Item — HN Reader

That's a really fallacious argument. Nuclear wouldn't stop truck emissions, car emissions, boat emissions, long distance freight train emissions (unless electric), and airplane emissions. It wouldn't stop military emissions (which are significant).

We could have done a lot more nuclear but it's not clear that it would have done more than a few percent of CO2 savings in the overall scheme of things. You can see this most clearly in China which is still burning tons of coal in 2026 and have had no compunction with nuclear ever.

2 comments

You can just look at the total emissions from France and compare with Germany. It's quite amazing the difference.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...

Imagine having HALF the CO2 emissions. HALF. That would be amazing. If we had that in most of Europe and the US instead of listening to the anti-nuclear lobby we would have a ton more runway to fix the issue than we have now.

Germany was the industrial heavyweight of the 70s and doing a lot more - those emissions aren't just because of nuclear vs coal (although that's very real too). Anyway, anti-nuclear activism only got traction in the 80s so any delta there is not because of that. Economics were probably the main driver (perhaps Atoms for Peace was more France-centric? Not sure if there were other drivers). You can see here that energy use per person was 1/3 higher in Germany than France in the 70s but I suspect if we could find total energy expenditure it would be more like double for Germany than France during that time period: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...

Germany does have half the CO2 emissions of the USA.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...

Holy hell, I didn't know it was that bad. Thanks for pointing that out.

If electricity is cheap enough, you can take CO2 from air and make fuel (not sure what is the threshold? 5-10 times cheaper then now?). then you can use that fuel where you need its energy density. I agree that it seems pretty dumb to ignore China (and soon India) CO2 emissions. Again, if you manage to make nuclear cheap enough, you could just gift reactors to everyone that needs them. It can be argued that cheap and safe nuclear was not really tried.

I think that is a pretty unrealistic scenario though. Nuclear won't get that cheap.

Well, it is quite difficult indeed, but I am curious what will happen in the next 20 years, with China very interested in this, and some renewed interest in the west too. I am also not sure which is more unrealistic, cheap nuclear or fusion.

Yea, I mean.. the point isn't the price imo. We can build out nuclear and sequester CO2 without it being super cheap. We can do massive projects like that anyway.