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How quickly could you pull CO2 out of the air if you were scaled up to make full use of a typical nuclear reactor for the electricity? If you just stored the ou
by DougWebb 7y ago
How quickly could you pull CO2 out of the air if you were scaled up to make full use of a typical nuclear reactor for the electricity? If you just stored the output of that process rather than refining it into gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel, how would that product compare in cost to drilled oil in the same state?
My thinking here is that creating gasoline and selling it for immediate use is at best carbon neutral, and at worst delaying the replacement of that gasoline-burning equipment with an all-electric version. But if your focus was on replenishing raw oil reserves for future (hopefully mostly non-burning) use, you'll be removing CO2 from the atmosphere. To do it at significant scale requires a lot of energy, and a nuclear reactor is much better at providing that level of energy than other zero-carbon sources. The trade-off is nuclear waste, but that's much more containable than the waste from non-zero-carbon energy producers for equivalent amounts of energy. Eventually it could be reprocessed to extract more energy from it as well, until the radioactivity is used up.