President Obama during his 2011 State of the Union address stated that we should have one million electric vehicles (EV) in the United States by 2015. The benefits of that would be to to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and to reduce emissions. These are worthy goals. This article will take look at the economic impact of using electric cars, their emissions, and their impact on the electric grid.

By  Suzanne Hobbs

For the majority of human history, people used their own muscles to provide almost all of the work required for survival and development. A thin slice of humanity achieved a moderate amount of personal comfort and leisure because they were able, often through an accident of birth, to control a portion of the daily work output of hundreds to thousands of their fellow humans. The only sources of work-in the engineering sense-that were not either human or animal muscle came from capturing falling water or intermittently by capturing the breezes through devices like cloth sails or wind mills.

Eric Loewen, the American Nuclear Society's vice president/president-elect, appeared on the Fox News Charlotte (North Carolina) television show on January 28 to promote new nuclear energy as part of the push in the United States for clean energy technologies.

In his State of the Union speech on January 25, President Barack Obama advocated a Clean Energy Standard that includes natural gas as well as renewables, nuclear and "clean coal." In my previous post on Clean Energy Standards, I said that if the standard were expanded to include natural gas generation, then the required clean energy percentage would have to be increased substantially in order for the policy to remain meaningful, particularly if gas is given "full credit" (i.e., is treated no differently than non-emitting generation).

See Jim Hopf's previous ANS Nuclear Cafe posts on the Clean Energy Standard (CES) here and here.

A few months ago, I had the honor of leading a class of future engineering leaders at Iowa State University. The dean, Dr. Jonathan Wickert, occasionally asks alums and others who have done interesting things with their engineering degrees to come in and lead the class in a case study. Events in the Gulf of Mexico that started in April 2010 with the Macondo oil spill provided an excellent opportunity to talk about crisis management and communications, with the added benefit of current technology relevance. This is an area that the nuclear industry also needs to study and understand.

Vermont's new governor, Peter Shumlin, was inaugurated on January 6, 2011. He ran as the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant's number one enemy, as he stated.

Can renewables rescue us?

Part 2 of this article, which appeared here on December 29, made the point (in part) that the nuclear power industry sequesters its nuclear "waste," while other power producing industries do not. This capturing of waste products matters when calculating the external costs of energy technologies.

Where does waste = external costs?

Wind turbines are now a politically popular way for generating emission-free electricity for the grid. There are now windmills operating in many parts of the United States and more of them are proposed.

This year's North American - Young Generation in Nuclear (NA-YGN) continental conference was held in May and was themed "Leading the Change: Go Green." Participants learned that the future of electricity production in the United States would be heavily influenced by the desire to combat global warming. This desire is starting a national debate on how the country should select technologies for new electricity production facilities.