| I think we should start talking about the possible climate impact of waste heat from nuclear thermal power plants too. I'm definitely pro-nuclear, wherever it makes sense, in the short term. As long as it's never at the expensive of building renewables too. But many nuclear proponents talk as if nuclear is the end-goal for power generation. That we should just replace everything with nuclear. But if we do, it's going to get harder to bring the Earths climate back to equilibrium, since a world on 100% nuclear power would add a lot of heat to planet. Not as bad as greenhouse gases, but significant enough to make reversal harder. Sabine Hossenfelder has a video covering the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRtA7STvH4 I think focusing on solar and energy storage will always be a good bet. It will probably be the absolute dominant way to get energy in 100 years, along with geothermal in colder climates. We're just one generational improvement from that being inevitable, and those improvements are arguably already out of the lab and in trial production stage. Given how important solar+storage will be, the amount of R&D flowing into it will be staggering in the coming decades. When we've completed the transition to sustainable solutions (which right now is requiring a lot of mining and energy intensive metal processing, which will mostly be recycled in the future) and the population growth flattens and then reverses, I'd hope that the amount of energy needed for industry will fall dramatically. Edit: I'm also hoping Helions approach to fusion works out. If it's combined with panels that radiate the waste heat to space (there should be much less heat per MWh of electricity generated compared to fission, perhaps so little that radiate cooling is feasible), there should basically be zero downsides to their power plant. |