With 1st Nationwide Fracking Law, Germany Approaches A Ban - "As long as the risks cannot be fully evaluated, fracking will be banned."

With nuclear, I think it would take a minimum of 15 years (but probably more) bring nuclear up that high because 1) the ridiculously slow permitting process (which theoretically could be made faster), but 2) the amount of engineering that goes into a nuclear plant, they just take a long time to build.

The govenrment actually did approve 2 nuke plants in 2012, first time it's done that since the TMI accident, so that's a good sign.

It does take a long time to build a nuclear plant. Often as long as a decade. I agree with you about a lot of the problems, but right now, about 20% of our energy in the US come from nuclear; I don't think it's unreasonable to think that we could push that up to at least 40% by 2050.

Another issue with building nuclear (right now) is that if we go forward with nuclear, theoretically we don't want to build more of what we have, we want better, more advanced nuclear, which hopefully will be ready for major deployment starting in 10 years (as opposed to starting now).

Eh. I think that starting to deploy current-gen nuclear plants, while taking offline 40 year old coal plants, is pretty clearly a positive step, even if we'll have better nuclear plants in a decade.

Although only to a limited extent; we will have to develop either thorium plants or else breeder plants, or else uranium might start to become a problem.

The thing is though, that even if we get the electricity and transportation sectors to zero carbon by 2050, which I agree with you is definitely possible though it would be hard, we still don't have a good alternative to many types of plastic.

Well, turning fossil fuels into plastic doesn't necessarily release a lot of carbon; most of the carbon is trapped in the plastic, where it stays, well, basically forever (unfortunately). There will still be a demand for fossil fuels, but that doesn't have to be a huge source of greenhouse gasses (depending on what the power source for the process is, of course). In the long run, we'll eventually probably need to switch to plastics that come from biomass of some kind, which should be possible, but that's more a long-term problem.

Sustainable forestry isn't a huge problem, either (although clear-cutting and burning rain forests certainly is).

/r/worldnews Thread Parent Link - thinkprogress.org