Yes it will be. There are many many more externalities to using cars as primary transit than their CO2 output. Noise, land use, inefficient use of energy in terms of kWh/personmile, microplastic from tires, accidents,...
Hey, maybe you're right! Maybe we should stop using cars! Maybe you've convinced a couple of people to do that right now! Now convince 100 million US voters! Politics is the 'art of the possible'. That's what we're discussing!
There’s such things as mass transit that’s actually quite ok at solving that problem
But none of our cities in North America have been built with that in mind. Convince 100 million US voters to move to transit-serviceable neighborhoods.
Now, if you mean “we cannot all live in suburbs and everyone gets a house and a little garden.”, yes, that’s already true
With nuclear, you can continue doing this. Convince 100 million US voters to move out of the suburbs in the next 20 years. Maybe they will?
Heating a house is the least of our issues. Heat is something that we can store fairly easily: Take a large, well insulated tank in your basement, fill it with water (or a better suited liquid, but water will actually do). Heat it up during the day, either using solar panels or electricity driving a heat pump, use it during the night. Works with coolant, too. Insulation is a fairly well understood problem and in such a setting, losses are fairly low.
This is difficult in northern climates, with short days and shallow noontime sun. Or are we asking people to stop living north of some particular latitude? That's a tough sell too!
And its not just the US - politics is reflexive. As soon as your "impose a heavy carbon tax to make oil and gas prohibitively expensive and to encourage the deployment of solar storage" bill gets passed, you can forget about winning the next election - people will vote a guy in who repeals it as soon as it hits their pocketbook and their standard of living drops. Politics is the art of the possible. I don't see how you're going to convince people to vote for this.
I don’t really see how nuclear power is helping you to replace all the fossil fuel cars on US roads with electric ones. Extending mass transit could be done in smaller timeframes given sufficient political will.
Even then power generation for electric cars is really not a major issue with renewables: most cars will be charged during the day when for example solar power is quite abundant. So I don’t recognize the argument for nuclear power here.
I don’t really see how nuclear power is helping you to replace all the fossil fuel cars on US roads with electric ones. Extending mass transit could be done in smaller timeframes given sufficient political will.
political will
Yes! And money! Convince people to vote for that now! Convince 100 million US voters! Anyone who has taken an interest in municipal politics knows how expensive and inefficient it is to service suburbs with transit service. The suburbs themselves are the problem. Just don't tell the people living in them that!
Even then power generation for electric cars is really not a major issue with renewables: most cars will be charged during the day when for example solar power is quite abundant. So I don’t recognize the argument for nuclear power here.
On cloudy days, in the winter, do you just not go to work? Does everyone stay home from work? Or does everyone draw from the utility-scale storage to charge their cars? 3TW doesn't include cars - presumably we need to store power for them?
Hey, maybe you're right! Maybe we should stop using cars! Maybe you've convinced a couple of people to do that right now! Now convince 100 million US voters! Politics is the 'art of the possible'. That's what we're discussing!
There’s such things as mass transit that’s actually quite ok at solving that problem
But none of our cities in North America have been built with that in mind. Convince 100 million US voters to move to transit-serviceable neighborhoods.
Now, if you mean “we cannot all live in suburbs and everyone gets a house and a little garden.”, yes, that’s already true
With nuclear, you can continue doing this. Convince 100 million US voters to move out of the suburbs in the next 20 years. Maybe they will?
Heating a house is the least of our issues. Heat is something that we can store fairly easily: Take a large, well insulated tank in your basement, fill it with water (or a better suited liquid, but water will actually do). Heat it up during the day, either using solar panels or electricity driving a heat pump, use it during the night. Works with coolant, too. Insulation is a fairly well understood problem and in such a setting, losses are fairly low.
This is difficult in northern climates, with short days and shallow noontime sun. Or are we asking people to stop living north of some particular latitude? That's a tough sell too!
And its not just the US - politics is reflexive. As soon as your "impose a heavy carbon tax to make oil and gas prohibitively expensive and to encourage the deployment of solar storage" bill gets passed, you can forget about winning the next election - people will vote a guy in who repeals it as soon as it hits their pocketbook and their standard of living drops. Politics is the art of the possible. I don't see how you're going to convince people to vote for this.