Comment by mort96
1 day ago
It would've helped a ton but it's not like electricity generation is the only source of emissions. You can't run a car or a plane on nuclear power. You can technically run a cargo ship on nuclear power but that's also not gonna happen. Yet transport is the second largest source of emissions.
Batteries have only recently-ish gotten energy dense and cheap enough for electric cars to be competitive, completely different solutions are needed for long distance shipping by sea or air.
It's the same situation across many other sectors like agriculture, construction and waste management. Lots of things causing emissions that's not electricity generation.
It would indeed have helped a ton. It's important to not let perfection be the enemy of good.
If we just wait around forever for a perfect solution to appear, then we'll simply be waiting around forever. That's not the path of progress.
I agree. I just wanted to point out that to "stop burning fossil fuels" requires more than green electricity generation. Green electricity generation is 100% necessary, just not in itself sufficient, as was implied by "Would have been doable if we could have switched to nuclear".
Agreed.
We'll never stop burning fossil fuels -- not in our lifetimes, anyway. They're too useful.
Like: Cement kilns. They're ridiculously intensive of energy, and they're necessary. They burn approximately everything, from coal and natural gas to heavy fuel oil and petcoke to used tires. About the cleanest thing I've heard of them burning is old railroad ties, which isn't really so great either. :)
But if we solve some of the other big industrial users and mostly leave the cement factories, then that's... that's actually pretty good.
And we can make cement with electricity. There are companies working on scalable processes to accomplish exactly that. Electricity has just historically been very cost-prohibitive compared to alternatives in the cement-making world for it to be practical.
But! If we'd landed in the age of cheap electricity instead of this timeline, then that process would probably have been solved long ago; the incentives would have been so great that solving it would be inevitable.
And it really may have once been possible at one point to have steered things in that direction, and it even may still be possible today. But we're certainly not there (yet?).
As Romanians will tell you in August 2026, you can't run nuclear power stations without a cooling mechanism. In this case, it's Danube which is failing to offer that. Fusion is almost nowhere to be seen.