The stuff isn't uranium and not much is needed. Any nation with an airplane should be able to get away with it.
But I said $50 billion per year. That’s what probably way too high. Other estimates mention $18 billion per year, I found one that mentioned $2 billion per year, and just doing the calculation by hand based on fuel and per hour operating costs, I get only like $100 million, although that depends on altitude (I think 20km is usually ideal, although most cargo jets can’t go much above 13km).
I even wonder what the effect would be of just using sulfur-rich jet fuel on regular commercial long-haul flights. The cost would be minimal or even negative (as sulfur-rich crude is cheaper). I guess in this way any nation could just decide to do sulfur-rich fuel in their long haul fleet and few would immediately notice.
It’s such a crappy solution to the problem, though, and will doubtless cause a bunch more problems. But it’d be insanely cheap to do.
Still sub optimal compared to other solutions but it’s possible we may need to try something like that.
We are letting anthropogenic global warming happen because it’s cheaper in the very near term. But climate change is a real thing and will have real, life-threatening effects especially for some geographic regions.
If we accept the reality that: 1) humans often just do what is cheapest and easiest even if the long-term consequences are bad AND 2) global warming will start killing massive numbers of people from things like heat stroke, putting enormous political pressure on governments to do something,
…then The logical conclusion (combined with how insanely cheap SO2 is to deploy, we’re talking maybe $50 billion a year, maybe less) is that there is an extremely high probability that some nation will just unilaterally do sulfur dioxide. Think of a Nation like India, with a large population that will be vulnerable to heat stroke and a big enough budget and military to just unilaterally do something like this to stop the political unrest of hundreds of thousands of heat stroke deaths per yearz