8 ms·
That's a really fallacious argument. Nuclear wouldn't stop truck emissions, car emissions, boat emissions, long distance freight train emissions (unless electr
by AdamN 9mo ago
That's a really fallacious argument. Nuclear wouldn't stop truck emissions, car emissions, boat emissions, long distance freight train emissions (unless electric), and airplane emissions. It wouldn't stop military emissions (which are significant).
We could have done a lot more nuclear but it's not clear that it would have done more than a few percent of CO2 savings in the overall scheme of things. You can see this most clearly in China which is still burning tons of coal in 2026 and have had no compunction with nuclear ever.
- empiricus 9mo agoIf electricity is cheap enough, you can take CO2 from air and make fuel (not sure what is the threshold? 5-10 times cheaper then now?). then you can use that fuel where you need its energy density. I agree that it seems pretty dumb to ignore China (and soon India) CO2 emissions. Again, if you manage to make nuclear cheap enough, you could just gift reactors to everyone that needs them. It can be argued that cheap and safe nuclear was not really tried.
- boxed 9mo agoI think that is a pretty unrealistic scenario though. Nuclear won't get that cheap.
- empiricus 9mo agoWell, it is quite difficult indeed, but I am curious what will happen in the next 20 years, with China very interested in this, and some renewed interest in the west too. I am also not sure which is more unrealistic, cheap nuclear or fusion.
- boxed 9mo agoYea, I mean.. the point isn't the price imo. We can build out nuclear and sequester CO2 without it being super cheap. We can do massive projects like that anyway.
- boxed 9mo agoYou can just look at the total emissions from France and compare with Germany. It's quite amazing the difference. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?country=FRA~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c... Imagine having HALF the CO2 emissions. HALF. That would be amazing. If we had that in most of Europe and the US instead of listening to the anti-nuclear lobby we would have a ton more runway to fix the issue than we have now.
- ZeroGravitas 9mo agoGermany does have half the CO2 emissions of the USA.
- boxed 9mo agohttps://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?country=FRA~DEU~USA~POL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c... Holy hell, I didn't know it was that bad. Thanks for pointing that out.
- AdamN 9mo agoGermany was the industrial heavyweight of the 70s and doing a lot more - those emissions aren't just because of nuclear vs coal (although that's very real too). Anyway, anti-nuclear activism only got traction in the 80s so any delta there is not because of that. Economics were probably the main driver (perhaps Atoms for Peace was more France-centric? Not sure if there were other drivers). You can see here that energy use per person was 1/3 higher in Germany than France in the 70s but I suspect if we could find total energy expenditure it would be more like double for Germany than France during that time period: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=line&country=DEU~FRA&mapSelect=DEU~FRA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...