Does anyone know how, specifically, building 40 nuclear plants affects our use and dependence on oil?
First of all, we make far more electricity from oil than most people realize. In 2006 (the most recent year I’ve found data for), we consumed 115,370,000 barrels of oil to produce 64,364,000 megawatts of electricity. If everything works right, those plants can be scaled back to emergency-only, with their load being taken up by the electricity generated by those reactors. In 2006, 531,845,000 gallons of fuel oil were used to generate electricity, or about 0.8% of the nation’s total use of fuel oil. And fuel oil was about 27% of what crude was refined into, making electric generation about 0.2% of our total crude oil consumption. “Every bit helps” gives a different view than the “big picture,” eh? At the moment, there are only 24 reactors in the works, with a combined potential capacity of 32,064,000 megawatts, or about half the electricity we’re currently making from oil. While the notion of “40 reactors” was proposed by a politician running for office, he doesn’t seem to be socialist e
Petroleum (i.e. oil) fired electricity generation accounted for only 1.9% of generating capacity in 2006, according to the EIA (official US Govt stats), versus 19.4% for nuclear and 49% for coal. Furthermore, it appears that oil fired plants are quite inefficient are being phased out in favor of natural gas plants, a commodity which is in abundance in North America. The EIA adds that : “Petroleum-fired generation fell 47.5 percent, to 64.4 million MWh and accounted for only 1.6 percent of total net generation. Over the past decade, petroleum-fired electric power generation has declined at an average annual rate of 1.3 percent. The large decrease in 2006 is directly attributable to sustained high petroleum prices following the 50.1 percent price increase in 2005, as petroleum prices declined only 3.3 percent in 2006.” I would guess that it is even less today.
Although there are a few oil-fired power plants, the major sources of electricity in this country are coal and natural gas. Oil is less than 2%. In the short term, adding nuclear capacity doesn’t decrease our dependence on oil, which is used primarily for transportation, though also in manufacturing. It does, however, decrease our greenhouse gas production, a useful goal in and of itself. In the longer term, nuclear power plants will be helpful in powering the next generation of vehicles, which don’t depend on oil. The mechanism of getting power from the (big, stationary) plant to the (small, mobile) cars and trucks is still being worked on. It might be batteries. It might be hydrogen, produced with electricity. It could be ethanol, distilled with electrical power, either in a combustion engine or a fuel cell. Using electricity as a medium also means that we can swap in solar thermal, photoelectric, wave power, wind power, etc. Having many different source
