It’s already happening. The demand for chicken wings is so great that instead of their being a cheap piece of meat that used to be thrown away the price of them became more expensive than regular chicken. That’s why you see “boneless wings” on so many menus.
Since a nuclear sub costs about 2 to 2.5 billion dollars, it would not be cheap energy. Then you would not have them on patrol either.
(raising my hand) I volunteer to be the one who has to give up ranch dressing.
Nah. Energy providers will still charge you through the nose for the wattage, no matter how cheap or inexhaustible their supply is, on one simple basis : “Do you own and know how to operate a fusion power station ? Thought so.”
Unless you expect every home will have its own cold fusion generator in the basement, of course. I could see a few safety issues with that scenario ;).
You will be treated like a hero, sir.
Well, over 10 years that’s only $200 million a year. And it isn’t as if they cannot be unplugged in a pinch. Or allow them to charge municipal batteries loaded onto barges.
How many nuclear subs (or aircraft carriers, whichever is cheaper) would it take to achieve a combined output equivalent to 10 million barrels of oil a day?
He may even get the Medal of Lenin for it 
An infinite number, since military nuclear reactors aren’t required to conform to civilian safety regulations and would never be allowed to be used.
**Mistaken assumption #1: oil is used to produce electric energy. ** In the US, the use of petroleum distillates to produce electrical energy is negligible. “Petroleum was used to generate just over 1% of all electricity in the United States in 2008.” The situation is similar in Europe, where less than 5% of energy production is from oil.
**Mistaken assumption #2: nuclear-powered vessels have power plants comparable to land-based ones. ** As mentioned above, naval nuclear power plants are designed to produce high-temperature and pressure steam to drive steam turbines which are optimized for mechanical output, not to drive electrical generators. Electrical generating station nuclear power plants are designed to produce electricity as efficiently as possible. These aren’t necessarily conflicting goals, but they do produce different designs. For example, a third of US reactors are boiling-water reactors (BWR), instead of the pressurized-water reactors (PWR) used on almost all vessels. Two-thirds or land reactors are PWR’s, so they are certainly usable for electrical generation, but this does show that land-based designs are driven by different considerations from vessel-based ones.
**Mistaken assumption #3: naval power reactors represent a large and ready resource than can be diverted to other uses. ** It is feasible to use water-based power generation to satisfy land-based electricity needs[sup]1[/sup], that’s *not *the mistaken assumption. The problem is that the total combined capacity of the US nuclear naval fleet is negligible. The 105 land-based nuclear reactors producing electricity in the US have a combined capacity of 100,881 megawatts, or an average of 970 Mwe apiece[sup]2[/sup]. “Reactor powers range from 10MWth in prototypes to 200Mwth in large subsurface vessels to 300 Mwth in surface ships.”[sup]3[/sup] (warning, pdf). the efficiency with which thermal energy can be converted to electricity varies based on the complete plant design[sup]4[/sup]. A conversion efficiency of 33% is very good[sup]5[/sup], so think of naval reactors as producing 67-100Mwe at near-optimum conditions. The US Navy has 10 Nimitz-class carriers, 1 Enterprise-class carrier (soon to be retired), 18 Ohio-class missile boats (14 carrying ballistic missiles, 4 for cruise missiles), 44 Los Angeles-class attack boats, and 3 Seawolf-class attack boats (including the special-warfare-designed USS Jimmy Carter). That gives us a very optimistically-estimated total capacity of at most 5,000 Mwe. This is like adding about 5 new power plants to the grid. The total US generating capacity is 1,010,171Mwe. So taking every US nuclear naval ship out of its current duties and adding them to the grid adds all of *maybe *0.5% extra capacity. Not a huge source of cheap waiting electricity, would you say?
**Mistaken assumption #4: Nuclear-powered naval vessels aren’t doing anything “productive” and diverting them to an economic project is cost-free. **This is the base wrong assumption behind most of the suggestions so far, and explaining all the ways this is wrong would require at least a college semester. Suffice it to say that the predominant economic position of the United States in the post-WWII era is directly related to its predominant security position in that era. Poll a hundred economists and you’ll get 200 opinions, but that said, most of the debate about the size and purpose and deployment of the US military is essentially nibbling around the edges. Any economist or military strategist suggesting we could park the US Navy and still have a secure economic position is laughable.
[sup]1[/sup] For example, MH-1A, a power plant based on a former Liberty Ship used to power the Panama Canal Zone.
[sup]2[/sup]For the interested, Units 1-3 of Palo Verde in AZ top the list at 1,335 MW, Fort Calhoun in NE is lowest at 482 Mw.) (Source: download Appendix A of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Information Digest, 2009–2010)
[sup]3[/sup]Note the difference between Mwe (megawatts of electricity) and Mwth (megawatts of thermal production)!! These numbers are not directly comparable. As mentioned, land based power plants are geared for electrical production, and so rated that way while naval nuclear propulsion is intended to product thermal energy for work, and rated in that way.
[sup]4[/sup]E.g., working temperature, cooling temperature, generator design, turbine design, etc.
[sup]5[/sup] Nero, Anthony V. A Guidebook to Nuclear Reactors University of California Press, 1979, Berkeley, California, p. 259
Well, you could put water paddles on the outsides of the submarines to generate electricity 
Putting aside the naval issue, my question about 10 million barrels of oil a day mostly comes down to conversion of units, right? 10 million bbd produces x gallons of gasoline, which is converted into momentum at y% efficiency. In electric vehicles, it would require z mwe to achieve this level of transportation with electricity.
How does that number compare to our current generating capacity?
You don’t have your own Mr Fusion?
I was just working on that actually. Note that this is not my particular forté, but hopefully Una will correct any errors.
Step 1: What is the energy content of a barrel of oil? This immediately creates our first problem: What do we mean by a barrel of oil? A barrel of Texas Light Sweet Crude, which is composed of hundreds of different types of molecules and refined into hundreds if not thousands of products? Probably not. Let’s then pick a refined product, say, Number 2 fuel oil, a/k/a Diesel fuel, a/k/a, marine gas oil. We’ll use a value of 41Mj/Kg, which is apparently a nice, middle-of-the road number for the range of fuel oils. Fuel oil has a density of 57.4 lb/ft[sup]3[/sup], which converts to 919.46kg/m[sup]3[/sup]. There are 0.159 cubic meters in a US barrel of oil, so 41Mj/kg*919.46kg/m[sup]3[/sup]*0.159m[sup]3[/sup]= 5,993.96Mj/barrel of fuel oil.
Step 2: How much energy is in 10million barrels? 5993.96Mj/barrel*10,000,000 barrels = 59,939,597,400Mj of energy. This is, by the way, a metric buttload of energy, equivalent to 56,811,774,049,000 (or almost 57 trillion) BTU’s. Your 10 million barrels could heat all of North Dakota on a cold winter day with room to spare.
Step 3:How much electricity can we generate with that much energy? First of all, there’s the thermal efficiency issue mentioned previously, so we can immediately reduce the energy to a third of its value to 19,979,865,800Mj. Since 1 watt is 1 joule per second, and you specified that this would be produced over the course of a day, we can multiply by a million (to convert megajoules to joules) and divide by 86,400 (seconds in a day). This gives us 231,248,446,759.26 watts, or 231,248.45Mwe[sup]1[/sup].
Step 4: What is the equivalence of this number in naval nuclear vessels? Above I estimated the entire US nuke fleet producing 5,000Mwe. So it would take a fleet over 46 times as large as our current one to provide this much power.
Step 5: How many miles can electric vehicles drive on this amount of power? We need to go back to the energy produced by our putative oil-burning power stations, that 19,979,865,800Mj above. This is because electric car efficiencies tend to be expressed per kilowatt hour. Converting Mj to kwh gives us 5,549,962,722.20kwh. The Idaho National Laboratory gives values of between 2 and 4kwh/mile for electric vehicles. (warning, pdf) Taking the middle value, that means your 10million barrels would produce the power to drive 1,849,987,574.07miles. That’s enough to drive back and forth to the moon almost 4,000 times.
[sup]1[/sup] Note that this is not a real-world number, as it ignores numerous other inefficiencies in the process of converting burnable stuff into electricity. I’m not an expert enough to estimate those other losses, so take this as an upper bound on the energy that can be generated from 10,000,000 barrels of oil.
Despite all the reasons why this won’t work (and it won’t be either “cheap” or a “solution,”) this isn’t quite as far-fetched as some posts imply. My brother tells the tale of a nuclear submarine being worked on in Groton when a sudden power outage struck the town. A suitably large cable was run from the otherwise-idle sub to the town’s power grid and the town was temporarily powered by the boat’s reactors.
More of a stunt to earn local goodwill than a stable fallback plan, but it happened at least once.
Just to add a few more thoughts:
The idea that there are significant numbers of nuclear-powered naval vessels just sitting around, available to do other things, is wrong. Let’s say our military strategy is to have, let’s say for the sake of argument, 10 nuclear submarines deployed around the world at any given time.
Well, for every one submarine deployed, you need one getting ready to deploy by receiving maintenance, training its crew, getting equipment upgrades, and so on. And every so often, submarines have to go in for major work that can take a year or more to complete, like when the reactor needs to be refueled. So if you want to deploy 10 submarines constantly, you probably need 2-3 times that number on hand – that means that up to 30 submarines are always being used to deploy, get ready to deploy, or getting fixed in long-term maintenance. If you take submarines away from that cycle, then you can’t meet your military strategy.
Second, as has been alluded to, submarines’ reactors are not like commercial reactors. The life of a submarine has to be plotted out so that its refueling comes at the proper time – because refueling are really expensive. Like, hundreds of millions of dollars. I’m not kidding.
So, the more we run the reactor to power Groton, San Diego, or where ever, the sooner we’d have to refuel the submarine, and the more times during the submarine’s life it would have to be refueled. Instead of adding one or two refuelings to the life of a submarine, at the cost of a better part of a billion dollars, why not just build commercial nuclear power plants with that money?
To be fair, I did both mention and link to MH-1, which powered the CZ for a time. I didn’t say it was far-fetched, I said what you did: this isn’t a cheap solution.
I think you go off the rails when you make this your step 3. There are x trillion btus in 10 million gallons of oil. Engines burn that at something like 20% efficiency.
An electric motor will convert electricity to mechanical energy at something like 90% efficiency. Less total energy is required to achieve the same mileage.
Certainly possible The take-away, however, is likely unchanged: your figure of 10million barrels of oil a day is a HUUUUUUUGE amount of energy, and there’s no “cheap” way to provide that much power.
How cheap is cheap? Say we were willing to invest $2 trillion. Is that cheap? In the long run, probably.
Yes, but you are neglecting the costs of getting the electricity to the engine.
Transmission of electricity loses 5%-7.5% on average, in getting it from the generation point to homes & businesses. And for mileage in an electric car, you need to have a big bank of batteries in the vehicle; the added weight of those will cost quite a bit of mileage loss.
And this isn’t even considering the feasibility of that much electricity added to the transmission grid – much of the US grid is already heavily loaded, and could not take such a major added load without a good deal of rebuilding.
People will use more of it, until the additional uses render the cost not negligible.
I don’t think so.
Electricity (or any other bounded-by-phsyics input that we desire) will never be “too cheap to meter” because we’ll find more cool things to do with it. The amount of electricity it takes to power my home costs a few hours of wages each month. Just a century or two ago, it would take several hours of work a day to perform a fraction of the work that my appliances do for me. Hell, I could probably light and heat my house (which would be big enough to house a medium-sized family) to the standards of 150 years ago in a half an hour of work a month. That’s bordering on “too cheap to meter” by 1800s standards.
Or consider computation. Computers are many orders of magnitude cheaper than they were in the 1950s. By their standards, computation would indeed be “too cheap to meter”. Yet every year we spend more on computers and energy to power and cool them than the last.
The only stuff that really becomes cheap is the stuff that nobody wants.