2trill2spill

I think your looking at this all wrong. Why would I or any other person spend $30,000 - $50,000 on a vehicle that is less capable then the vehicle I currently own? I cant charge at my apartment so I'm totally dependent on charging infrastructure, which is slower, has less locations and has compatibility issues that gas stations do not have. Even if most Americans dont use the full capabilities of their ICE car, why would they pay more for a less capable EV?

What about a long day trip or a weekend camping trip not in a cabin, which I do all the time. For the day trips I will be sleeping at home, so I don't want to have to take an extra day to charge my vehicle overnight. And for weekend trips camping there is again no place to charge when your in the middle of the woods, mountains or deserts. And a 120V outlet is going to be slow. Seriously why would I spend 30,000 - $50,000 on an electric car when it's less capable than my current vehicle?

Ohh so I need a specific brand of car so I can use a specific charger, and If I leave the interstates I have to be very careful about where I can charge? Also I'm not counting anything that is not a fast charger, I don't want to have to wait somewhere for hours to charge my vehicle.

Edit:

Do the downvoters really think the above scenario is acceptable? Being limited on where you can go, what chargers you can use and the increased time to go places?

> This is like asking how to tow the Space Shuttle with your pickup truck. It can be done (Toyota did it with a Tundra pickup for marketing), but no one is selling into a market to do so.

Sorry but that's a ridiculous comparison, I just want to be able to drive to places my current gasoline vehicle can travel to, but in an electric car. Also there are large numbers of people out west camping, climbing, skiing, etc on all sorts of remote backcountry roads far from services. Its the reason many of us live out here.

> Define "middle of nowhere", I guess? Not a lot of places, even in Utah and Wyoming, are more than 100mi from an interstate.

In Utah and Wyoming you can be on the interstate and still be far from a gas station[1]. I don't think most people who don't live out west are aware of how remote parts of this country truly are.

[1]: https://www.deseret.com/2013/9/23/20526064/about-utah-no-bul...

Exactly, I want to go visit the Deep Creek Mountains in western Utah, and I've heard that bringing your own gasoline is a good idea because of just how far the Deep Creeks are from a gas station or civilization for that matter. I love exploring the deserts of Utah, and that just wouldn't be possible with current electric vehicles.

15 year old cars might be better economically. But if your in a car accident, your definitely going to want to be in a modern vehicle.

You know you can stop in a gasoline powered car and take breaks if you want or feel tired. But I cant imagine being forced to take an extra 1-1.5 hours whether I want to or not.

According to the Bloomberg tracker[1] the United states has given 24.9% of the population at least one shot and 13.5% two shots. The EU has given 8.7% one dose and 3.8% two doses. The United States is administrating 2.5 million doses a day and the EU is administrating 1.1 million doses a day, although the EU has a larger population. Also the rate of vaccines administered in the EU is down from 1.5 million a day from the prior week, while the US rate is going up. So severely behind seems about right.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...

> It must be far less than is needed for mining the uranium needed to generate the same power. Think about it; the copper required for the wind turbines is a fixed one-off cost that lasts the lifetime of the turbine, and can be recycled. Nuclear reactors need a continual supply of uranium (about 27 tonnes per year for a 1GWe reactor: http://bit.ly/3voR0II).

A single wind turbine can contain 3.6 tons of copper[1], so using your source for uranium used by a nuclear power plant in one year. Just seven and a half wind turbines use as much copper as a nuclear power plant uses uranium in one year.

If you replaced the ~100GW of nuclear power capacity in the United States you would need about 360,000 tons of copper. It would take the current US nuclear fleet ~133 years to use the equivalent amount of uranium. The above also assumes that wind turbines runs at 100% capacity which we all know they won't. So your going to need an additional 2 - 4 times more turbines and copper to replace the current US nuclear fleet.

> Furthermore copper concentrations are typically around 100 times higher than uranium concentrations, which means you need far more uranium ore than copper ore to produce the same weight of metal. Copper has been extracted with relative ease for thousands of years.

Also copper concentrations in typical copper ore is not 100 time greater than uranium concentrations. Copper concentrations are about 0.6%[2] and uranium is 0.1% - 0.2%[3].

[1]: https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1281864/soaring-cop...

[2]: https://www.geo.arizona.edu/sites/www.geo.arizona.edu/files/...

[3]: https://www.ippnw.org/pdf/uranium-factsheet3.pdf

What are you talking about? Wind turbines use substantial sums of copper and that requires mining on a scale much larger than uranium mining.[1]

[1]: https://copperalliance.org.uk/knowledge-base/education/educa...

> Your points about mining are a bit beside the point. I don't actually disagree that the mining sector needs to be cleaned up. But our economy generates demand for lots of things we dig up out of the ground. If anything, it seems that the likes of Tesla are vaguely being responsible here and are actually making efforts to clean up that part of their business by working to source what they need in a sustainable way.

Mining is not besides the point, mining is a potential major bottleneck for renewables and has huge environmental costs that should be discussed. Also Tesla is trying to reduce the ecological and human costs of producing battery metals by bringing production/mining to North America, and switching to battery chemistries that don't use cobalt. However those non cobalt battery chemistries use lots of nickel. Also it is becoming extremely difficult to start a mine in the United States. Polymet has been trying to get their copper/nickel mine permitted for over a decade, if you include exploration, which started in the 80's, this project has been going on for decades. Starting a new mine is a very slow process and as the whole world switches to clean energy, demand will surge and new mines will be needed.

> You seem to imply that a scale change is needed on the mining front to bootstrap renewables. I doubt that that's as big of a deal that you seem to imply.

There is plenty of research, articles and information about the incoming surge in demand for metals due to the switch to clean technologies. For example this report from the world bank says that production of some metals would need to increase by nearly 500%[1]

[1]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/05/11/m...

> What about the hidden cost of nuclear? The waste storage. The security measures (can't have terrorists walking off with the nuclear waste). The constant need for inspections, audits, etc. And that's before you consider the corruption and the gravy train that is basically associated with funding existing plants using massive amounts of public funding.

Nothing wrong with pointing out issues/costs with nuclear, in fact it's good to point out the issues with nuclear so it can be properly weighed. I'm just trying to point out issues/costs of only using renewables, so we can weigh those as well.

> Nuclear being too expensive is the main point of this article. That seems upsetting to a lot of nuclear proponents. But I don't see a lot of arguments to counter that core point.

I think your missing the point. If you ran your entire grid on just solar and wind, no nuclear, or coal or natural gas peaker plants, you'll find that wind and solar is no longer cheap, and is much less resilient to exceptional circumstances.

> I don't get your argument about mining.

My point about mining is, our current course to fighting climate change relies entirely on mining, were making the switch from the Oil and Gas industry to the Mining industry for our energy and transportation markets. This change is going to have huge impacts on the world, mines are quite capable polluters of the local environment, setting up mines in developed countries can take a decade or more, which is the same problem nuclear plants face. Mining is also quite controversial for many good reasons, so there is significant push back from locals and environmental groups whenever and wherever a mine is proposed. All of this means a huge portion on mining takes places in countries with lax environmental and or human rights standards, which just exacerbates the problems.

Uranium mining seems hell of a lot better than Copper/Nickel mining[1]. Not only is the scale of copper and nickel needed for wind and solar vastly greater than the amount of Uranium needed, but Copper/nickel mines have all the same issues with leaching heavy metals and arsenic, just on a larger scale. And wind turbines use a lot of copper[2], so I'm fine with looking into the costs of nuclear energy through uranium mining if we also calculate the costs of mining from Wind, Solar and grid storage.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_mine_drainage

[2]: https://copperalliance.org.uk/knowledge-base/education/educa...

Wow, what a simplistic look at nuclear vs renewables. They don't even begin to look into the "hidden" costs of renewable energy. They fail to mention or include the costs of new transmissions lines, bringing new mines onboard, building grid storage, etc.

If we forgo nuclear power the only other currently viable carbon free, stable, energy source is hydro power, which has huge environmental costs and immense public resentment/push back. For example look at the James bay hydro project[1]. 11,500 km2 of land flooded, intense protest from the Cree and other first nations as well as conservation groups, increases in mercury levels in fish populations, etc. Expanding hydro power enough to handle base load energy use is unlikely, due to the above costs and push back.

So if we can't expand hydro or nuclear then we have to go all in on wind and solar plus grid storage. We could use pumped hydro but that brings about many of the same costs/problems as hydro power. That leaves us with over building wind and solar, and adding huge amounts of transmission lines and batteries to account for the variability. Add in the switch from ICE cars to electric and the amount of new metals needed is going to be immense.

I've also noticed that every time a new transmission line or mine is purposed in the United States their is immense push back from environmental and conservation groups, and from the public as a whole. For examples of this look at the fight over adding new transmissions lines in southern Wisconsin[2] or the intense opposition to mining the Duluth complex[3] in northern Minnesota[4]. The Duluth complex is the largest untapped copper and nickel resource in the world and Polymet has been trying to get permits for well over a decade to mine. Copper and nickel are greatly needed for renewable energy and batteries, and it could still be another 4 or 5 years if it ever happens.

Not using nuclear energy is just going to massively exacerbate the transmission line and mining problems as well as increase the prices of renewable energy. Wind and solar is "cheap" because we don't factor in the added transmission lines, and natural gas peaker planets needed to currently make it happen. Also many of the groups pushing for wind and solar + batteries also happen to be against adding additional mines and transmission lines required to make it happen, and honestly you cant really blame them, mines can pollute local water supplies and transmission lines are ugly.

All and all a balanced approach is probably the cheapest and most viable path forward, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, grid storage all working together on the grid.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bay_Project

[2]: https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/cardina...

[3]: http://www.miningminnesota.com/duluth-complex/

[4]: https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2020/06/polymet-copper-nickel-...

> So what is cheaper? Manufacturing, setting up, operating, and securing 1000 5 MW plants or one 5 GW plant? It seems like the 5 GW one might be cheaper.

It's not 1000 5MW plants vs 1 5GW plant, each SMR plant would have dozens of smaller cores. Most of the plans I see are in the 300MW - 1100MW range.

> Everyone agrees. But our goal with electricity isn't to make plants, it's to make watt-hours of electricity.

If the goal is to create carbon free electricity then making as many carbon free power plants is exactly how you'd get more watt-hours.

I don't know, the idea that mass manufacturing wouldn't lower the price of something seems kinda ridiculous, you have any examples of a product where mass manufacturing didn't lower the price?

If you said something like "mass manufacturing wont make them cheap enough to be economical", that seems believable, but I'm not sure how you can blanket declare it wont make them any cheaper.

The SMR community does have a lot of hype, but the general idea seems fairly sound. Instead of building huge reactors on site, as basically big one off projects. Instead, mass produce a bunch of smaller modular reactors at a factory. That doesn't seem much different than a modular home vs a custom home to me, with the modular home being way cheaper. But we will see if it actually works.

But for me the biggest issue is, if fighting climate change is so important, why wouldn't we try everything possible? Why do so many people insist on only renewables?

> Hell their API’s are providing a longer forecast than the actual website. That’s silly.

forecast.weather.gov doesn't show longer than 7 day forecasts because forecasts beyond 7 days are not very accurate[1]. So why show something that has a 50% chance of being wrong?

[1]: https://scijinks.gov/forecast-reliability/

> Their website only publishes a subset of their API data so that missing data is provided to 3rd parked and curious users but not the public.

The majority of the data available to download is superfluous to most people hence why only a subset is shown on any weather app or website including forecast.weather.gov or Accuweather or whatever.

> It’s reasonable to separate providing data to providing data to the public

The NWS actually does provide visualizations for most of their data, and at this point I feel you don't know much about weather data/forecasting and are just looking to argue online. I provided a bunch of links below that allow curious people to look through American model data without having to use a company or having to program their own software. This list doesn't even include free to use apps/sites made by companies. American weather data is easy to access and view for free, Where as European model data is harder to access because you have to pay for it.

[1]: https://www.ready.noaa.gov/READY_animations.php

[2]: https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/

[3]: http://weather.utah.edu/

[4]: https://prism.oregonstate.edu/

[5]: https://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/nsa/

[6]: https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snow/

> Didn't downvote myself, but if I had to lay money on it, I'd guess that you got downvoted for not providing links to the raw NOAA data? Sources FTW.

Yeah probably true, I didn't post a source because I thought it was common knowledge which in retrospect I'm not sure why I thought that.

And I'm glad you enjoyed the links, when I first started looking into the raw NOAA data and PRISM[1] data it took a bit to figure out what to do with it. But I've found the GDAL library helpful for parsing various weather data formats, and there are a lot of them[2].

[1]: https://prism.oregonstate.edu/

[2]: https://gdal.org/

> The first link is useable but hardly designed to maximize views by the general public.

So you admit that forecast.weather.gov is usable to the general public, but because it "doesn't maximize views" its some how invalidated? You said above that the public shouldn't need to use an intermediary to get a weather forecast and that's exactly what forecast.weather.gov is. And not only that but its faster and better than the for profit apps such as Accuweather, Weather.com, Weather Underground, etc.

> This isn’t some major expense, even 3% of their budget spent on communicating with the general public would easily cover several clean apps etc. Instead, it’s clear their largely a giant subsidy for private profit. Other government agencies charge for this kind of large scale data access by private companies to lower costs to taxpayers by removing subsidies.

3% of a multi billion dollar budget is a lot of money also why would they waste money on a "several clean apps" as you put it when they already have a working weather forecasting app and that money could be used to address issues like the bandwidth one described in the article above, or updating weather models? It sounds like you just want a fancy new app even though they already have a working one.

> By use I am referring to people directly using NOAA or other government apps/websites to directly access it without intermediates. Other companies repacking that same data bring very little to the table.

Huh? Did you even look at the links I provided above? They are literally what your talking about. One is a free government run website that any person can use to get a weather forecast, the other is a free government run website where any person can download raw weather data and use any way they like. So no intermediates or companies required.

Why are people downvoting my comment above? It's true you can download the raw NOAA data, just go here if you don't believe me: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datas...

And if your not able to use the raw data go to the NWS site which displays it in human friendly form: https://www.weather.gov/

Silly Accuweather, I've heard meteorologist refer to anything beyond 10 days as "fantasyland", because forecast that far out are not really accurate.

I just use https://www.weather.gov/ because its not bloated. Unfortunately it doesn't have 10 day forecasts and I believe the reason they don't show 10 day forecasts is because they are not very accurate. That far out your better off looking at forecast ensembles and looking at what the Euro, Canadian, as well as the GFS model is forecasting. But no common, free weather websites I'm aware of exposes that info. If you live in the west you can use this site to a degree[1], although its more targeted to snow/ski forecasting.

[1]: http://weather.utah.edu/

Why would you pay for Accuweather forecasts? You can use their website for free, they just have a bunch of dumb ads.

Although I agree I like NWS way more than Accuweather or weather.com, etc, and I would be sad if NWS were forced to take it down.

You can just go to national weather service site which uses NOAA data and it's quite human friendly[1]. Also I don't understand how you can call the raw data not very useful, when it's literally the backbone of weather forecasting in this country. Every weather forecasting app uses the raw NOAA data, its there for you to use as well[2]. The hardest part of using the raw data is the learning curve related to meteorological programing, not getting access to the data.

[1]: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=40.76031000000...

[2]: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/data/global-forecast-system/access...

NOAA already provides the data to the general public, its all there, so I'm not sure about the "if" in your first sentence.

Did any non island democracy do well? Also just to note I'm including South Korea as an "island" as its effectively one being a peninsula and its only land border being with North Korea.

Edit: Also, one of the main reasons vaccines were able to get through trials so quickly is precisely because countries like the United States, Brazil, the UK, etc did so poorly handling the pandemic. Doing phase 3 drug trials in a country that successfully dealt with SARS-COV-2 such as Australia would take significantly longer.