Let’s first describe where we are. Our energy demands to fuel a century and a half of dramatic economic growth has forced us to rely significantly on hydrocarbons. Inherent in the oxidation of hydrocarbons, complex combinations of carbon, hydrogen, and the occasional oxygen, is the consumption of oxygen in the atmosphere and the emission of carbon dioxide, water, and pollutants. These molecules trap heat as they amplify the blanket of gases in our atmosphere that moderate our temperatures. 

 

In addition, the extraction of hydrocarbons from the earth, in the form of natural gas, oil, peat, and coal all result in the release of methane, the simplest hydrocarbon that contains four hydrogen atoms and one carbon atom. This methane is an extremely potent global warming gas. Fortunately, it does not have a long life in the atmosphere, as it degrades within years or decades. However, once this molecule, as potent as up to seventy carbon dioxide molecules, finally degrades into water and carbon dioxide, it still leaves behind a potent greenhouse gas. 

 

The result is a doubling of the heat-retaining blanket that circles the earth and affects its climate. 

 

This is where we are. The unnatural processes humans have put in place have awakened natural processes of polar ice and permafrost melting, and forest decay that are in themselves releasing millions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane each year. Were humans to stop all emissions entirely, the Genie is out of the bottle and the planet’s temperature will continue to remain above natural levels for centuries to come. 

 

The challenge is not to reverse global warming at this point then, but merely to try to contain it, at least if we expect to retain our planet and its economies as we know them. 

 

Clearly, the situation is dire, even if we had the global resolve to immediately curtail net human greenhouse gas emissions and use engineering to begin to sequester excess global warming gases from the atmosphere. 

 

We can do this, and indeed we must. We can lament for a better world, but we must live with this one. The first thing we should do is ensure we no longer make things worse. Unfortunately, arctic warming, permafrost melting, and massive cycles of forest fires will continue to contribute to the problem for centuries to come. But, we can and must do everything possible to convert to energy usage that does not produce greenhouse gases. 

 

The best bang for our buck is to reduce consumption of energy as much as we can. Once we no longer consume energy unnecessarily, in proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining, in inefficient vehicles, and in obsolete heating equipment, we can increasingly focus on energy consumption that does not generate greenhouse gases. We have a series of tools at our disposal. They can be classified into two categories, energy production and energy storage. 

 

Let’s begin with storage. Some of our most promising technologies are intermittent as they depend on the sun, the tides, and the wind. The bulk of their generation potential are also at locations at some distance from where we need to consume their power. Hence, we must be able to store and transport energy. There are big technologies we can tap into by rebuilding our electric grid around direct current more suitable for wind and solar and more efficient to transport. We can enhance the efficiency of hydrogen production from sustainable electricity so we can more easily store and transport this fuel that can be burned without the production of greenhouse gases. There remain many ideal sites for pumped water storage into reservoirs, mine shafts, and mountain lakes that allow us to pump water up when electric production is high and draw the water through generators when the sun goes down or the winds die down. And dramatic improvements in battery technologies will help solve the storage and time shift dilemma. 

 

Storage is an engineering imperative, but not a solution. We must still enhance our ability to generate power from earth’s sustainable resources such as the wind, tides, and sun. Technologies are improving, costs are coming down to be competitive with the burning of hydrocarbons, if we can crack the physics of storage, and we can imagine a day, still many decades away, when we can rely fully on sustainable energy. We must do everything possible to ensure that the centennial challenge is indeed only decades away. 

 

We can’t wait decades, though. When I was graduating from college as a young physics major four decades ago, we believed that abundant, clean, and sustainable energy was only a couple of decades away. The perennial joke in physics is that we’ve been two decades away for the last seven decades. Research is promising, with the first experimental fusion plants converting hydrogen to helium and releasing immense heat to run electricity-generating turbines now close to generating as much energy as they consume. In some of our lifetimes this may solve our global warming challenges and energy needs. 

 

As we do everything we can, there is one resource we can rely upon almost immediately to bridge the gap between the energy we need and the sustainable energy we can produce. As a legacy of 443 operating nuclear power plants in the world, and hundreds more decommissioned plants, these primitive and inefficient fission plants have left at their locations stockpiles of unspent nuclear waste that will remain radioactive for many millennia. 

 

The spectre of these plants designed as part of the post-WWII zeal in the 1950s and constructed in the 1960s and 1970s are permanent reminders of the lack of fail-safe and environmentally sound first and second generation plants such as Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. 

 

These plants should be dismantled and their waste processed. We now have the science and technology for Generation Three plants that are fail-safe, and we are only awaiting more technology verification for Generation Four plants that can actually be fuelled by the radioactive waste left behind from three generations of inferior and inefficient designs. They are also designed to be inherently stable. If pumps or pipes or generators break, the reaction ceases, unlike the runaway meltdowns of previous Gen I and Gen II plants. 

 

We’ve developed such a bias against nuclear power generation because of our past zeal with an incomplete plan. However, we must now plan for the world we meet, not wish for the world we should have had. The new breed of Gen IV plants will play an important part in our energy mix, help transition us to a fully sustainable solution, and clean up by consuming our stockpile of nuclear waste, all safely and perhaps even cheaply. Just as I am willing to give my electric car and home solar panels a chance to allow me to come closer to carbon neutrality without being locked into a mindset that cars are bad based on those we built from the 1950s to today, I must be willing to give NEW nuclear power a closer look. We should do so for no other reason than to render safe and extract energy from the nuclear waste that arose from six decades of nuclear power production. But if we can also move toward global warming reductions and use Gen IV plants to act as an important 24/7 bridge in our energy needs, with their inherent heat storage capacity to also bridge periods when solar or wind generation are not possible, we should open our minds to the possibilities, for the sake of our planet. 

 

Our world is far from perfect, and politics far less perfect than just about any other human institution. COVID-19 has demonstrated that a sizable portion of our population prefers to trust their favorite politicians instead of scientists. We’d be far better off had we trusted science much earlier when they first began sounding the alarm about global warming many decades ago. Their job is to give comfort to us that they understand extremely complex theories and data and offer sensible solutions. Our job is to listen with an open mind and not rely on politicians and their agendas and allegiances that invariably preserve a status quo that is not currently working. 

 

Read more about such emerging technologies at: 

 

https://newatlas.com/energy/natrium-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor-storage/