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The very concept of climate change has been so politicized in the US, I see any efforts to discuss it as extremely unlikely to have a positive outcome. However,

The very concept of climate change has been so politicized in the US, I see any efforts to discuss it as extremely unlikely to have a positive outcome. However, I do see a discussion which could be had, which results in effectively the same actions, that doesn't mention this topic... resource depletion. We're out of easy to reach oil, the amount of energy required to pump a barrel of oil out of the ground has been rising steadily since the first commercial wells. If we want to have a prosperous future for our grandchildren, we owe it to ourselves to divest away from fossil fuels before we're forced into it. Nuclear power with a closed fuel cycle (where old fuel is reprocessed and re-used) can deliver the power we need for generations to come. It has been show that the amount of power a person has per capital is roughly proportional to wealth, let's make power more affordable, and give everyone a better future.

LatteLazy 4y ago
The issues with nuclear are the same ones you mention as oil only worse: It costs vastly more per kWh to get energy from nuclear than it does from Oil (or gas or other fuels). And if you think getting people to agree on climate change is hard, try getting them to agree on big subsidies for nuclear, let alone agree to have plants (and waste stores) built on their districts...
- mikewarot 4y ago
  We're not about to run out of Uranium, we've got tons of it just sitting around, waiting to be reprocessed. We also don't have to drill down 10 miles, then turn sideways to find more of it. Nuclear just needs the fuel cycle to be closed again, as it was originally intended to be. The technology is known, and well proven, we just need to deploy it.
  - LatteLazy 4y ago
    The problem is you will run out of money long long before we run out of fossil fuels. And closed fuel cycles are great but they're even more expensive, and you're still going to end up with at least some waste. People think there is an easy simple answer to this. But there isn't. People think it's nuclear, and it is if you ignore the costs, the waste and the political issues. But then fossil fuels are a great solution... if you ignore all the issues.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    "We just need". But we don't. That is absolutely not a thing we need, and doing it would steal time and money away from what we really do need to do instead.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  If you include air pollution and carbon, the price of nuclear is more than competitive with coal. And the electricity it generates can do lots of things cheaper and cleaner than unsubsidized oil and gas can (EVs and heat pumps) and it pretty fungible. So, it's incorrect to say nuclear is more expensive, it's just easier to trace the costs compared with fossil fuels. That might be a hard political argument to make when the government is controlled by the people getting the fossil fuel subsidies from everyone else and using them to buy politicians, but if we're talking about global civilization collapse, then we can't just sweep those things under the carpet and ignore them.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Coal could turn out to be the most expensive fuel ever. That depends on whether we avert disaster. Similarly, when the nukes are mothballed, long before their design life is over because their power is too expensive to find any buyers, the actual cost of each kWh produced up to that end will balloon out of sight, as the exorbitant construction cost is suddenly amortized over much less energy. But comparing nukes to coal is pointless. Wasting money building nukes instead of the much larger amount of renewables the same money could buy brings catastrophe nearer. Burning coal for ten years while the nuke is built brings catastrophe nearer. To avert catastrophe, we will need to build out renewables radically faster than we are doing this far. And, we will need to build out factories for the equipment we will also need, particularly hydrogen and ammonia synthesizers to provide portable fuel for vehicles that cannot rely on batteries.
    - njarboe 4y ago
      I bet nukes, wind, and solar have very different material needs so ramping up all of them as fast as possible should be the course of action. Why exclude nuclear?
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Money is fungible. Our industrial capacity could cope with a great deal more activity than it will be devoting to building renewables. But money directing it to that activity, and not some other instead, is the limiting factor.
bmitc 4y ago
And also, climate change is not even really the issue. It's environmental and ecosystem change that is the real disaster looming. Wildlife, especially pollinators, and native plants, which affects wildlife, are in serious danger. Their eradication has little to do with climate change and more to do with people replacing habitat with lawn wastelands that never get used. It's gonna be real hard to grow crops without pollinators and the ecosystems they're a part of.
- scaramanga 4y ago
  It wouldn't matter even if we had them, we've destroyed 40% of the earths topsoil and the rest will be gone within the lifetime of people alive today. It takes thousands of years to regenerate topsoil. https://www.unccd.int/news-stories/press-releases/chronic-land-degradation-un-offers-stark-warnings-and-practical https://www.unccd.int/news-stories/press-releases/chronic-la...

LatteLazy 4y ago

The issues with nuclear are the same ones you mention as oil only worse: It costs vastly more per kWh to get energy from nuclear than it does from Oil (or gas or other fuels). And if you think getting people to agree on climate change is hard, try getting them to agree on big subsidies for nuclear, let alone agree to have plants (and waste stores) built on their districts...

mikewarot 4y ago
We're not about to run out of Uranium, we've got tons of it just sitting around, waiting to be reprocessed. We also don't have to drill down 10 miles, then turn sideways to find more of it. Nuclear just needs the fuel cycle to be closed again, as it was originally intended to be. The technology is known, and well proven, we just need to deploy it.
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  The problem is you will run out of money long long before we run out of fossil fuels. And closed fuel cycles are great but they're even more expensive, and you're still going to end up with at least some waste. People think there is an easy simple answer to this. But there isn't. People think it's nuclear, and it is if you ignore the costs, the waste and the political issues. But then fossil fuels are a great solution... if you ignore all the issues.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  "We just need". But we don't. That is absolutely not a thing we need, and doing it would steal time and money away from what we really do need to do instead.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
If you include air pollution and carbon, the price of nuclear is more than competitive with coal. And the electricity it generates can do lots of things cheaper and cleaner than unsubsidized oil and gas can (EVs and heat pumps) and it pretty fungible. So, it's incorrect to say nuclear is more expensive, it's just easier to trace the costs compared with fossil fuels. That might be a hard political argument to make when the government is controlled by the people getting the fossil fuel subsidies from everyone else and using them to buy politicians, but if we're talking about global civilization collapse, then we can't just sweep those things under the carpet and ignore them.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Coal could turn out to be the most expensive fuel ever. That depends on whether we avert disaster. Similarly, when the nukes are mothballed, long before their design life is over because their power is too expensive to find any buyers, the actual cost of each kWh produced up to that end will balloon out of sight, as the exorbitant construction cost is suddenly amortized over much less energy. But comparing nukes to coal is pointless. Wasting money building nukes instead of the much larger amount of renewables the same money could buy brings catastrophe nearer. Burning coal for ten years while the nuke is built brings catastrophe nearer. To avert catastrophe, we will need to build out renewables radically faster than we are doing this far. And, we will need to build out factories for the equipment we will also need, particularly hydrogen and ammonia synthesizers to provide portable fuel for vehicles that cannot rely on batteries.
  - njarboe 4y ago
    I bet nukes, wind, and solar have very different material needs so ramping up all of them as fast as possible should be the course of action. Why exclude nuclear?
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Money is fungible. Our industrial capacity could cope with a great deal more activity than it will be devoting to building renewables. But money directing it to that activity, and not some other instead, is the limiting factor.

bmitc 4y ago

And also, climate change is not even really the issue. It's environmental and ecosystem change that is the real disaster looming. Wildlife, especially pollinators, and native plants, which affects wildlife, are in serious danger. Their eradication has little to do with climate change and more to do with people replacing habitat with lawn wastelands that never get used. It's gonna be real hard to grow crops without pollinators and the ecosystems they're a part of.

scaramanga 4y ago
It wouldn't matter even if we had them, we've destroyed 40% of the earths topsoil and the rest will be gone within the lifetime of people alive today. It takes thousands of years to regenerate topsoil. https://www.unccd.int/news-stories/press-releases/chronic-land-degradation-un-offers-stark-warnings-and-practical https://www.unccd.int/news-stories/press-releases/chronic-la...