Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Will electric cars kill gas stations?" video.

  1. 5
  2. Even taking transmission loss into account, you're still making gains on miles-to-polution-generated by switching to electric, even using Coal plants, which are pretty awful, due to scaling factors in the generation process. Heck, if I understand correctly, just dumping the fuel that would have gone into car engines into a properly designed power plant instead of an individual engine per vehicle would make a huge difference. (Bad as it is, it's better than coal!) Microgeneration actually loses some of those benefits again. Photovoltaic cells have the same disposal issue as batteries (well, different chemicals, same problem though). Wind is not particularly reliable in most places. Nuclear has a Lot of issues surrounding the existence of nuclear weapons to deal with (both the desire for the military to have materials for nuclear weapons, and the desire to then Not let anyone Else have said materials, for obvious reasons), and has the issue that, if an accident Does occur, about the only thing worse, depending how you measure it, is being directly down stream from a hydro electric dam that has just suffered a catastrophic failure. Now, obviously, this is vanishingly unlikely with a properly designed, built, maintained, and protected power plant... But really, the USA can't even maintain its highways, bridges, and storm drains reliably. It's far from unheard of to be able to get into the secure parts of nuclear missile silos by pretending to be a pizza delivery guy. For most people, that sort of thing seems like a bad gamble the odds of failure are low, but not zero, and the consequences extreme. Mind you, if anyone ever cracks a practical Fusion generator (rather than fission), it's my understanding that most of the catastrophic failure states become much less... Catastrophic... For the surrounding... Er... Everything. (On an interesting side note, on a day to day basis, Coal plants irradiate their surroundings more than nuclear plants do, as they have little or nothing in the way of measures to actually prevent this.) Improvements are, obviously, always desirable, of course.
    3
  3. 3
  4. 2
  5. 1
  6. 1
  7. 1
  8. 1