You can't (well, couldn't) make steel or concrete from electricity from a nuclear power plant. And up until recently you couldn't really drive a car from the electricity from a nuclear power plant. You can't plow or plant a field, or pave a road, or so many other things.
I think if you look at a breakdown in sources of CO2 emissions, it's less than half. Yes, that's a lot, but it's not the whole story.
I'm 100% for getting off fossil fuels. I drive electric. But the transition is a hell of a lot more complex than "build a lot of nuclear power plants."
I didn't expect it to complete replace all fossil fuel -- just almost all the coal + a large share of the oil. Cars would still have used petrol. Heating could have become largely electric. If they really wanted, they could have used synthetic petrol -- but that is rather inefficient.
The US produced (and produces) lots of oil. It would probably have been enough (or close enough) to make the US entirely independent of OPEC oil.
The two proposed solutions were: military (the road taken), very expensive research (not really taken). I added a third one (nuclear) because it was cheaper and it wouldn't have needed much research. It was a known solution that would have gotten the US most (likely all) of the way towards energy independence and it would have reduced CO2 emissions a lot.
You can't (well, couldn't) make steel or concrete from electricity from a nuclear power plant. And up until recently you couldn't really drive a car from the electricity from a nuclear power plant. You can't plow or plant a field, or pave a road, or so many other things.
I think if you look at a breakdown in sources of CO2 emissions, it's less than half. Yes, that's a lot, but it's not the whole story.
I'm 100% for getting off fossil fuels. I drive electric. But the transition is a hell of a lot more complex than "build a lot of nuclear power plants."
I didn't expect it to complete replace all fossil fuel -- just almost all the coal + a large share of the oil. Cars would still have used petrol. Heating could have become largely electric. If they really wanted, they could have used synthetic petrol -- but that is rather inefficient.
The US produced (and produces) lots of oil. It would probably have been enough (or close enough) to make the US entirely independent of OPEC oil.
The two proposed solutions were: military (the road taken), very expensive research (not really taken). I added a third one (nuclear) because it was cheaper and it wouldn't have needed much research. It was a known solution that would have gotten the US most (likely all) of the way towards energy independence and it would have reduced CO2 emissions a lot.