Featured Future Toyota Prime PHEVs: How much range and performance?

Most counties have set targets .. but no one is making any hard decisions. We think we make progress by, for example, setting EV subsidies but at the same time we are buying ever larger vehicles in record numbers and soon to be EV trucks. We buy hybrid, PHEVs and EV's and that will help ... but it will take 30 years to replace the fleet and vehicles are only one part of the problem.

There is actually very little progress ... and in my view we won't have progress until we start taxing fossil fuels and using the recovered tax to remove the emitted CO2 from the atmosphere .. and this needs to cover all aspects including fossil fuels but also production emissions.

Here in Australia our State Government has announced a $3,000 EV subsidy and everyone is cheering .. but at the same time they approved a new coal mine. The subsidy is meaningless in the scheme of things and in the meantime we keep burning more fossil fuel with no limits.

Another example is Norway .. yes massive subsidies of expensive EV technology ... but the they are digging up fossil fuels at an alarming rate ? Are they making any attempt to address the major part of their emissions ?

I'm not saying the solution is easy .. but we are kidding ourselves if we think we are really making any progress.

 

Norway's electric generation is from hydroelectric. The fossil fuels are nearly all exported. Shutting that down would cause short term pain for many, but long term would just mean someone else pumping more. Perhaps it would lead to some shifting to renewables elsewhere, maybe. It would mean no more funds for Norway's EV and other green energy subsidies.

Norway was the first country to use carbon sequestering commercially. It is real sequestering, not just using the CO2 to pump out more oil or make fizzy water. Doing so let them avoid EU carbon taxes.

Carbon taxes do work to reduce emissions. Reducing them and their sources alone isn't enough. Replacements to those sources need to be available too.

 

You also have places like Finland that have permanent ways of locking nuclear waste embedded miles underground in bedrock

Finland’s Spent Fuel Repository a "Game Changer" for the Nuclear Industry, Director General Grossi Says | IAEA

Several newer documentaries on this, systems like this get rolled into the cost of production and make the waste inaccessible and sequestered far more effectively than co2 capture that can always end up re-released due to unforeseen earthquakes or shifts in the earth

 

Yes older fields are winding down but there is a lot of exploration for new fields.


But the point I'm making is that we are making very slow progress .. even Norway's domestic emissions are not really decreasing and electricity related emissions are on the increase .. presumably due to EV's.

On this site we are all very interested in clean cars, and we jump at things like EV's and subsidies as solutions but the reality is that we are not making hard decisions and so we are not going to make much difference.

 

Maybe nuclear is part of the solution but I don't like the idea of radioactive waster for millions of years. If they can get Fusion to work well that would be ideal ..,

 

I think your last line is a good answer to this.

If you are building PHEVs for people who specifically want PHEVs and you choose to include more of anything and raise the price, you aren't going to lose much for sales. The market wasn't that big to begin with and you aren't changing the scope by much.

When you are trying to sell commuter & family cars to people who buy Corollas and Civics and Camrys and the like, you charge another dollar for an aero door handle and you're already losing sales.

If a given subsidy can't transparently cancel the entire cost delta between a gas car and its PHEV-alike across all types of purchase/lease/rental (including insurance effects) then it probably isn't worth doing.

 

This is where molten-salt, thorium fission reactors have distinct advantages. The highest is separation of the fission products at the reactor into a much much smaller, rapidly decaying mass than the light-water reactors. They don't make fission explosive by-products.

Personally, I would like hydrogen manufacturing be limited to fusion power sources. Solves two problems at once. <GRINS>

Bob Wilson

 

Change needs to go faster. My point was that if there isn't a means to pay for it, or if there isn't enough of the replacement to meet demand, the change will fail.

Hypothetically, if Norway did end oil production, they wouldn't have money to fund their fast switch to EVs, and they'll have more ICE vehicles on the road for longer. Which will emit more carbon than EVs overall. Their lack of oil production likely wouldn't reduce global carbon emissions. Saudi Arabia will just pump more, the US frack more, etc..

Then petroleum also has value beyond fuel for burning. It is used to made other goods. Developing replacements, and expanding their production will take time.

Much of the old fuel can be recycled for reuse in a reactor. One plan for thorium will make use of waste plutonium. Reducing that nuclear waste can be done.

Even without reduction, the amount of high energy nuclear waste is small in comparison to others, like coal fly ash. Containing it can be done. The bulk of nuclear waste is low energy stuff, and a lot of it comes from sources besides the power industry, such as medical.

The coal plants in Australia are exposing more of the population to radiation than nuclear ones would.

 

Why does your profile still show that you are driving a Prius Prime when you traded it in on a Tesla several years ago? It's sort of disingenuous to complain about a car that you barely used and sold 3 years ago.

 

Unfortunately, with today's lousy batteries, the energy to produce the car is so high for a BEV that they end up not being the lowest life-cycle energy consumers. Most of this is due to the energy cost of producing the batteries.

What we need is *good* BEVs with *good* batteries. Unfortunately, that technology does not yet exist. At the moment, going BEV is not the most environmentally-conscious choice, but it is good in another way - bringing awareness to the problem. So maybe the higher carbon footprint of a BEV (vs a PHEV) is worth it for that reason.

For me, the energy use in my life is so vastly dominated by my house that my transportation use is almost irrelevant (well under 5% of my total). This is why I'm spending a lot of time and money improving my house, which was already quite good to begin with. But over the period from May 2021 to May 2022, its energy usage will be reduced by almost half, and I might even take up that half with solar (still deciding).

 

Oh - if you want an efficient vehicle, try an e-bike. My Lectric XP 2.0 has an MPGe of about 2,000 without pedaling. My son and I have been doing many local trips on the e-bikes, including grocery shopping. With saddle bags and such, it's all quite practical for me and uses a ridiculously small amount of energy. A trip to the grocery store 2 miles away and back, for both of us, uses under 100 Watt hours, round-trip. I've had it for just a few weeks and I've already saved 100 miles of driving which, at my average of 200Wh/mile, is 20kWh saved minus the tiny amount the bike has used.

 

Someday nuclear waste may be valuable since it requires no processing for a supplemental fuel in a Thorium reactor

Quite sad we ran Thorium reactors successfully until the early 70’s then completely forgot how to do it.

 

@Lee Jay I'm in the @Richard2005 camp here. I respect your view of what we need, but have little faith, currently, that even if the million mile battery gets released for consumer use, the convenience of the automobile world wide is one of our biggest issues as the planets population continues to rise.
It's an even bigger issue than most of US in the US want to address. As whatever we figure out that should or could be done to bring our own emission under control. there are other areas that have different priorities that can and do eclipse our emissions reductions (if we actually have any that are not purely statistics calculated on paper).

It brings to mind a 10 year old hearing in front of the nuclear regulatory commission, D. Feinstein presiding, concerning bids for a new nuclear waste facility and one contractor guaranteeing the safety of their waste facility for a million years. see where I'm going with this line of reasoning?

 

Actually, no.

I'm of the opinion that we need to do what makes the biggest impact, and that whatever impact happens anyway, we can adapt to. Yes, it's expensive (in both cost and lives) and yes, it's stupid not to do things faster, but it is what it is and we'll persevere. We'll get to 100% renewables sooner or later, hopefully sooner.

 

evolution is not that well understood, even presently.
And adapting to new environmental norms may or may not be as exciting a concept in the future.

 

That takes care of the fuel rods. So what are you going to do with the other 97% of nuclear waste?

 

Biological evolution? We know a helf-of-a-lot about it, but there's a hell-of-a-lot left to know. This is the case with all science. Ever hear the expression that every answer creates two new questions?

Biological evolution isn't the problem with a changing environment. It's societal and technological evolution that's impacted.

 

hmm, low level contamination is usually 0.4bq/kg and coal fly ash can be as high as 300bq/kg

What do we do to dispose of fly ash?


for more contaminated items it’s a waiting game.
“50% of contaminated steel drops to “low levels” in 50 years”

 

@Lee Jay (indeed) thank you for expressing in your terms what I was not able to in my post, given the constraints of my understanding.

 

That amounts to tens of thousands of tons of material that has to be transported, stored, and secured for dozens, hundreds or thousands of years, depending on what it is and what it's contaminated with.