Personally, I think nuclear could be fantastic, humans just cannot be trusted to manage it. Fukushima was a case of negligence, it wasn't caused by the Tsunami. The operators did not implement the recommended safety improvements because they didn't respect Murphy's law.
So when a case is made like this, "just spam nuclear reactors", you're glossing over the details that we've fucked up a lot of nuclear reactors?
And while solar is great, you still need base-load and for most places in most cases solar + storage can’t do that.
With that said, cooling reactors need a bit of rethinking with this warmup, rivers may no longer be fine to use.
The costs from climate change far exceeds the cleanup and damage costs from all nuclear accidents combined.
Even if we spammed nuclear reactors I still don't think a proportional increase in nuclear accidents would come anywhere near the damages from climate change.
The advantage of nuclear energy is that it will only pollute a large area in a disaster. While fossil fuels spread their pollution constantly over the entire planet by design, no disaster required.
Doesn't honestly seem too bad scenario. And being cynic, isn't population reduction the most effective way to combat climate change anyway?
That massive carbon footprint exists because although the Haber-Bosch process represents a huge technological advancement, it’s always been an energy-hungry one. The reaction, which runs at temperatures around 500 °C and at pressures up to about 20 MPa, sucks up about 1% of the world’s total energy production.
Here in my state we're looking hard at mass production (global scale numbers) of 'green' ammonia.
https://fortescue.com/what-we-do/green-energy-research/green...
High-grade phosphate rock (for Phosphorus (P)) is the declining resource, or perhaps more accurately isn't matched by our ever increasing demand for it in fertilizers as our human population grows. For now at least we're coasting along on increased beneficiation of lower grade ore through washing, flotation and calcining.
It's a fair point - I'm personally in the "let's see fewer humans overall camp", I'm not advocating genocide, just in favour of birth rates continuing to decline until we're back between (say) 4 to 6 billion.
Unlimited growth in a petri dish has obvious issues, even if the dish is the surface of a relatively large sphere.
Govts/corporations are full of ppl. People are programmed not just for Consumption but Conspicuous Consumption.
Social status is directly tied to what Luxuries you can afford. No one wants to work for a simple boss, but for the dude who lives on a super yatch.
The most ambitious ppl know this and take full advantage of it to trap ppl who work for them in golden cages. The greatest anxiety of a beauracrat/corporate exec is exiting the cage.
Luxuries are a gigantic WASTE. And the largest companies in the world sell Luxury cause the most ambitious of the elite use luxury to signal status and trap/control everyone.
Technical minded ppl spend most of their day trying to reduce waste. So they are the group that can come up with ways that can interfere with these cycles everyone feels they are trapped in.
This is a pet peeve of mine, but seeing “ppl” drives me crazy. Particularly when the rest of the comment is typed normally, and then the next word is “people”!