The problem with using pure electricity is the fill-up problem. To charge a vehicle in ~5-10 minutes at an electric station, you'd have to push well over 1 megawatt (more like 5) of power into the vehicle's batteries (using some calculations I did a few months ago), and there is no way in hell you're going to see the power infrastructure to do that on a wide scale, plus engineering batteries to sustain that rate of charge (without exploding from overheating) will be difficult. If everyone's fine with taking ~8 hours to fill up their car at home, well, then there's a significant market opportunity for this stuff. But I seriously doubt our society will support that on the market, especially considering people vacationing--what happens when you're driving 800 miles away from home, and you need to continually fill up along the way? Solar sure isn't going to cut it. Moving a heavy vehicle across the highway at high speeds takes a ridiculous amount of power, way more than you get from the sun over the surface area of the vehicle.
Using a material fuel is the most effective way to store energy; liquid hydrocarbons have been the holy grail of portable energy for a long time, as is evident by the fact that we use them right now. When you're pumping gas into your car, if you were to consider the rate of pumping in terms of an equivalent electricity transfer, you're basically transferring energy from the station's storage tanks into your car at a rate of roughly ~5 megawatts. Try doing that with an electric hook-up.
I do agree that nuclear power is the best sustainable long-term method of producing energy for our society, but the resulting power must be packaged in something far more effective than conductive electricity. A nuke plant powering a facility next door which refills tanks of compressed air would be one idea, or one that uses electrolysis to produce hydrogen from water (not the best, but it's an option). I saw something recently where a process was invented to extract CO2 from the air and use it to produce gasoline--naturally this process requires a significant amount of energy input, which is where the nuke plant comes into play. That process is effectively a method of storing nuke-sourced energy inside gasoline. It's carbon-neutral too, since the carbon used to produce that gasoline came from the atmosphere in the first place.
Here's some math to back this up:
Facts-
1 gallon of gasoline contains
131 megajoules of energy, or roughly
36.39 kilowatt-hours.
Assumptions-
A vehicle is to be converted to electric propulsion, whose gasoline operation specifies the following:
15 gallon tank, 30 miles per gallon on average, 20% combustion efficiency (
this is fairly average)
1 gallon of gasoline, at 20% efficiency nets (X=) 7.27 kwh usable power. Assuming the electric motor we're using to replace it operates at (Y=) 80% efficiency (also around average, might be higher), the resulting electric car will have to store 9.0875 kwh (Z) of electricity for every 1 gallon of gasoline the original vehicle could store.
Formula: Z = X * 100/Y (9.0875 = 7.27 * 100/80)
Multiply by 15 gallon capacity, and you need to store 136.3125 kilowatt-hours worth of power.
Wanna charge that? Assuming you're getting 100% efficiency in your charge (which you won't), to charge that in 5 minutes you will need to transfer electricity at a rate of 1635.75 kilowatts, or 1.63575 megawatts. (1 KWH / 60 minutes-per-hour = 60 kilowatt-minutes, transferred in 5 minutes = multiplier of 12. 136.3125 * 12 = 1635.75 kilowatts)
So 1.6MW is less than the 5MW I stated above, but it's still way out of anyone's league for distributable fill-up stations. FWIW, at 240VAC, that would entail transferring 6815 amps worth of current off the power grid. Yikes.
And of course, for academic reasons, consider 15 gallons in 5 minutes:
15 gallons = 36.39kwh/gallon * 15 = 545.85 kilowatt-hours, in 5 minutes = 6.55020MW.
Awesome!! Woo-hoo!!
