On 2 May 2013 00:33, Karl Schmidt <k...@xtronics.com> wrote: > Assuming that charging is free - one can run the numbers and know that > battery powered cars are not > at all practical. The market is driven by people that want to feel good - ( > or superior? ) to > alleviate their guilt of existence. Thus there is a real market. > > The other little detail is that electric cars actually consume MORE fuel per > energy delivered to the > road than ICE cars. There are losses at every conversion and transmission > step.
There is a lot of Lithium available, however. And a lot of Thorium to burn in fission reactors to extract it. And when the batteries are dead, the Lithium is still Lithium, and it is still there. With a fossil-fuel engine all the carbon is just floating about in the atmosphere (or is adsorbed into people's lungs, which may be better or worse, depending on your viewpoint) The estimates are that if everyone in the world had the same energy consumption as the average US citizen, and we switched overnight to Thorium fission, then we would run out of known Thorium reserves in 10,000 years. The number for Uranium is 20 years, but that is pessimistic as the commercial price for Uranium could rise by a factor of 100 without materially effecting the cost of the energy extracted. So Uranium fission can probably work for 400 years. For the whole of my life Fusion has been 20 years away. But given 10,000 years to get it right, I am optimistic we can. [on topic] The big problem with Fusion has been fast real-time control of the containment fields. Moore's law is helping here[/on topic] Electric cars are not clean, but they could be. Electric cars are not practical, but they will be. -- atp If you can't fix it, you don't own it. http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Introducing AppDynamics Lite, a free troubleshooting tool for Java/.NET Get 100% visibility into your production application - at no cost. Code-level diagnostics for performance bottlenecks with <2% overhead Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap1 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
