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We Still Have No Idea How To Eliminate More Than a Quarter of Energy Emissions (technologyreview.com)
Climate discussions typically center on the need to replace fossil-fuel power plants with technologies like wind turbines and solar panels. But a new paper in Science offers a stark reminder that there are still huge parts of the global energy system where we simply don't have affordable ways of halting greenhouse-gas emissions. MIT Technology Review: Air travel, long-distance transportation and shipping, steel and cement manufacturing, and remaining parts of the power sector account for 27 percent of global emissions from the energy and industrial sectors. And the authors say we need much more research, innovation, and strategic coordination to clean up these sources. "If we're really ambitious about meeting our climate targets, we need to be tackling these hard sectors now," says the paper's lead author, Steven Davis, an earth system scientist at the University of California, Irvine.
Bullshit. We can power all those items with nuclear power.
Nukes can work for cement, which just needs heat for the kiln. But nuclear aircraft? I don't think so. An iron blast furnace uses metallurgical coal (converted to coke), as an integral part of the process. You can't just drop in nuclear as a replacement.
Like TFA says, we need new tech. Business leaders and politicians can't save the world. Only nerds can do that.
A nuclear plant could easily power a processing plant to produce methane from the CO2 in the air and water (Sabatier reaction). The high energy density of liquid methane fuel can then be used on aircraft with a net-zero carbon footprint. The net effect is a "nuclear powered airplane."
Many steel plants already use induction furnaces for for melt processes, but the addition of coke to remove impurities is a required part of the process. Using induction heating with a much smaller carbon injection reduces the footprint from steel production, while CO2 capture and electrolytic splitting becomes possible with massive energy sources. In other words, capture the CO2 that does come off, and re-split it to carbon and oxygen, which also lets you re-use the carbon on the next batch of steel. Bonus.
The real killer is concrete production, as the cooking off of CO2 to create portland cement is actually one of the major sources of CO2 in America. Again, capture and reprocessing becomes possible with the availability of cheap power, though I personally think alternatives to traditional cement need to be found.
In any case, abundant energy at low prices derived from an "assembly line" 6th generation walk-away safe nuclear reactor would solve pretty much every one of the problems out there when it comes to carbon emissions and energy. And that merely assumes fission. With Lockheed supposedly producing a "semi-truck sized" fusion 100MW fusion plant that could be parked next to any major factory, the game changes even more.
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Aluminum was more valuable than gold before Deville came along and figured out electrolysis in 1859. Guess what made that process so cheap that we now throw piles of aluminum cans away without a thought -- not that we should?
Cheap electricity.
Guess what? You can extract iron from ore using electrolysis as well.
Iron Metal Production through Bulk Electrolysis
Green Iron
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.