Now show how to build enough reactors in the next twenty years to completely replace fossil fuels. If your strategy doesn't show at least 75% CO2 reduction by 2030 you've likely missed the 1.5° goal.
Building reactors takes a long time. We probably first need to ramp up the industries that manufacture pressure vessels. The forging presses able to produce pressure vessels for modern reactors can manufacture maybe half a dozen a year, and there aren't too many of these massive presses around. You can of course argue that we build a different kind of reactor that doesn't require pressure vessels, but then you need additional time for R&D and proving the design in practice. Don't forget that we also need to train the engineers that staff the new power stations. Nuclear engineering is not a terribly popular major right now.
Wind and solar on the other hand are well suited to reducing our CO2 output starting today. Building a wind turbine doesn't take ten years.
One of the reasons it takes a.long time is because we build so few.
When France decided to go nuclear for its power grid they where bringing a reactor online every 3mths for 15 years on average (56 plants in 15yrs).
Economies of scale combined with mass production would bring the costs down, if you could get multiple countries to agree to a standard design with commonality of parts and maintenance you could scale up really fast once you had a pipeline for each major component.
When we are talking about an extinction level event I think a species level Manhattan project is a good solution.
Won't happen for myriad reasons but wouldnt it be nice if our own vicious self interest didn't doom our not so distant ancestors.
maybe wind energy indeed, it's always good to have alternatives. But the electricity demand is mostly when there's not much wind (start and end of day, same for solar) and it's not easy to store that energy
Are there any videos of these presses? The process sounds interesting: the entire industrial capacity of the world to produce these is only a dozen a year? How many are there, and how long does each one take? Surely not that long...