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Comment by jonathankoren | Hacker News Reader

We’re past the point that nuclear can help.

We broke the planet.

But hey. “Needs more study.” and academics are living large, unlike the poor billionaires.

This is defeatist and also not true. We adopt nuclear, invest in carbon capture technologies, and employ geoengineering strategies as needed until fusion comes online. This is a solvable technical problem with significant political hurdles.

Nuclear is dead, it's better to install 10x as much solar and batteries right now. "Carbon capture" is also highly dubious. Direct air capture is the only realistic version and it'll take a significant portion of world GDP (8% to 20%) on an ongoing basis, which we are not spending. I'll keep you posted when that changes. Fusion is not coming online in our lifetimes.

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.

Thank you for being optimistic and realistic concurrently. We need more people to have such approaches to the topic.

Optimism != realistic.

Optimism is what got us in this mess.

Dude. Nuclear takes decades to build, and that’s IF you can even build it. There’s zero appetite for it in the US or even formerly nuclear happy Europe. We’re literally decommissioning more reactors than we build.

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.

Better to do something (build nuclear) than do nothing (cry on twitter).

You should do something that actually has a chance to work, rather than feel good about doing something that that doesn’t.

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

There is no reason to believe that fusion power will be cheap.

> adopt nuclear

Not possible in the timescales required.

> carbon capture technologies

Don’t exist.

> geoengineering strategies

Unproven and potentially catastrophic.

Humanity has not "broken" the planet; to argue such is the epitome of conceit. We are not special nor powerful.

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.

We can all take comfort in your wise words that a ball of rock will still be here even after the planet has become literally unlivable for humans across vast swaths of previously populated areas, and the planet violent has undergone a completely predictable and preventable ecological collapse.

Yes. Very wise.

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