Reply #4: All of these numbers depend upon the availability of water, weather, and [View All]

[NNadir]

nutrients, including many that are chemically produced at great energy cost. Given the growing instability of the climate, we open ourselves not only to food famine (and yes, that can happen even here, and energy famine simultaneously. No matter what the calculations said about land area in Northern Illinois this summer and what could grow there, very little actually did.

Also all depend on harvest and mechanized transport which reduces the actual amount of energy that must be expended to create the energy to be used.

If nuclear sources are used to make liquid fuels, electricity will only be a side product from cooling high temperature gases in thermochemical processes. It is not really suitably modelled by the majority of modern reactors, almost all of which are designed to produce electricity.

It would take about 5000 reactors, at a cost of 8 to 10 trillion dollars to provide all of the world's energy by nuclear means. My view is that such a thing is achievable and desirable in an ideal world, but we do not live in an ideal world, mostly because people keep kidding themselves. Thus the world will build fewer reactors than it needs. Therefore we are pretty much out of realistic options.

We should not delude ourselves into thinking that even if the world elected to go completely nuclear that it would be an easy thing. Clearly it would not, and there will be environmental hell to pay for our past practices no matter what we do.