Which is most technically feasible to scale? Coal? Carbon emissions…cap and trade…coal cleanup costs…coal is an unlikely source of electricity to nearly triple. And, coal has important uses in the manufacture of metals and metal products.

Renewables? If only! But scaling up by a factor of 13 is a formidable challenge. Not in the next twenty years. Not even in the next 50 years.


Nuclear? The USA has 104 operating nuclear power plants. Scaling up by a factor of six would require 624 plants, or 520 new ones to replace crude oil totally. They cost about $4-5 billion each. For this, we would pay $2.34 trillion. We import 10 million barrels of crude every day. We send out of the USA $438 billion annually for purchased crude oil.

We’d pay off the nukes in five years and four months, and then we are ahead more than $1,430 per year for every citizen in America.

Of course it’s not quite so simple…I know that. It’s way oversimplified. But it does place a yardstick on the economics if we could make electric cars powered by nuclear power plants sending electricity into every garage. The Michigan University case for nuclear power. It’s a good summary.