And this presents a unique opportunity to make a dent in the emissions. The US military also runs a large number of high performance nuclear reactors. They are

And this presents a unique opportunity to make a dent in the emissions. The US military also runs a large number of high performance nuclear reactors. They are the organization with the most nuclear know-how on this planet (both bombs and electricity). The US Navy reactors never had a single incident (and this includes leaks and disposal) in their 70 year history. If the Congress mandates them to become net zero emitters, they can build some more reactors and generate all the energy they need. Let's do a bit of back-of-envelope math. I'm using this US Navy study about the feasibility of producing jet fuel out of seawater [1] - capital cost of A4W nuclear reactor [2] = $1200 per kw (page 9, table 5) - power needed for synthesis of 100k gallons fuel / day = 246 MW (page 5, table 2) - for 270 k barrels of fuel per day (entire US military consumption) you need 28 GW of power - at $1.2 BN/ GW that comes at $33 BN - the nuclear reactor is only about 20% of the total cost to synthetically produce the fuel, so we end up with about $150 BN total - in terms of number of reactors, that would be about 100 A4W reactors; by the way these reactors power the Nimitz class aircraft carriers, of which there are 10 active, with 2 reactors each. So there are 20 such reactors active as of now. Making 100 new ones is not impossible - if we spread the total cost of $150 BN over 10 years we end up with $15 BN/year, or about 2% of the US defense budget. [1] https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a539765.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a539765.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4W_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4W_reactor