Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Fossil Fuel Reality Check

 The USA consumes 13 million barrels of oil PER DAY for transportation.

The amount of energy in 13 million barrels of oil is 7.95322216e+16 joules.

That's a daily average power (joules/second) of 920511824074.074074074 Watts. (920 gigawatts)

A nuclear reactor produces about 1 gigawatt of power.

Therefore, to replace fossil fuels with nuclear will require around 920 additional nuclear reactors just for transportation "fuel"--obviously this is based on an extremely simple model of how power is produced, used and transmitted, etc... (There are currently 55 nuke plants in the US). That's roughly 20 nuclear power plants per state, of course, more in the bigger states, less in the smaller states, obviously. There's currently no way to dispose of spent fuel rods safely, and I doubt there will ever be a way to dispose of that waste economically in a safe way. Clearly, that is not going to happen.

A very large amount of solar panels are produced and installed per year. In the USA, something like 15 gigawatts is added per year, i.e. 1.6% of the amount of power needed per day for transportation; really 0.8% because the sun is only out during the day time. How many panels are needed to support quick charging at 150 kWatts? I guess 750 x 200 Watt panels at noon would work for that task. That's around $150,000 for just the panels that could support fast charging one car at a time. Lol.

The math is pretty bleak. There's no feasible energy "transition".

We might end up with a very different mix of vehicles on the road, which probably makes a lot of sense, and that will be in the context of a completely different economy than today. That will be extremely violent transition that kills a large portion of the population and I doubt anyone from the current top of the pyramid is going to make it into the new thing.


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