[survirtual]

No miracles required.

Make the usage of fossil fuels a crime against humanity / all sentient life, and use nuclear reactors for base load with renewables for variable load.

Modernize the power grid by including excess energy storage mechanisms (batteries, water pumps, etc), harden it against solar flares, and create a profitable energy sink to keep reactors running (crypto mining) to further stabilize the grid.

Heavily subsidize electric vehicles to the point of gas trade-ins being a net profit for anyone with a car, and mandate conversion to electric vehicles.

Make all fossil fuels shipping barges illegal. Subsidize the usage of nuclear reactors on shipping barges. This can be done in several ways, such as expanding an agency like the NRC to manage reactors in consumer usages.

Those don't require a miracle. They require a sensible population to wake up and make the world better without compromises.

[realreality]

In order to replace the world's current energy mix with nuclear, we'd have to switch on a new nuclear plant every day for the next several decades. All of that new infrastructure would also require massive amounts of fossil fuels to build (which you've magically made illegal) and would only last a few decades before having to be replaced (presumably without requiring any fossil fuels by then).

There isn't even enough copper on earth to electrify everything.

Your scenario isn't a miracle; it's a pipe-dream.

[survirtual]

U235 has an energy density around 80,000,000 megajoules per kilogram (MJ/kg).

Burning coal has an energy density around 24 MJ/kg for lignite (a lower grade of coal) to about 32 MJ/kg for anthracite (the highest grade of coal).

This makes utilizing U235 for energy around 2,500,000 more efficient than coal.

If we used thorium-232 instead, the theoretical energy density is around 79,000,000 megajoules per kilogram (MJ/kg) if considering the full lifecycle of the reaction.

The physics speaks for itself, regardless of people too dense to understand numbers.

Just because fossil fuels own our governments, industry, and most societal mechanisms, doesn't make the world they've fabricated real.

[realreality]

You didn’t address anything I said. It takes a lot more than raw uranium or thorium to electrify all of our infrastructure.

[survirtual]

Usage of fossil fuels implies utilizing oil as a fuel. In other words, other usages of oil are still on the table -- plastics, chemistry, etc.

Infrastructure would not be so difficult to electrify. We already all know how to do it, and many countries are much further along than the US.

Water heating can be electrified. Heat pumps are already superior to other methods of heating / cooling. Trains can be electrified. Semis can be electrified.

I believe it would not be much of a challenge to make nuclear powered aircrafts with today's technology. It seems crazy because nuclear anything has been made to seem crazy, because it is literally free energy. The cost is overcoming our fears, and putting in some work to make it infallible on safety.

We have all the tools and all the capabilities. There are no longer excuses. The technology is here and has been here for a long time, to make a society that flourishes in every fashion.

[soloist11]

What you are suggesting would require coordination on a scale that's almost unimaginable. The effort and coordination required would be similar to wartime mobilization.

[paulryanrogers]

Why do we need an energy sink? Can't batteries be a good short-term buffer? The nuclear fuel lifecycle is still quite ecologically expensive.

[survirtual]

The nuclear fuel cycle is exponentially less ecologically expensive than the fossil fuel cycle -- and it hasn't even been remotely optimized to the extent that it can be.

Nuclear fission is millions of times more efficient than any of the nearest energy sources when considering purely energy density. That efficiency compared to the cost and ecological danger is barely even tapped at this point, because it blows everything else out of the water by orders of magnitude.

The nuclear fuel cycle is economically expensive, not ecologically nor physically. And it is economically expensive because we are all slaves to the fossil fuel industry, who own nearly everything.

Why would slavers / masters living in luxury sacrifice everything so that their slaves would flourish instead? Answer: they wouldn't. Instead, everything would be rigged in their favor. Their most powerful opposition would be made to seem weaker than them.

[SamPatt]

>Make the usage of fossil fuels a crime against humanity

Delusional.

Fossil fuels have been unbelievably beneficial to humanity and are absolutely vital for modern society.

If a theoretical global ruler immediately outlawed fossil fuels they would be remembered as the greatest villain in world history, killing hundreds of millions and plunging us into chaos.

>They require a sensible population to wake up and make the world better without compromises.

No compromises? Sounds like utopian thinking. Tradeoffs exist everywhere.