Nuclear could have already replaced coal by now. Renewables need a lot of battery storage and transmission to scale up to not relying on coal any longer, since a majority of it is relying on the sun and wind.

Nuclear is such a horrible replacement. Let's let future generations deal with the waste from the power that sustained our lifestyle. I hate it. I'd rather live with less.

You would, but realistically, a majority of people are not willing to live with significantly less (which would entail a contraction in the economy and loss of jobs). And that includes all the people in countries still catching up. Nuclear was the alternative decades ago, and we could have witched to it until renewable tech was up to scale.

So we decided a significantly warmer climate was better than dealing with radioactive waste. Now it looks like we made the wrong risk assessment.

It does not have to mean a loss of jobs.

It would mean different jobs, and it means valuing work differently right along with things.

Realistically, which is all that matters for this issue, you're not going to change how everyone values their work and things. Maybe it changes once we get to 2.5-3 degrees warming.

All that really needs to happen is for enough people to value other kinds of work to make a market. Once that happens, it will compete with existing ones and that is just fine.

Could happen via government action, literally start paying for work and pay at a rate that seeds a market.

Could happen with individuals too. Think gig work without a company making billions at the top. While that is super attractive for some, it is entirely unnecessary, and in my view, a leaner overall model paying more to labor will prove a worthy device to move these sorts of ideas along. A variation on all this could be collectives. Companies owned by everyone in them, lean at the top, robust otherwise.

As for things, maybe we see a return to longevity in service life being more highly valued. I harbor this value now. Absolutely hate things that I know I cannot use for a decade or more. We can do so much better than the current churn of devices and software. A bit different priority and we could see more things as robust as say, Google maps still able to operate with devices made a long time ago.

I was just about to add the same reply.

Nuclear waste is very easy to deal with. It’s physically small, and easy to transport.

It has a long half life, but a deep shaft filled with cement in a remote area does the trick.

There’s no kicking the can down the road.

Oddly, it seems that finding that deep shaft that is known to be geologically stable for at least a couple of half lives is fairly difficult, to say nothing of the issue of transporting the material from the reactor to said shaft.

The obstacles aren’t scientific or engineering. Plenty of safe places to put it. The problem is NIMBYism.

https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-radioactive-problem-...

Every time I mention this here on HN I am down-voted. But I really think that in a next few decades sending (dangerous) cargo to (deep) space will become cheap and reliable. Space tourism just started this month and that will fund thousands of engineers working on that goal.

Looks like I got the downvotes too. Sometimes the unpopular opinion is the correct one.

nucelear is the only realistic option to even get to the future.

Nah, we can do pretty well with just wind and solar.

The practical difficulty with using renewables effectively is that you need to be able to either store large amounts of energy for later use, or trade power across long distances. We (by which I mean "in the U.S." but for other developed countries it's pretty much the same) could buy solar power from Kenya, Australia, Algeria, or similar places to get us through the night if we had high-capacity transcontinental HVDC lines running to those places. That's a major infrastructure project that would cost a lot of money, but I expect it's probably worth it.

(We can even mitigate the risk of the power lines being temporarily disabled by keeping the fossil fuel plants on standby and just not using them except as an emergency backup.)

Another option is to just build batteries on an unheard-of scale. Lithium iron phosphate cells might do the job -- being free of cobalt an nickel, the only other major bottleneck resource would be lithium. I'm not sure how practical it is to build the kinds of gigantic battery packs that would be needed to provide, say, an 18-hour backup power supply for the entire U.S., but it's probably less cells in total than we'd need to electrify our current fleet of gas-powered cars.

edit: to clarify, I'm not particularly opposed to nuclear. I just don't think it's the only option at this point.

> That's a major infrastructure project that would cost a lot of money, but I expect it's probably worth it.

So, we'll just keep burning coal.

> I just don't think it's the only option at this point.

It needs to be viable economically and politically, which could be years from now.

I don't think those figures are right - 5.3T/7.5T would mean 70% of CO2 in the US is caused by coal-fired power plants. According to the EPA data for 2019 [1], power generation accounted for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions, and 62% of that was fossil fuels ("mostly coal and natural gas") - so that means fossil fuels for electricity accounted for 16% of the greenhouse gas emissions. The EPA report shows transportation as the largest source, at 29%

Their figures also suggest CO2 emissions were 20T pp in the US in 2019! (6558MT of CO2, 328.2M population)

1: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

> The EPA report shows transportation as the largest source, at 29%

The reason I'm so struck by the coal-fired electricity production numbers are that this seems VASTLY easier to fix than the transportation numbers. Even if the latter would have more impact, I think we're still a long way from being able to dramatically affect that, whereas ramping up renewable electricity generation and ramping down fossil fuels seems like a (relatively) simple challenge.

Yeah, add it to the long list of things we're just not doing :-( nuclear could have made a significant dent in CO2 from base load generation, but we didn't fund work into safer nuclear generation so we're stuck with fairly limited options for base load now

Just edited it. I missed the 1 from the 17.

My source was

http://www.ecocivilization.info/three-tons-carbon-dioxide-pe...

which I think is from about 2017 (and has several citations at the end).

Even replacing coal with natural gas generation would eliminate about 2.5T PP/yr. Obviously we can do better than that, but it probably makes sense to some extent as an interim measure. What I mean is some highly beneficial changes don’t even need to be particularly drastic or costly.

Source? Genuinely curious to read more about this.