Global Dimming is an environmental disaster in and of itself. I’ve never heard it referred to as a technology before. What do you actually mean by this?
My WAG is they are talking about some sort of shade structure at one of the Lagrange points. Either that or some sort of large-scale atmospheric cloud to do something similar, i.e. at a high altitude to deflect sunlight upward so it’s not absorbed further down.
While I think such things are possible, there are unknown and unanticipated consequences for them, as well as it still doesn’t actually get the CO2 out of the atmosphere, so we would still have a problem even if the temperature was stabilized.
ETA: I do think we will end up needing some sort of carbon capture to go along with the other things we need to do to stabilize the environment. There are various proposed methods, but none of them really scale up to what we need. But that we will need them as well as other measures are, to me, pretty much inevitable. The first thing though is to get our current carbon emissions down to levels where we aren’t adding to the problem.
Global Dimming / Stratospheric aerosol injection / Solar radiation management - are the last line of defense if Humans are not able to reduce their CO2 footprint.
I share the above opinion with many scientists / Climate Change experts, one of who is :
@Beelzebubbly - sorry I should have provided links to you. The above article covers it well
I haven’t given up on it, because I think the problem will be solved by technology.
Without China and India, the only rational way to,fix global warming is to adopt energy supplies that are better and cheaper than what we have now. Then you don’t need to risk conflict with China - they will be forced to adopt the same tech to compete.
There are candidate technologies out there now. Thorium reactors, Small Modular reactors, new generation nuclear plants. potentially fusion, even space solar power if Starship works and can move mass into orbit for a couple of orders of magnitude less than it costs now.
In the meantime, it’s increasingly obvious that electric cars are a better technology for most use cases than ICE cars are, and I expect them to,continue eating into the market share of ICE cars without the government needing to mandate anything. Electric smelting furnaces are better than gas and coal furnaces, etc.
I suspect we will get nuclear when our current mad rush to wind and solar leaves us with power rationing, blackouts and brownouts. That will help change public opinion, especially when they see countries like France awash in cheap nuclear energy while at home they pay a fortune and have to constantly worry about whether they will have power when they need it.
So we’ll go down this current path for a while, virtue signalling with laws that are extremely expensive and don’t do much other than pit political sides against each other, until we suffer real damage to the economy from it. Then we’ll smarten up and do what we should have been doing from the beginning. That’s the point at which we’ll start actually making a real difference.
France is starting. They just announced a shift from their old plan to eventually phase out their nuclear plants, and instead are going to start building more. China has announced construction of 150 new nuclear plants, along woth new coal and gas plants. What are we waiting for?
We have covered this before :
Also, please remember that Uranium is not abundant -
" Uranium abundance: At the current rate of uranium consumption with conventional reactors, the world supply of viable uranium, which is the most common nuclear fuel, will last for 80 years. Scaling consumption up to 15 TW, the viable uranium supply will last for less than 5 years." Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy needs
This is nonsense. The reason we don’t mine more Uranium and have more proven reserves is that until now there has been no reason to. Also, the use of fast breeder reactors and reprocessing reduces the need for uranium to about 1% of what current LWR reactors use. That’s also the kind of reduction you get in high level waste.
Also, fueling costs make up a small part of the overall cost of nuclear power, unlike fossil fuel plants. So you can tolerate higher prices for uranium without raising energy prices much. As the price goes up, new exploration will find more uranium. Have we learned nothing from the failure of ‘peak oil’ to come true?
Finally, uranium can be extracted from seawater, and there are 4.5 billion tons of uranium in the oceans - enough to provide tens of thousands of years of global power. It’s very expensive to do this today, but we can work on making that cheaper.
Then there’s thorium, which is abundant.
As China is doing far more in the development of nuclear technology, especially next gen nuclear including Thorium, I don’t know that China is going to be the problem in the mid to long term. In fact, within a decade or so, we may be buying modular MSRs from China like we buy solar panels from them today.
Yes, and as pointed out before, that is all based on 70 year old technology. I’m not a big advocate of building out more nuclear power plants based on that, even though it would actually be better than nothing.
Using the flaws inherent in the first ad hoc design that was developed in the 50’s to restrict development of new technology makes no sense, and in nuclear it is the only place where such a fallacious argument gets trotted out and treated as though it is relevant.
If there is anything that makes me give up on climate change, it is this resistance to nuclear, which is really the only way for us to get down to sustainable carbon emissions within a timeframe to do any good.
Nuclear fuel is still mined and purified using 70 year old technology. I keep myself pretty updated on these technologies.
I am ready to change my opinion, if you can cite a publication that clearly shows that the carbon footprint of Nuclear Fuel Mining and Purification has significantly reduced over the last few years.
You will change your opinion about investing in new technologies if I can show you the results of those new technologies? Sounds like a fair challenge. 
Anyway, you haven’t kept that abreast of it, if you think there haven’t been any advances in 70 years. Several points. First, mining in and of itself has advanced substantially for mining any and all materials. Then we do have the fact that enrichment has also advanced substantially. Then we have the fact that some reactors like CANDU designs don’t need enrichment at all. Then we have the fact that Thorium isn’t Uranium, and that is entirely ignored by everything that you have said.
We also have the point that nuclear fuel is extremely energy dense. It doesn’t take much at all to fuel a reactor. As electricity becomes more carbon free, then so will energy use, which would mean that the energy used in mining and refining uranium and thorium also becomes more carbon free.
With better reactor technologies, these nuclear fuels can be used much more efficiently, even further reducing their carbon footprint.
With Thorium technology, we don’t have to mine Uranium at all. Thorium is 4 times as abundant as Uranium, and about a thousand times as abundant as U-235.
Currently, most reactors use less than 2% of the energy available in their fuel. If we increase that to just 10%, that’s an 80% reduction in the carbon footprint of producing these fuels, even without touching the mining or refining process. There’s no reason why we can’t get well over 90% use of nuclear fuels in molten salt designs.
But, it is attitudes like your own that prevent these technologies from being developed, contributing directly to the prevention of mitigating climate change.
I’ll change my opinion if you can show that the use of fossil fuels doesn’t contribute to climate change. That’s your alternative to nuclear. That’s what countries like Germany and Japan have turned to after shutting down their nuclear plants out of irrational fears.
You thinking solar? Not so fast, even with current nuclear technology, solar has 50% more carbon footprint. Solar doesn’t have much room to improve on this, nuclear has plenty of room to improve.
Anyway, China doesn’t play such ridiculous games, and is investing in these technologies. They will be the world leader, and we will be left in the dust. That’s the only hope I have for mitigating climate change, as we obviously will allow FUD like you present to prevent us from doing anything.
One of the reasons I’ve given up hope is that I honestly don’t believe that most people are prepared to do even the minimum heavy lifting required. IME most people express concern about it but consistently drive remarkably short distances to do anything. I work in an approx 4000 person building, of which maybe 100 people bike to work. I also know that some of my co-workers live in adjacent neighbourhoods and could walk to work in an hour, but don’t.
In a previous job I had there were co-workers who complained about their weight issues but instead of walking for 15 minutes to get to work, they drove. And a couple of them had environmentalist pretensions as well.
Also, urban developers persist in building single-use zoned residential suburbs, the designs of which make automobile use almost mandatory because of low densities and winding, circuitous street layouts instead of higher density grid patterns more conducive to public transit.
If governments actually take action I suspect that there will be some significant lifestyle changes forced on us that most people won’t appreciate.
Anything that asks people to reduce their standard of living is not going to work. There may be a few who voluntarily do so, but it will not offset the overwhelming vast majority who do not.
Anything that requires people to reduce their standard of living is going to be resisted. In a democracy, any politician that proposes regulations reducing standard of living is going be voted out. In an authoritarian regime, the fighting and civil war involved will likely wipe out any possible gains from imposing such measures.
The solution is not reducing population or standard of living, the solution is technologies that reduce our carbon footprint per individual to sustainable levels. We can reduce our carbon footprint without reducing our standard of living, the problem is that much of the same who worry most about climate change refuse this solution in favor of those that do.
But a lot of these things don’t even require reductions of standard of living. An example of this is actually occurring right now, thanks to Covid - employers who are starting to require face-time back at the office. Unless there’s a bona fide functional requirement to return to the office, this should be completely optional.
Also, higher density, mixed-use neighbourhoods don’t necessarily reduce standard of living (if you ever go to Montreal check out Westmount, bloody spiffy, old row-houses) but if well designed can significantly reduce motor vehicle requirements.
In terms of sacrifice, I live in an older (post-war) neighbourhood with unnecessarily large backyards (about 70 feet from back of house to property line). Montreal could, for example, offer some sort of tax rebate, take half of our yards from willing participants, and greatly expand the urban forest. This would have no impact on most of us (there are some swimming pools so they could opt-out) but if that was done in a lot of areas that would be a boon, with no real sacrifice. But we are burdened by inertia, laziness, and a lack of imagination.
We have a good example of this. The Democrat’s plan for fossil fuels was to constrict supply to drive up prices, accelerating the move to alternatives. As Obama said, “Under my plan, gasoline prices will necessarily skyrocket”. This is actually not bad policy if it actually works and the alternatives it incentivizes can do the job. At least it’s not crazy.
Many people were totally okay with this - until gas prices actually rose. Now they are screaming for Biden to ‘do something’, and he’s okayed lifting sanctions on Russia for a pipeline in Europe, begged OPEC to produce more oil, talked about opening the strategic petroeum reserve, etc.
This is insane politics, to cut your own country’s fuel production to raise the price, then demand other countries provide more of it or weaken your own energy security to drive the price back down. But it’s the reality of how politicians behave under political pressure.
This is why the only real option for lasting change is, as Jerry Pournelle said, “Survival with style”. Move to higher density fuels that provide even more clean energy than you had before. Then you don’t have to twist arms or impoverish people. They will willingly accept the change. And with abundant energy we can fix a lot of other problems such as water shortages.
The only thing we have today which can do that is nuclear power. it’s clean, safe, and abundant. We are idiots to be ignoring it.
I always thought the opposite. Countries should strive to harvest as little of their non-renewables as possible. Make OPEC burn through their supply and then when prices inevitably skyrocket be the only game left in town.
I never could understand why Republicans are so hell-bent on using up US oil supplies first. Short term thinking, I guess.
Disregarding the personal attack, we are doing plenty to address Climate Change. Green Hydrogen, Ammonia, just to name a few and lots of previously dedicated fossil fuel folks are joining in.
Nuclear has just not received as much funding because the technological innovations needed to scale up the new technologies are huge. But I believe DOE and Southern Power and GE-Hitachi have been working with Molten salt with Terrapower and the like.
That said, there is still a huge CO2 footprint in the Uranium mining industry. A lot of this happens in Africa, so people have swept it under the rug, but it has received increased scrutiny. Nuclear has a zero carbon footprint, only when the carbon used in mining and purifying is magically ignored.
I believe in Capitalism, and here is a chart of investment in Nuclear, compared to other green technologies. Nuclear is very very small - and validates what I have been saying :
Please look at plot : “Global investment in the power sector by technology, 2011-2021E” Page 14
If you are going to take disagreement with your post as a personal attack, then this will likely be my last reply to you in this thread.
And how are those working out? You do realize that those are energy storage solutions, not energy generation, right? Still need to generate the energy to produce them somehow.
No, it has not received as much funding because people are scared of it, and don’t support politicians who support it.
Anyway, the phrase, “the technological innovations needed to scale up the new technologies are huge” is actually pretty vague and meaningless. I’ve actually been following the field quite closely, and the innovations are there, there are private companies and foundations making great progress on these technologies with little or no government support. In fact, they make this progress in spite of government roadblocks. Many are sitting in a phase of , ‘we cannot progress any further until we are allowed to use actual nuclear material in our systems.’ They’ve done everything they can, and are just being held up because politicians are afraid that if the approve anything nuclear related, then they will be castigated by the anti-nuke crowd.
Out of everything that I hated about the Trump administration, this is the one place where it did good. Many projects were actually allowed to move forward under Trump’s DOE, and some even received a bit of funding.
Honestly, this was more because there was little or no political pressure on the DOE, as its appointed director could barely even remember its existence, but that allowed the people at the DOE to actually do their jobs and evaluate projects based on merit, as opposed to based on their directives from a politically appointed head.
I follow the nuclear community closely, and it actually bothered me the praise that these people were giving to the Trump admin over finally being able to move forward with projects that were stalled for decades under more anti-nuke administrations.
I’d love to see them give the same praise to a Democratic administration, but I see that there is still enough resistance that these projects will likely be held up for the foreseeable future for political reasons again.
Burning this much straw has a huge carbon footprint as well. Sure, nuclear has a carbon footprint, there’s not much that doesn’t. As the alternative to nuclear, fossil fuel, has a much greater carbon footprint, I don’t see your point.
And, as already pointed out, we currently only use a small fraction of the energy contained in the Uranium we mine, so improving that will decrease that footprint even further. As also already pointed out, Thorium is not Uranium, and is, as you say, “magically ignored”, in that anti-nuke zealots don’t have a reply to it, so just pretend that they didn’t hear it.
I believe that it exists as well, and has some uses, especially in the area of matching unlimited wants to limited resources. What I don’t believe is that it solves all problems.
And that wouldn’t be because the money follows subsidies, and investors are timid in investing in something that has an unsure regulatory future that is based on politics rather than science or engineering?
According to your chart, Capitalism says that oil and gas are the winners.
Anyway, what we do here in the US is going to be increasingly irrelevant as other countries take the lead, and leave us behind. If we are lucky, China won’t charge us too much to buy power and production capabilities.
My problem with nuclear is the billions of dollars and decades of time spent building nuclear plants that are never turned on, and never produce any power. This is a political and corruption problem, not a scientific or engineering problem. We won’t nerd our way out of it, because nerding isn’t the problem.
We won’t make a dent in green house gas production because there is still too much money to be made from finding, extracting, refining, and burning fossil fuels. Capitalism can’t fix the problem without government regulation. Internalize the externalities, and then capitalism has a chance of fixing it.
Yes, that’s a carbon tax. And it needs to be taxed at the production and consumption ends, worldwide. Turn around and give the money back, so economically it is net zero.
And Biden is not our friend on any of this. He just opened up massive amounts of the ocean for oil exploration. We need to be in the position today where nobody is bother to explore for more oil, because it won’t be needed long enough for the investment to pay off. Because that’s not happening, we need to make it so new exploration is prohibited or too expensive to be worthwhile.
It’s a problem created by anti-nuclear activists and a media wedded to shock and fear as a way to gain eyeballs.
No, we won’t make a dent in GHGs because current wind/solar solutions cannot replace fossil fuels. I don’t know how many times this has to be explained. Wind and solar are not dispatchable power. They do not provide baseload power. Countries that have gone too far with wind and solar are finding that they make too much power when they don’t need it, and not enough power when they do. They also can’t deal with extended periods of low wind and cloud. Thus the Nord 2 pipeline being built to supply more fossil fuels to Germany, and a resurgance of coal.
France is making out like a bandit selling cheap, clean nuclear power to its foolish neighbors. France has reversed its plans to eventually phase out nuclear and is now planning to build more nuclear plants, having seen the results of trying something else.
There are no technical obstacles to building nuclear plants. They don’t have to take decades to build - that’s a result of lawfare from anti-nuclear goups. France converted 80% of its electrical production to nuclear power in 15 years, building 54 reactors in that time frame. China builds nuclear reactors in 4 years and about $5 billion. They are building 150 more of them.
At $5 billion each, the ‘infrastructure’ bill could have funded over 200 reactors. That’s more than enough to offset all GHGs emitted in the U.S. transportation sector. If you REALLY wanted to do something about global warming, that would make a measurable dent. Weatherstripping homes and all the other ‘green’ initiatives Democrats are offering won’t even be visible in the background noise in terms of their effect on greenhouse gas emissions. They do, however, punish and reward the correct people.
Carbon taxes and other measures that drive up the cost of energy clearly have political and economic limits. Why do you think Joe Biden is begging OPEC to release more oil? High energy prices are killing him politically. High energy prices also have the perverse effect of causing high energy manufacturing to move elsewhere, often to places that are less efficient overall or are strategic competitors.
There are currently 455 reactors running in the world. Most have been running for decades, with zero pollution, zero accidents, and zero deaths. In the meantime we kill tens of thousands of people per year from emphysema and other illnesses resulting from fossil fuels while we dick around with low-grade energy sources that can’t possibly fix the problem but do shovel money to the right constituents and allow people to feel good about their green bona fides.
My only nitpick with this is that it’s estimated that a million people die in China alone (maybe even 1.5 million…or more) due to air quality issues connected with fossil fuel use. Even if you mean ‘we’ to be just the US (you might have meant Canada though as you are, IIRC, Canadian) it’s estimated over 100k per year.
Other than that, I have to mainly agree…we could have been building nuclear power plants all along and that certainly would have been a huge help in the current carbon footprint. Instead of a long, very slow decline in CO2 in the US, we could have had a very measurable decrease. We still could do this, of course, as the cost and time to build have come down, at least in theory, especially with the small modular plants. The real issue is political, not engineering. If we were REALLY serious about CO2 and climate change we’d be building nuclear plants like crazy.
As to China building nuclear power plants, while that’s true enough, they are also still building a ton of coal-powered (and the dirtiest coal-powered) plants, and still building a ton in other counties as part of their Belt and Road scam, so it’s not likely to really impact their own CO2 production any time soon. They are and will be reliant on coal power for at least another decade, despite their promises and assurances. The other thing is…China is building these nuclear power plants. That’s a cause for some trepidation at least, IMHO. In China, things are either built to very high standards or they are complete crap…and, like a lot of their dams and other infrastructure projects (as well as buildings and everything else), I think at least some of the nuke plants will be tofu construction crap.
That’s the wrong thinking that makes me so pessimistic about stopping climate change. Everything you said is true, but it doesn’t matter that it’s true. In order to stop climate change we have to stop emitting CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. Not cut back when it is convenient, not reduce it a bit here and there, and definitely not merely slow down the rate at which we’re emitting, we need to stop.
Does that mean a world where there is only power when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining? Maybe. Maybe that world is enough incentive to get governments to actually move to reasonable nuclear options, and upgrade the grid to move power from where it’s being generated to where it’s needed.
What doesn’t fight climate change? Burning more oil because it’s too inconvenient (or profitable) to stop. Blaming anti-nuke hippies, and not also blaming the corruption that surrounds the nuclear industry (see Ohio and Illinois).