly it was a very forward-looking time, and not unreasonably so.

In a similar way we will eventually have nuclear powered aircraft and cargo ships. Power and heat from nuclear plants on land will be used to manufacture synthetic liquid fuels.

Along the same line of thinking though, they are nuclear powered already. The fossil fuels owe their energy to the sun which is nuclear powered.

I think nuclear powered should be used to something that has a nuclear reactor on board directly supplying power.

Nuclear usually refers to nuclear fission. Fossil fuels are not the product of nuclear fission. Even if they were, saying that things powered by fossil fuels are nuclear powered is just a terrible take.

Synthetic fuels need an energy price of about $1/MWh to be competitive. Intermittent solar will be that price in a few years, I doubt that nuclear will ever hit that price.

Perhaps, but fuel synthesis processes usually have to run continuously. They can't really start and stop intermittently based on momentary solar power availability. Those plants will represent huge capital investments, the workers will have to be scheduled in advance, and they'll have to make fixed delivery commitments to customers. Some form of carbon tax on fossil fuels might make this more economically viable.

Heat is an input to these processes, so restarting is expensive. That cost has to be weighed against the increased cost of continuous electricity.

> start and stop intermittently

Solar & wind electricity is actually fairly predictable, based on the weather forecast. You don't know what it's going to be next week, but you do have a good idea what it's going to be in an hour. That helps a lot.

> fixed delivery commitments to customers

Maybe in the future, but that's definitely not an issue at the moment because excess production can always be sold without the green premium.

I'm probably missing something, but why $1/MWhr? That's far cheaper than gasoline or residential electricity.

If you want to sell synthetic gasoline at $4/gallon and make a profit, $1/MWh or so electricity enables that.

Because it takes a lot of energy to make synthetic jet fuel from nothing.

Why does that matter? Anyone with a brain would design a process to start with something better than nothing energy content, perhaps biomass or plastic.

We know how to make synthetic fuel, and right now you either need "real" fuel to go way up in price, or you need $1/mw energy. It's not literally "made from nothing" but it's not made from petroleum products.

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