Is it stupid not to use a readily-available and relatively cheap fuel to generate electricity?

Question

Johnny short haul railways do quite well but I don't think the markup is quite 33%.

Answer 1

Yes.  That's why there are so many coal powered plants working very efficiently.  And where I live everyone has a wood stove to help with heat in the winter, with cords of chopped firewood in the shed.  It's cheap, efficient and extremely reasonable.

Answer 2

Coal is the cheapest and with new methods it's safe for the environment.

Nuclear is good too.

Oddly enough, with the high price of oil, the oil shieks would rather sell it than use it, so they are building coal plants for their own power needs.  I think that's rather ironic.

Answer 3

It depends on which fuel you're talking about.

Also, it depends on how you define "relatively cheap."

"Cheap" it terms of which costs?  The dollar value of the labor and machinery we need to remove it from the environment and use it .... today?

Or "cheap" in terms of its total costs to human society AND to the environmentl, and in terms of the costs we pay not ony today, but also for centuries to come?

If you define "relatively cheap" one way, you get one answer. If you define it another way, you get a very different one.

For example, coal and oil today are relatively "cheap" fuels for generating electricity.  But both generate industrial CO2 emissions when burned that have the effect of accelerating "global warming" aka global climate change.  

The CO2 generated from coal use is even greater than that generated from oil consumption, but both of these "relatively cheap" fuels in DOLLAR terms turn out to be horrendously costly in climate terms.

Coal also has the added disadvantage of generating bad air pollution when burned in older electric power plants to generate electricity, and some of the air pollution associated with some coal-fired power plants comes in the form of airborne mercury -- mercury being a brain poison that persists almost forever in the environment.

The mining of coal traditionally has been very costly in terms of human lives lost in mining accidents, and today although the coal mining industry is much safer, this is because the mining companies practice "strip mining" -- in the USA in Appalachia, this often takes the form of "mountaintop removal," in which entire mountains and the adjacent river valleys are leveled, destroying whatever forests once existed there.

"Acid mine drainage" from old coal mines is a powerful and destructive form of water pollution, too, and one that has ruined some Appalachian streams.

It is NOT stupid, therefore, to make a policy of avoiding the "relatively cheap" fuel of coal to produce electric power, because it reality this kind of energy resource is horribly expensive when you take the environmental destruction into account.

If by "relatively cheap" you're referring to the total costs, environmental and otherwise, of solar and wind power, that's another question.  These fuels really are "cheap" in the good sense, although somewhat costly just in terms of dollars.

If you think nuclear power used in electricity generation is "relatively cheap" -- well again, make sure you're looking at the total costs.  

One cost of nuclear-generated electricity that the industry doesn't talk about much is the long-term costs of safeguarding radioactive wastes given off by nuclear fission reactors.  

These wastes generally need to be sealed off from the environment for 5 - 10 radioactive "half lives" before they become safe enough to release for environmental contact and human contact.  The radioactive half life of one important nuclear waste product, plutonium 239, is 24,000 years.

So h ow "relatively cheap" is it going to be, over a period of centuries rather than a period of years, to rely on nuclear power plants that generate waste plutonium 239?  

And even if we can afford the expense of storing this stuff in some kind of sealed receptacle for 120,000 - 240,000 years -- what historical reason does anyone have for thinking that any human government or human corporation or any other human institution will last that long, to safeguard the plutonium wastes the ways they need to be safeguarded?

The other obvious cost to nuclear power that isn't measured only in dollars, but is important to many people, has to do with military security and national security.  

Radioactive wastes stolen by terrorists from a functioning US nuclear reactor might be used to build a so-called "dirty bomb," a device that could spread radioactive contamination and radioactive sickness over, say, Manhattan if some evil terrorist group managed to steal the right stuff and use it the wrong way.

Meanwhile, the same civilian nuclear power plants that produce electricity can also be designed, with some fairly elaborate engineering work, to produce "bomb grade" plutonium that can be employed in making nuclear weapons.

It's for this reason that the US government is enormously concerned about North Korea, for example, having a nuclear power program, and why the US and several European countries are now trying to block future nuclear power development on the part of Iran.

Whether it's fair for the US to enjoy access to nuclear weapons while demanding that the North Koreans and the Iranians not have these weapons is a good question, morally and politically speaking.  But however you answer it, the fact remains that a good nuclear power program can easily become the basis for a nation's nuclear weapons program.

So is nuclear power really "relatively cheap," when we take all of that into consideration.  You be the judge.

Answer 4

coal can be used. it is cheap fuel

Answer 5

There aren't many options as we develop infrastructure to utilize new and advancing technology. As you said, 'cheap' is a relative term and there are environmental implications we have to take into account too.  But in general, yes-it would be stupid to not use readily available fuel to generate electricity.  I'd rather not see a lot of money poured into additional capacity for coal or nuclear generated power if cleaner alternatives such as wind and solar can be brought on line in the same amount of time and are viable.  And with coal, I'd certainly hope they'd avoid topping mountains or other types of environmentally antagonistic methods of mining.

Answer 6

like what????

air, water and the sun..... couldn't agree more.

Answer 7

We do, its called COAL. The price issue with it is transportation, upon delivery to the power plant more than 1/3 the total price of it is for transporting it.

Answer 8

Cost projections for carbon sequestration do not look very good so any claim that coal is cheap rests on very shaky grounds so you obviously aren't referring to coal (well if you just dump the CO2 (and NOx, Mercury, Cadmium, etc) into the atmosphere coal might be able to undercut nuclear fission but no sensible regulator would allow that, since the wastes from coal for the most part aren't radioactive and so will not decay they must be stored forever just like wastes used to make PV cells which are non-radioactive and therefore must be stored forever).

Answer 9

Depends what the fuel is and how available. The gasoline we use now is derived from light, sweet crude oil; it has a high energy content that no other form that can readily be produced has matched. Some other fuels are cheaper to produce, but they will not give the results that the gas we have now delivers. Its all about the energy content in the fuel. Hoped that cleared somethings up. :]

Answer 10

If when we say cheap we are including all of the costs of use, including environmental damage and risks thereof then it is likely wise use that fuel.

Our evaluation of most fuels is based on pricing that does not take into account either unintended damage, and does not make account of the fact that the fuel is under priced based on future needs for the fuel.

Answer 11

What makes humans think they are the only ones that mater,you want someone to grow up, look around you, your not alone on this world , and to say the truth, your a long ways form being important enough to even have an opinion about something of such importants, Idiot.