Either the world accepts that nuclear energy along with wind and solar is part of the solution to climate change, or we will be forced into geoengineering solutions. We may have already reached that point.
Also, the same site shows nuclear as about 10% of the electricity generation mix worldwide; unless there's about 5x as much coal being used for steel-making and other non-electricity purposes, then the numbers would be around 5x instead of 20x.
Now that Vogtle 3 & 4 are complete or almost so, there is essentially no new nuclear power plants under construction in the United States.
Europe? The long-delayed Flamanville 3 and Hinkley Point C1 and C2.
Canada? Nothing.
Australia? Nothing.
There won't be any additional new nuclear plants built in any of those regions before 2040 (which is only 17 years away)
We will have to almost completely decarbonize our electricity grids by 2035-2040 if the world is going to get net zero by 2050 (which is probably not enough to avoid the need for geoengineering anyway).
How many square miles of solar reflector could each Starship launch carry to a stable-ish region near the Earth-Sun L1 point?
What a time to be alive.
We broke the planet.
But hey. “Needs more study.” and academics are living large, unlike the poor billionaires.
We're not headed for +8C, but we're never going to see +1C or below again in our lifetimes. Maybe in the 2300s they'll have it under control.
Optimism is what got us in this mess.
Carbon capture doesn’t work. Even if you did manage to capture it from a coal plant, that’s not enough. You have to suck it from the air, and a scalable technology doesn’t exist, and even if it did, we’d need massive amounts of power to do it, because you’re literally up against the second law of thermodynamics.
And even if you did have all that stuff today, you’d have to deploy it faster than exponential growth!
I’m aorry, but you can’t just yell, “SCIENCE!” and expect it work. It ain’t magic, and the clock has expired. If we listened 50 years ago, and started then, yeah, maybe we’d be in a fighting chance. It’s sure as hell like we didn’t know that check was coming due. Now acting like we can just reverse a century and a half of exponential growth in a weekend is naïve at best, and “thoughts and prayers” level of “fuck you” at worst.
When your house is on fire, you don’t start shopping for sprinklers saying, “Good news everyone! The sprinkler system will be installed in three weeks!”, instead of calling the fire department
Not possible in the timescales required.
> carbon capture technologies
Don’t exist.
> geoengineering strategies
Unproven and potentially catastrophic.
Humanity is just one of many lifeforms the planet had, has, and will have over the course of its vast existence transcending any human sense of time.
Yes. Very wise.