9 ms·

There is no chance of removing existing CO2 from Air to make any sort of difference. There is no chance of meaningfully reducing CO2 emissions, because outside

There is no chance of removing existing CO2 from Air to make any sort of difference. There is no chance of meaningfully reducing CO2 emissions, because outside of Nuclear (and hydro/geothermal but only if you have the geography for it) there is no alternative to replacing fossil fuels. At some point the public will realize the lie of solar/wind as a replacement. We lost 50 years of greatly reduced emissions had nuclear power continued to be rolled out at the same rate as it did in the 60s/70s. There is possibility of geoengineering (e.g. emitting some sort of sun-light reflecting gas into the atmosphere to cool the climate) but that suffers from a potential "law of unintended consequences". It seems like we're going to have to deal with it.

doublerabbit 4y ago
> there is no alternative to replacing fossil fuels. At some point the public will realize the lie of solar/wind as a replacement. What lie exactly? Scotland had produced enough to power itself twice on Wind alone. [1] How is nuclear a better alternative than Wind or Hydro when - Nuclear is extremely dangerous with toxic waste needing special storage facilities. Criminal & Environmental contamination risks. - Disaster if the plant is to be damaged - Chernobyl / Fukushima / Ukraine-Russia war - You need an external power source to kick-start a nuclear station on top of requiring uninterruptible power supply - Fossil Fuels - You need a large water source for cooling, extracting, processing - Limited Resource Thorium reactors are a dream away, nice but not feasible as of the moment. [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/scotland-wind-power-on-shore-renewable-energy-climate-change-uk-a9013066.html https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/scotland-w...
- macspoofing 4y ago
  >What lie exactly? Scotland is producing enough to power Scotland twice itself on Wind alone. No they aren't. This is at best misleading, at worst, a blatant lie. What is happening is that on days with strong winds, they are overproducing wind energy but ONLY at certain times of the day. When they overproduce this energy, they cannot store it for later (because there is no battery technology today, or in the near-to-mid future that is able to store that amount of energy), and they cannot give it away, so they lose it. This kind of headline is very very common. This is how the public is continually lied to and thinks that wind/solar is just around the corner. It isn't. It's never going to be. >Nuclear is extremely dangerous with toxic waste needing special storage facilities. Destruction if the plant is to melt-down. (chernobyl)? You need an external power source to power a nuclear plant. Nuclear also requires uninterruptible power. If you don't like nuclear ... fine, but there is nothing else. So now what? >Thorium reactors are a dream away, nice but not feasible as of the moment. Agreed. Also Fusion is a pipe-dream at this point in time. So now what?
  - gitfan86 4y ago
    Manufacturing, refining, and AI improvements are going to reduce the price of batteries by another 90%
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > Manufacturing, refining, and AI improvements are going to reduce the price of batteries by another 90% This is a pipe dream. Battery demand will be astronomical for decades to come. That means ramping up supply and prioritising deployment via price signals.
      - gitfan86 4y ago
        Your logic is backwards, it is the demand for batteries that will make them cheap. Just look at the actual data https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > it is the demand for batteries that will make them cheap This isn’t how supply and demand work. Demand can induce scale efficiencies in production, which lowers costs. That’s what’s happening in your link, which tracks through 2018. In 2019, electric car sales shares rose globally and non-linearly [1]. We persist on that path. As a result, battery costs are spiking [2][3]. [1] https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/ad8fb04c-4f75-42fc-973a-6e54c8a4449a/GlobalElectricVehicleOutlook2022.pdf https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/ad8fb04c-4f75-42fc-... page 15 [2] https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-to-an-average-of-132-kwh-but-rising-commodity-prices-start-to-bite/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-to-an-a...
        gitfan86 4y ago
        It is exactly how supply and demand works, lithium refiners are making huge profits, which causes more investment in refining capabilities which unlocks larger economies of scale. If you don't understand this please just circle back to this thread in 5 years, and I can show you what actually happened.
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
  > Nuclear is extremely dangerous with toxic waste needing special storage facilities. I don't think this is true. Nuclear power plants generate relatively little waste and we know how to store it safely.
  - doublerabbit 4y ago
    We may how to store it safely, but still doesn't stop it from being a risk. Only takes the contracted company get lax on the upkeep of the facility.
    - feet 4y ago
      So stop contracting the work out. Have a government department handle it instead of just chucking it off to the lowest bidder
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  All the possible "extreme" dangers and disasters have end result comparable with 1 day of using coal at the scale humans are using it. >- You need a large water source for cooling, extracting, processing - Limited Resource Seas are going nowhere. Most NPPs are at the coast.
  - doublerabbit 4y ago
    Salt-water is highly corrosive, you can't use salt-water to power the whole plant. You still need a pure water source.
- JetSetWilly 4y ago
  > What lie exactly? Scotland had produced enough to power itself twice on Wind alone. Doesn't say much for a variety of reasons: - Even in Scotland, there's loads of days where there's "no wind" - on those days electricity has to be generated by gas or other means. So practically speaking as wind cannot be guaranteed it is impossible for Scotland to not generate carbon, via wind alone. - As usual for breathless wind articles, completely fails to account for heating - which in Scotland makes up the bulk of domestic energy consumption and most homes are heated by gas combi boilers. - Also as usual, neglects transport - another huge proportion of energy consumption - Scotland is a best case scenario - it is very windy relative to other countries. It doesn't have a huge population. And as part of the UK national grid it makes sense to build a lot of wind capacity within Scotland. But then looking at statistics for Scotland in isolation doesn't really make sense - it should be done at a UK national grid level rather than trying to gerrymander things. Wind is fine for reducing gas consumption when it happens to be windy. But if you really want to tackle climate change, you need to tackle having a need for gas consumption at all, and wind won't do it.
eloff 4y ago
You can build solar or wind plus some energy storage or long distance transmission to even it out for less than the price of nuclear and with income beginning quickly, not after 10 years. By the time nuclear projects started now complete, solar and wind will be mopping the floor with them ROI wise. Far from being a lie, we're in danger of them becoming the only game in town, for better or worse. Nuclear had so much potential, but we stopped investing and stopped innovating and it's unclear if it can ever catch up again. For our sakes, I hope so. More options are better.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  As long as you build 5-10x redundancy for solar/wind I don't see it, solar and wind are all over the place between the peak and valley outputs. Unless we find a "battery" storage technology that can smooth it out over say a couple of weeks, I don't think countries are going to go for it as the only grid power source. We have nuclear now, and climate change is a huge deal to solve, possibly end of human civilization huge. Note I didn't say solar and wind wouldn't be part of the mix,but as the sole source, it's not going to happen with a 10X or better leap in battery technology (energy density)
  - psadri 4y ago
    How about using solar/wind to synthesis hydrocarbon fuels and use that as the storage medium?
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Where does your 5x-10x number come from? I sense that it's a guess, but the cool thing about stats is that we can actually find a redundancy ratio for a given probability of shortage.
    - anton96 4y ago
      Because at best, Renewables run at 20% percent of their installed capacity comparing to more 80% for nuclear.
jansan 4y ago
To the German Green party, who indulges itself in blaming everyone but itself for all kinds of problems in the world, there is only one thing that is worse than global warming, and that is nuclear energy.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  Ironic because uranium tends to be associated with the colour green.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Nonsense, nuclear is not economically viable.
el_nahual 4y ago
Geoengineering is starting to seem like less of a "possibility" and more of a necessity, because self-sustaining methane emission loops seem to have been unlocked in the artic and tropics. So even if we were to magically stop the emission of new carbon, Earth will likely just keep heating up. And yes, it's hard to prove that runaway warming is happening (data is noisy, and the time is short), but the burden of proof imho has shifted to the other side. There is a known mechanism of action for runaway warming, data that fits runaway warming, and no known mechanism of action for natural dampening of that warming. The question at this point seems to be "why woudlnt' runaway warming happen"? This is a good (if pop-sci) overview of the methane problem: https://www.ft.com/content/9ef195d6-dcc3-4378-bb35-2721981d6416 https://www.ft.com/content/9ef195d6-dcc3-4378-bb35-2721981d6...
- _jal 4y ago
  > Geoengineering is starting to seem like less of a "possibility" and more of a necessity It always was going to end up here. Humans suck at collective action, and especially so on long timescales.
toomuchtodo 4y ago
> There is no chance of meaningfully reducing CO2 emissions, because outside of Nuclear (and hydro/geothermal but only if you have the geography for it) there is no alternative to replacing fossil fuels. At some point the public will realize the lie of solar/wind as a replacement. We lost 50 years of greatly reduced emissions had nuclear power continued to be rolled out at the same rate as it did in the 60s/70s. 25% of electricity in the US was produced with renewables this year, more than both coal and nuclear [1]. There is roughly 1TW of renewables in interconnection queues [2], and 400GW of energy storage. The cost of renewables is expected to decline to less than half a cent per kwh due to the Inflation Reduction Act [4]. Tesla's Megafactory (to manufacture 40 GWh of Megapacks per year) is getting ready to begin production [5]. It can be difficult to understand the curve of the hockey stick when you're at the growth inflection point. In no uncertain terms, we are at the inflection point. > There is no chance of removing existing CO2 from Air to make any sort of difference. What was the cost delta between sequencing the human genome in 2003 versus today? (About ~$1B) Yeah, it is going to be very energy intensive to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it. It's a good thing enough sunlight falls on the Earth every 2 minutes to meet humanity's energy needs for the year, because we need enough clean energy to electrify everything, to account for growth into the future until the human population peaks, as well as to pay back all of the carbon emitted during industrialization. I'll plug YC's Charge Robotics here (automating solar panel installs with robotics), as it seems like the polite thing to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30780455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30780455 ("Launch HN: Charge Robotics (YC S21) - Robots that build solar farms") [1] https://electrek.co/2022/08/25/us-renewables-first-half-2022/ https://electrek.co/2022/08/25/us-renewables-first-half-2022... ("Renewables provided over 25% of total US electrical generation in first half of 2022") [2] https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-interconnection-queues-as-wait-times-continue-to-grow/ https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-inter... ("Nearly 1TW of renewables in US interconnection queues as wait times continue to grow") [3] https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-storage-in-us-interconnection-queues-alongside-nearly-1tw-of-renewables/ https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-st... ("Estimated 427GW of energy storage in US interconnection queues alongside nearly 1TW of renewables") [4] https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/15/credit-suisse-predicts-renewable-energy-that-is-too-cheap-to-meter-by-2025/ https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/15/credit-suisse-predicts-... ("Credit Suisse says the Inflation Reduction Act will have such a tremendous impact on renewable energy that the US may see the levelized cost of electricity from renewable sources fall to less than 1 cent per kWh hour by 2025 after factoring in all tax and production credits.") [5] https://electrek.co/2022/10/26/tesla-unveils-megafactory-battery-production-ramps-up/ https://electrek.co/2022/10/26/tesla-unveils-megafactory-bat... ("Tesla unveils its Megafactory as battery production ramps up")
throwaway5752 4y ago
Nuclear is just a scapegoat. If it was easy or cheap, the free market would have done its magic. All manufacturing would already be done in a country with unlimited free and clean energy, even if other countries had issues with it. Plant costs, operation, safety, waste management, and non-proliferation are real hard problems. It's just lazy and wishful thinking that there's a deus ex machina if some people would just get over their irrational fears of radioactivity. It is only an easy way of saying "the so-called environmentalists caused global warming" by groups of people that have made no policy efforts, no investment, and have no actual industry expertise. The surest solution to the problem is to keep using fossil fuels. That will lead to a desertification of the tropics, acidification of the oceans, and the death of about 5 billion people. Eventually, over the next 5-10,000 years, maybe 1-2 billion humans can sustain themselves on Earth near the poles and they won't have the opportunity re-industrialize on mined hydrocarbons because we'll have used up all of it.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Nuclear tech is dual use so it is strongly controlled. That's what makes it impossible for, say, Sudan to become some energy+manufacturing powerhouse in the way you're talking. If you try to start a civil nuclear program and America finds out, America will kill your program. And America will find out.
  - throwaway5752 4y ago
    China or Russia would be entirely powered by nuclear and would be the world's leading industrial nations if it were as easy as proponents suggest. China is the world's leading industrial nation, but their national energy production from nuclear is a quarter of the US's (5% vs 19%). India has a quarter of global reserves of thorium and doesn't have a single commercial thorium reactor.
- otikik 4y ago
  The market that exists is not free.

doublerabbit 4y ago

> there is no alternative to replacing fossil fuels. At some point the public will realize the lie of solar/wind as a replacement. What lie exactly? Scotland had produced enough to power itself twice on Wind alone. [1] How is nuclear a better alternative than Wind or Hydro when - Nuclear is extremely dangerous with toxic waste needing special storage facilities. Criminal & Environmental contamination risks. - Disaster if the plant is to be damaged - Chernobyl / Fukushima / Ukraine-Russia war - You need an external power source to kick-start a nuclear station on top of requiring uninterruptible power supply - Fossil Fuels - You need a large water source for cooling, extracting, processing - Limited Resource Thorium reactors are a dream away, nice but not feasible as of the moment. [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/scotland-wind-power-on-shore-renewable-energy-climate-change-uk-a9013066.html https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/scotland-w...

macspoofing 4y ago
>What lie exactly? Scotland is producing enough to power Scotland twice itself on Wind alone. No they aren't. This is at best misleading, at worst, a blatant lie. What is happening is that on days with strong winds, they are overproducing wind energy but ONLY at certain times of the day. When they overproduce this energy, they cannot store it for later (because there is no battery technology today, or in the near-to-mid future that is able to store that amount of energy), and they cannot give it away, so they lose it. This kind of headline is very very common. This is how the public is continually lied to and thinks that wind/solar is just around the corner. It isn't. It's never going to be. >Nuclear is extremely dangerous with toxic waste needing special storage facilities. Destruction if the plant is to melt-down. (chernobyl)? You need an external power source to power a nuclear plant. Nuclear also requires uninterruptible power. If you don't like nuclear ... fine, but there is nothing else. So now what? >Thorium reactors are a dream away, nice but not feasible as of the moment. Agreed. Also Fusion is a pipe-dream at this point in time. So now what?
- gitfan86 4y ago
  Manufacturing, refining, and AI improvements are going to reduce the price of batteries by another 90%
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Manufacturing, refining, and AI improvements are going to reduce the price of batteries by another 90% This is a pipe dream. Battery demand will be astronomical for decades to come. That means ramping up supply and prioritising deployment via price signals.
    - gitfan86 4y ago
      Your logic is backwards, it is the demand for batteries that will make them cheap. Just look at the actual data https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > it is the demand for batteries that will make them cheap This isn’t how supply and demand work. Demand can induce scale efficiencies in production, which lowers costs. That’s what’s happening in your link, which tracks through 2018. In 2019, electric car sales shares rose globally and non-linearly [1]. We persist on that path. As a result, battery costs are spiking [2][3]. [1] https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/ad8fb04c-4f75-42fc-973a-6e54c8a4449a/GlobalElectricVehicleOutlook2022.pdf https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/ad8fb04c-4f75-42fc-... page 15 [2] https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-to-an-average-of-132-kwh-but-rising-commodity-prices-start-to-bite/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-to-an-a...
        gitfan86 4y ago
        It is exactly how supply and demand works, lithium refiners are making huge profits, which causes more investment in refining capabilities which unlocks larger economies of scale. If you don't understand this please just circle back to this thread in 5 years, and I can show you what actually happened.
jakelazaroff 4y ago
> Nuclear is extremely dangerous with toxic waste needing special storage facilities. I don't think this is true. Nuclear power plants generate relatively little waste and we know how to store it safely.
- doublerabbit 4y ago
  We may how to store it safely, but still doesn't stop it from being a risk. Only takes the contracted company get lax on the upkeep of the facility.
  - feet 4y ago
    So stop contracting the work out. Have a government department handle it instead of just chucking it off to the lowest bidder
KptMarchewa 4y ago
All the possible "extreme" dangers and disasters have end result comparable with 1 day of using coal at the scale humans are using it. >- You need a large water source for cooling, extracting, processing - Limited Resource Seas are going nowhere. Most NPPs are at the coast.
- doublerabbit 4y ago
  Salt-water is highly corrosive, you can't use salt-water to power the whole plant. You still need a pure water source.
JetSetWilly 4y ago
> What lie exactly? Scotland had produced enough to power itself twice on Wind alone. Doesn't say much for a variety of reasons: - Even in Scotland, there's loads of days where there's "no wind" - on those days electricity has to be generated by gas or other means. So practically speaking as wind cannot be guaranteed it is impossible for Scotland to not generate carbon, via wind alone. - As usual for breathless wind articles, completely fails to account for heating - which in Scotland makes up the bulk of domestic energy consumption and most homes are heated by gas combi boilers. - Also as usual, neglects transport - another huge proportion of energy consumption - Scotland is a best case scenario - it is very windy relative to other countries. It doesn't have a huge population. And as part of the UK national grid it makes sense to build a lot of wind capacity within Scotland. But then looking at statistics for Scotland in isolation doesn't really make sense - it should be done at a UK national grid level rather than trying to gerrymander things. Wind is fine for reducing gas consumption when it happens to be windy. But if you really want to tackle climate change, you need to tackle having a need for gas consumption at all, and wind won't do it.

eloff 4y ago

You can build solar or wind plus some energy storage or long distance transmission to even it out for less than the price of nuclear and with income beginning quickly, not after 10 years. By the time nuclear projects started now complete, solar and wind will be mopping the floor with them ROI wise. Far from being a lie, we're in danger of them becoming the only game in town, for better or worse. Nuclear had so much potential, but we stopped investing and stopped innovating and it's unclear if it can ever catch up again. For our sakes, I hope so. More options are better.

stjohnswarts 4y ago
As long as you build 5-10x redundancy for solar/wind I don't see it, solar and wind are all over the place between the peak and valley outputs. Unless we find a "battery" storage technology that can smooth it out over say a couple of weeks, I don't think countries are going to go for it as the only grid power source. We have nuclear now, and climate change is a huge deal to solve, possibly end of human civilization huge. Note I didn't say solar and wind wouldn't be part of the mix,but as the sole source, it's not going to happen with a 10X or better leap in battery technology (energy density)
- psadri 4y ago
  How about using solar/wind to synthesis hydrocarbon fuels and use that as the storage medium?
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Where does your 5x-10x number come from? I sense that it's a guess, but the cool thing about stats is that we can actually find a redundancy ratio for a given probability of shortage.
  - anton96 4y ago
    Because at best, Renewables run at 20% percent of their installed capacity comparing to more 80% for nuclear.

jansan 4y ago

To the German Green party, who indulges itself in blaming everyone but itself for all kinds of problems in the world, there is only one thing that is worse than global warming, and that is nuclear energy.

HPsquared 4y ago
Ironic because uranium tends to be associated with the colour green.
goodpoint 4y ago
Nonsense, nuclear is not economically viable.

el_nahual 4y ago

Geoengineering is starting to seem like less of a "possibility" and more of a necessity, because self-sustaining methane emission loops seem to have been unlocked in the artic and tropics. So even if we were to magically stop the emission of new carbon, Earth will likely just keep heating up. And yes, it's hard to prove that runaway warming is happening (data is noisy, and the time is short), but the burden of proof imho has shifted to the other side. There is a known mechanism of action for runaway warming, data that fits runaway warming, and no known mechanism of action for natural dampening of that warming. The question at this point seems to be "why woudlnt' runaway warming happen"? This is a good (if pop-sci) overview of the methane problem: https://www.ft.com/content/9ef195d6-dcc3-4378-bb35-2721981d6416 https://www.ft.com/content/9ef195d6-dcc3-4378-bb35-2721981d6...

_jal 4y ago
> Geoengineering is starting to seem like less of a "possibility" and more of a necessity It always was going to end up here. Humans suck at collective action, and especially so on long timescales.

toomuchtodo 4y ago

> There is no chance of meaningfully reducing CO2 emissions, because outside of Nuclear (and hydro/geothermal but only if you have the geography for it) there is no alternative to replacing fossil fuels. At some point the public will realize the lie of solar/wind as a replacement. We lost 50 years of greatly reduced emissions had nuclear power continued to be rolled out at the same rate as it did in the 60s/70s. 25% of electricity in the US was produced with renewables this year, more than both coal and nuclear [1]. There is roughly 1TW of renewables in interconnection queues [2], and 400GW of energy storage. The cost of renewables is expected to decline to less than half a cent per kwh due to the Inflation Reduction Act [4]. Tesla's Megafactory (to manufacture 40 GWh of Megapacks per year) is getting ready to begin production [5]. It can be difficult to understand the curve of the hockey stick when you're at the growth inflection point. In no uncertain terms, we are at the inflection point. > There is no chance of removing existing CO2 from Air to make any sort of difference. What was the cost delta between sequencing the human genome in 2003 versus today? (About ~$1B) Yeah, it is going to be very energy intensive to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it. It's a good thing enough sunlight falls on the Earth every 2 minutes to meet humanity's energy needs for the year, because we need enough clean energy to electrify everything, to account for growth into the future until the human population peaks, as well as to pay back all of the carbon emitted during industrialization. I'll plug YC's Charge Robotics here (automating solar panel installs with robotics), as it seems like the polite thing to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30780455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30780455 ("Launch HN: Charge Robotics (YC S21) - Robots that build solar farms") [1] https://electrek.co/2022/08/25/us-renewables-first-half-2022/ https://electrek.co/2022/08/25/us-renewables-first-half-2022... ("Renewables provided over 25% of total US electrical generation in first half of 2022") [2] https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-interconnection-queues-as-wait-times-continue-to-grow/ https://www.pv-tech.org/nearly-1tw-of-renewables-in-us-inter... ("Nearly 1TW of renewables in US interconnection queues as wait times continue to grow") [3] https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-storage-in-us-interconnection-queues-alongside-nearly-1tw-of-renewables/ https://www.energy-storage.news/estimated-427gw-of-energy-st... ("Estimated 427GW of energy storage in US interconnection queues alongside nearly 1TW of renewables") [4] https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/15/credit-suisse-predicts-renewable-energy-that-is-too-cheap-to-meter-by-2025/ https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/15/credit-suisse-predicts-... ("Credit Suisse says the Inflation Reduction Act will have such a tremendous impact on renewable energy that the US may see the levelized cost of electricity from renewable sources fall to less than 1 cent per kWh hour by 2025 after factoring in all tax and production credits.") [5] https://electrek.co/2022/10/26/tesla-unveils-megafactory-battery-production-ramps-up/ https://electrek.co/2022/10/26/tesla-unveils-megafactory-bat... ("Tesla unveils its Megafactory as battery production ramps up")

throwaway5752 4y ago

Nuclear is just a scapegoat. If it was easy or cheap, the free market would have done its magic. All manufacturing would already be done in a country with unlimited free and clean energy, even if other countries had issues with it. Plant costs, operation, safety, waste management, and non-proliferation are real hard problems. It's just lazy and wishful thinking that there's a deus ex machina if some people would just get over their irrational fears of radioactivity. It is only an easy way of saying "the so-called environmentalists caused global warming" by groups of people that have made no policy efforts, no investment, and have no actual industry expertise. The surest solution to the problem is to keep using fossil fuels. That will lead to a desertification of the tropics, acidification of the oceans, and the death of about 5 billion people. Eventually, over the next 5-10,000 years, maybe 1-2 billion humans can sustain themselves on Earth near the poles and they won't have the opportunity re-industrialize on mined hydrocarbons because we'll have used up all of it.

renewiltord 4y ago
Nuclear tech is dual use so it is strongly controlled. That's what makes it impossible for, say, Sudan to become some energy+manufacturing powerhouse in the way you're talking. If you try to start a civil nuclear program and America finds out, America will kill your program. And America will find out.
- throwaway5752 4y ago
  China or Russia would be entirely powered by nuclear and would be the world's leading industrial nations if it were as easy as proponents suggest. China is the world's leading industrial nation, but their national energy production from nuclear is a quarter of the US's (5% vs 19%). India has a quarter of global reserves of thorium and doesn't have a single commercial thorium reactor.
otikik 4y ago
The market that exists is not free.