Submitted by Henry Gibson (not verified) on March 5, 2008 - 5:02pm.
Japan has some fuel cells installed at homes, but they don't say the cost. They are only about 2kw. Honda has a similarly performing home system but avoids the fuel cell and hydrogen producing step and uses a long life engine at far lower cost. A straight fuel cell car has to wait for minutes to start, and it costs too much for a fuel cell that has enough starting power for a car, so the car has to be hybrid anyway. Since you have paid for the electric system already, put a battery in the car and one at home or in the office that is charged with the cheapest electricity and you can dump the charge at a fairly high rate into the car battery. Flywheels could be used instead of the stationary batteries and give a very high charging rate. Nuclear power is very cheap once the power plant is paid for. The actual total fuel cost including fabrication of the fuel bundles for a kilowatt-hour is in the tenth of cent range or less. The actual uranium cost is not a significant fraction of this. The US could buy reactors from Canada that can reuse the old fuel rods waiting to be sent to Yucca Mountain without even reprocessing the contained fuel and get at least 40% of the energy that was originally obtained from the rods by the inefficient US reactors. US Reactor's don't have to be efficient because the uranium content of the fuel is very cheap. All the news promoting newer higher efficiency reactors has people ignore the fact that the fuel rods sitting in the pools are cheap and more than 90% of the energy in them is being wasted only because of political decisions based on no or false science. The plutonium left in such rods makes a cheap excellent reactor fuel, but it has the wrong plutonium isotope concentration to even attempt to make an effective nuclear explosion for war use.
The radiation from power reactor plutonium, in the quantities needed, would destroy both the electronics of the bomb and the conventional explosives needed to ignite it and kill any people attempting to construct such a device as if they were using weapons grade Plutonium that cannot be left in a reactor for more than a week. The money spent to investigate the destruction of weapons plutonium from deactivated bombs is wasted; simply mixing it with used, even unreprocessed, reactor uranium fuel in sufficient quantitites allows the fuel to be reused as was the original fuel and makes it immediatly impossible to extract weapons plutonium ever again. But it is much more radioactive to begin with than new uranium fuel rod.
Natural Uranium remains radioactive for billions of years as does the potassium in our bodies and all animal and plant material. No great effort is taken by environmental groups to ensure that no natural uranium is everr leached into the water supply. There is probably enough uranium in seawater to make it useful to extract it from sea water if the price goes up by a factor of five. We do not have to worry about being exposed to nuclear radioactivity, but only high levels of radioactivity. We will always be exposed to the radio-activity of our bodies and that from outer space and the sun. We take simple precautions from being over exposed to sunlight, and simple precautions are all that is needed to protect ourselves from used nuclear fuel. Far simpler and fewer precautions need to be taken than when crossing a street. Propane and chlorine tankers are millions of times more likely to cause death or injury than spent fuel rods in their transport containers. This is also true if they were being transported in the center of a load of sand in a gravel truck.
Making hydrogen with nuclear reactors is a good idea, but not if the electricity could be used for charging car or house batteries. Fuel cells can be used in space or research submarines, but even submarines find them too expensive to buy and operate but use Stirling engines underwater instead with liquid 02 and diesel.
Service stations could also sell fast charging by having large batteries or flywheels ready to charge a car battery at the enormous rate needed for the proposed ten minute recharge, but the sporadic high demand without batteries would be too much for ordinary power service. Twenty-five kilowatt-hours in ten minutes requires a generator or system that can deliver 150 kilowatts or the average load of one hundred houses just for one car. The lights in the neighborhood would dim. The copper in the cables would have to carry about 500 amps at ordinary voltages and be a half inch copper in diameter to avoid overheating. The internal battery conductors would also have to be massive.
Manufacturers who sell full electric cars should be required by law and allowed by statute to have small built in generators for emergency use without the vehicle losing its zero emission status. Never should it ever again be mentioned that such an electric car has limited range. If there were automatic starting large toy airplane engines fitted with alternators and rectifiers available when the Baker electrics were being sold in the 1900's they would have been installed as infinite range extenders; the size required depends on how fast you need to go. RCV makes some large ones. More power requires an OPOC or motorcyle engine as used in the TZERO trailer. No car manufacturer would every install a horse-power dial on a cars dash-board; you pay for 300 but can't use more than an average of ten on the fastest city streets. Horse carriages can obviously do with less than one; as can small cars with good tires and roller bearings. An average of a hundred horsepower would cost you 10 gallons of fuel every hour or about $35 an hour minimum with a standard efficiency engine.
Actual costs of fuel-cells.
Japan has some fuel cells installed at homes, but they don't say the cost. They are only about 2kw. Honda has a similarly performing home system but avoids the fuel cell and hydrogen producing step and uses a long life engine at far lower cost. A straight fuel cell car has to wait for minutes to start, and it costs too much for a fuel cell that has enough starting power for a car, so the car has to be hybrid anyway. Since you have paid for the electric system already, put a battery in the car and one at home or in the office that is charged with the cheapest electricity and you can dump the charge at a fairly high rate into the car battery. Flywheels could be used instead of the stationary batteries and give a very high charging rate. Nuclear power is very cheap once the power plant is paid for. The actual total fuel cost including fabrication of the fuel bundles for a kilowatt-hour is in the tenth of cent range or less. The actual uranium cost is not a significant fraction of this. The US could buy reactors from Canada that can reuse the old fuel rods waiting to be sent to Yucca Mountain without even reprocessing the contained fuel and get at least 40% of the energy that was originally obtained from the rods by the inefficient US reactors. US Reactor's don't have to be efficient because the uranium content of the fuel is very cheap. All the news promoting newer higher efficiency reactors has people ignore the fact that the fuel rods sitting in the pools are cheap and more than 90% of the energy in them is being wasted only because of political decisions based on no or false science. The plutonium left in such rods makes a cheap excellent reactor fuel, but it has the wrong plutonium isotope concentration to even attempt to make an effective nuclear explosion for war use.
The radiation from power reactor plutonium, in the quantities needed, would destroy both the electronics of the bomb and the conventional explosives needed to ignite it and kill any people attempting to construct such a device as if they were using weapons grade Plutonium that cannot be left in a reactor for more than a week. The money spent to investigate the destruction of weapons plutonium from deactivated bombs is wasted; simply mixing it with used, even unreprocessed, reactor uranium fuel in sufficient quantitites allows the fuel to be reused as was the original fuel and makes it immediatly impossible to extract weapons plutonium ever again. But it is much more radioactive to begin with than new uranium fuel rod.
Natural Uranium remains radioactive for billions of years as does the potassium in our bodies and all animal and plant material. No great effort is taken by environmental groups to ensure that no natural uranium is everr leached into the water supply. There is probably enough uranium in seawater to make it useful to extract it from sea water if the price goes up by a factor of five. We do not have to worry about being exposed to nuclear radioactivity, but only high levels of radioactivity. We will always be exposed to the radio-activity of our bodies and that from outer space and the sun. We take simple precautions from being over exposed to sunlight, and simple precautions are all that is needed to protect ourselves from used nuclear fuel. Far simpler and fewer precautions need to be taken than when crossing a street. Propane and chlorine tankers are millions of times more likely to cause death or injury than spent fuel rods in their transport containers. This is also true if they were being transported in the center of a load of sand in a gravel truck.
Making hydrogen with nuclear reactors is a good idea, but not if the electricity could be used for charging car or house batteries. Fuel cells can be used in space or research submarines, but even submarines find them too expensive to buy and operate but use Stirling engines underwater instead with liquid 02 and diesel.
Service stations could also sell fast charging by having large batteries or flywheels ready to charge a car battery at the enormous rate needed for the proposed ten minute recharge, but the sporadic high demand without batteries would be too much for ordinary power service. Twenty-five kilowatt-hours in ten minutes requires a generator or system that can deliver 150 kilowatts or the average load of one hundred houses just for one car. The lights in the neighborhood would dim. The copper in the cables would have to carry about 500 amps at ordinary voltages and be a half inch copper in diameter to avoid overheating. The internal battery conductors would also have to be massive.
Manufacturers who sell full electric cars should be required by law and allowed by statute to have small built in generators for emergency use without the vehicle losing its zero emission status. Never should it ever again be mentioned that such an electric car has limited range. If there were automatic starting large toy airplane engines fitted with alternators and rectifiers available when the Baker electrics were being sold in the 1900's they would have been installed as infinite range extenders; the size required depends on how fast you need to go. RCV makes some large ones. More power requires an OPOC or motorcyle engine as used in the TZERO trailer. No car manufacturer would every install a horse-power dial on a cars dash-board; you pay for 300 but can't use more than an average of ten on the fastest city streets. Horse carriages can obviously do with less than one; as can small cars with good tires and roller bearings. An average of a hundred horsepower would cost you 10 gallons of fuel every hour or about $35 an hour minimum with a standard efficiency engine.