And does anyone know how we could reduce the man-made atmospheric carbon load to ZERO? First get over this superstitious fear of the use of nuclear energy to generate electricity. All the older uranium-fueled nuclear energy generation plants are almost at the end of their engineered lifetimes, and shall have to be phased out over the next few decades if not sooner. Ramp up the engineering on Thorium-fueled Molten Salt nuclear generation plants which have a GREAT number of advantages over the older Uranium-fueled light water reactors.
For one thing, they are, by their very nature, not subject to a runaway reaction and a disaster like Chernobyl, or utter failure of backup redundancies like the Fukushima Daiichi accident, both of which led to wide release of radioactive material. When a Molten Salt plant exceeds critical temperature, the molten salt is simply dumped into a containment basin, where its radioactivity is well contained. And another advantage, if it may be called that, is the thorium fuel by itself is fissile, not capable of initiating a chain reaction, unlike fissionable material, capable of a self-starting chain reaction, like Plutonium-239, Uranium-233, or Uranium-235. But seeded with small amounts of fissionable material from “spent” uranium fuel rods, the thorium can then be started on a sustainable fission decay under much more controlled conditions, and continue to “burn” the fissionable products, thus eliminating need for long-term storage facilities that would have to be in place for perhaps centuries. Also, Thorium-Fueled Molten Salt reactors are highly scalable, meaning larger or smaller units could be linked together to supply 24/7/365 baseline power for years, and could be placed in or near the locations of heavy consumption.
The disadvantage of Thorium-fueled Molten Salt reactors is that they do not produce Pu-239 as part of the operational process, and thus are useless for nuclear weapons production, which is why the Uranium plants were developed in the first place.
The technology exists, it has been done as a demonstration, and the need is there. Get cracking, America.
Why bother?
There's practically ZERO CO2 in the atmosphere now.
CO2 makes up 4/1000s of all atmospheric gases...that's damn close to ZERO.
(compared to 99% Nitrogen and Oxygen)
Good summary.
A thorium rector not producing fissile plutonium is both an advantage and a disadvantage.
As far as I’m concerned, Iran can build as many thorium reactors as it wants.