Nuclear is clearly the winner in all this but for the religion in the U.S. of Anti-Nuke. It’s probably one of the reasons people give for hating the French, (though there are a few).

I am sick and tired of people in science doing politics instead of science. Way out in front one has to decide to work harder to learn more about less than anyone else, then halfway to a PhD they turn around and sell out for the cause of Popular opinions and money making studies.

E

I’m pretty sure the politicians who push to get these projects built consider that a feature, not a bug.

Land may be too expensive for solar in some areas. Fortunately that is not too much of a problem in the southern latitudes of the US.

Solar does not have fuel costs but it can have huge capital costs. Don’t overlook the interest on billions of dollars of bonds.

Solar Concentration helps solve the problem of generating electricity at night. For that and some other technical reasons I believe it will prevail over solar panels for utilities. But not for homes and buildings.

Think like engineers and analysts. Build solar at low latitudes where it works best and don’t waste money for prestige installations in the high latitudes. Use fossil fuels generators further North if you can’t get nuclear built or lack reliable wind.

The best single investment, bar none, is building a new grid.

First we know how to build a new grid, the costs are known and controllable. And we know what it will save in power losses. It will also allow power from anywhere in the country to be used anywhere else. Such a grid will let us move the lowest cost power from where it is generated to where it is needed.

Today the worst possible effort is to throw money into US urban transit. Everywhere that has been done in the US we have seen billions of $ vanish in political corruption while the transit system takes several decades to build and doesn’t meet projections when done.

What makes no sense whatsoever is filling the desert up with gigawatt solar capacity. Solar takes a lot of space, second only to wind you get from 100 – 300 watts per square meter depending on the technology.

Someone up there mentioned we will eventually run out of coal. The USA has enough coal and shale to supply our energy needs, – all our energy needs – for 600 years. I imagine in 600 years with technology advancements we would be better able to figure out some other energy source.

Electrifying a rail line does nothing to reduce future variable costs because their is no certainty in future electrical costs. There are still no technological breakthroughs with wind nor solar that will create an environment of certainty to their costs. Sorry to be rude but for the sake of being brief and to the point, such a claim is down right laughable.

In fact in the long run, it stands to reason that all things equal a BTU worth of energy will be priced the same.

BTW – The Russians started electrifying their trans Siberian line back in the 1920s. They only finally finished it.

Oooops. I guess that didn’t work.

Even when we eventually run out of the uranium that we have on the ground in the US, we can mine it, or even take it out of sea water at a cost that is not much higher than the spot price of U was a few years ago. And considering that the cost of the uranium itself is really minuscule, when you look at nuclear cost, we will NEVER run out of reasonably-priced uranium, as long as it continues to rain in the mountains of the world and wash the uranium into the oceans.

Thorium would be useful, but there is an existing infrastructure in place to deal with uranium fuel, and thorium has some quite unique “issues” that would make conversion of nuclear plants to that type of fuel failrly expensive. Not impossible, but until uranium gets VERY expensive, which is highly unlikely for a long time, the only people who will want to go to thorium will be the Indians, because they have a LOT of it. They really want the west to develop the technology and give it to them so that they can then become the Saudi Arabia of thorium.

Not likely to happen.

I used to license nuclear fuel designs for the NRC, and have some experience in this field…

Like wind & solar plants, railway electrification reduces future variable costs (diesel fuel, in this case) at the expense of heavy up-front capital outlays.

I wonder how the ROI of electrifying the U.S. freight railroads would compare with the ROI of wind/solar? I bet it would be considerably better.