More like an extra 100,000 years http://www.daretothink.org/numbers-not-adjectives/how-long-w...
We need cars to go electric, etc.
The point is that co2 generated over the last 16 years will stay with us for some time. We could have delayed the problem by doing more sooner.
A slow train wreck of decades that everyone sees coming.
At this rate, we’ll be saying the same thing in 2030.
Yes, and that creates massive extra demand for electricity generation, which seems very hard to achieve without nuclear power.
Marketing is once again far from the truth, check how co2 expensive producing a battery is. Then couple that with the fact that you need let's say 20 years of normal use of a car to "paybacck" that co2 footprint (comparing to an oil car).
Last one is : are you going to keep that same electric car for 20 years?
(I guess we should do both, but I feel like hydrogen as a fuel seems to be ignored.)
Synthetic CH4 from H2+extracted CO2 seems more likely to happen.
Because I very rarely see mention of ammonia as a fuel, I conclude that no one is seriously attempting to develop hydrogen fuel cells.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-ev-battery-production-co2-em...
Also, consider that we are in the early stages. Battery technology will improve.
Batteries making process is far from being carbon-free yet.
Even if, somehow, you had a perfectly safe magic hot rock that could put out a gigawatt, all the plumbing and turbine machinery would still have a minimum cost level that would be cheap but still metered. Maybe something like half the cost of natural gas.
If it is clever to shut down existing nuclear power plants (which are very often past planned life time) one can argue, but building new ones?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
The problem with this fantasy is that nuclear power is not by any stretch of the imagination "basically free". New build nuclear is very expensive, costing much more on a per-MWh basis than most renewables.
This doesn't mean that we shouldn't be developing new technology to improve the cost effectiveness of nuclear in the future. But right now, each dollar spent on renewables delivers more carbon savings than each dollar spent on nuclear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
> The point is that co2 [sic] generated over the last 16 years will stay with us for some time. We could have delayed the problem by doing more sooner.
There's never been a commercially viable thorium reactor.
Some of the claims are true. Cheap, abundant and safer. It's the "economically viable" part that's tricky. No-one has solved that yet. India has a ton of thorium and are highly motivated to build a commercial reactor but haven't been successful yet.