Joan, I haven't read all the posts here, but as far as I understand, I'd agree with others that electric cars are far from ready for prime time. Has California backed off of its ZEV deadline? I thought that law was pretty foolish, it wouldn't allow hybrid vehicles, which looks like the best bet for electrics, short term. Plus, it just relocates the pollution and does nothing for greenhouse gases.
As long as I've been reading about electric cars, there's been some wonder battery on the horizon, but they never seem to get any closer to reality, at least on the scale needed to power a car. Lead acid is at least cheap, mature, reliable technology, it'll be a long time before anything new-fangled can match those attributes. Maybe fuel cells or aluminum hydride batteries or something will eventually pan out, but it's still pretty speculative to project that.
On the moderately related topic of nuclear energy, it's fine with me in principle. Pollution wise, it's far, far better than coal, plus no CO2. But, it's expensive, and it's not just the governments fault. Incompetent electric utilities and nuclear contractors had something to do with the problem too. Then there was the cute little WPPS default play in Washington State. The safety issue is overblown, Three Mile Island was a full core disintegration, it required the grossest incompetence imaginable to make it happen, and no harm was done, except in money to the utility. No significant radiation escaped. Chernobyl, nothing like that will ever be built in the west. Waste disposal is a political problem more than anything else. But developing a new generation of plants would require a lot of development, and a lot of capital to deploy, and who's going to pay for it? The government paid for the lion's share of the R&D so far, the chance of that happening again is remote.
Cheers, Dan. |
