If we could create a carbon capture machine that turned CO2 in cinder blocks using the energy from a nuclear reactor, we'd really be set.
just my $0.02
I want to see this movie.
The movie might still be good but not because of the plot. But hey, it worked for The Matrix.
We have a lot of high-carbon energy substitution to do before DCC makes sense anywhere, let alone in the middle of an ocean, but before people trash DCC too hard I wanted to gently remind everyone that 1: industrial processes work better at scale, and 2: nature gives us magic rocks containing obscene amounts of low-carbon energy, so "inefficient" isn't necessarily a condemnation once we get past the energy substitution phase of decarbonization. I applaud the people working to de-risk the technology today so that when the time is right it can get off the ground.
https://today.tamu.edu/2016/11/29/6000-years-ago-the-sahara-...
Not sure there is evidence it was a forest, so wouldn't really be a "re-forestation"
I think you are reaching for an "if it were easy, someone would have done it" argument, which is trivially true in the short term but not very informative in the long term because we get better and better at doing things that are not easy. Profitability is a function of execution, feedstock prices, scale, cost of capital, etc. So far air-to-fuel hasn't been profitable, even in contexts that help reduce profitability concerns (e.g. Air-to-Fuel on aircraft carriers), so there is clearly a long road between this "movie" and reality. However, variables vary. If the nuclear industry gets back in gear, air-to-fuel gets de-risked on smaller emissions-capture projects, and we see advances in construction and chemical engineering, who knows?
You would need some sort of a Navy to guard this against sabotage.
Technically easy, economically and politically difficult. Ultimately I'd suspect it would need to be done at such a massive scale where the overhead of running a nuclear plant safely becomes minimal relative to the underlying costs to mine/refine uranium.