Essay by Eric Worrall
“…we know they don’t know how to get there. And most of them are not on track to get there. …”
John Kerry Expresses All About Climate Change
Biden’s envoy calls for World War II-like mobilization.
By Editorial Board
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The world needs to treat climate change like World War II when “to win the war, we must organize ourselves to control the sky and control the sea and be able to smash the battlegrounds.” have been built along the coasts of France, Belgium and the Netherlands,” Kerry said.
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“Let’s face it, a lot of companies around the world have chosen to say, ‘I’ll be zero by 2050,'” he said. “As for you and me, we know they don’t know how to get there. And most of them are not on track to get there.”
Maybe it’s because no one else knows because with current technology that’s not possible. That is certainly true of governments in the United States and Europe, which have committed to eliminating CO2 emissions by 2050 but have not yet implemented the policies or developed the technology to get there. It won’t make much difference if they do so as long as China and India continue to build coal power plants to fuel their economic growth.
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Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-kerry-lays-it-all-out-on-climate-davos-11674170143
Utility-scale nuclear power could bring the world to Net Zero, though Our Willis pointed out in 2021The 2050 goal is nearly impossible, even with nuclear power. Most green people seem to hate nuclear power more than they hate CO2.
To his credit, Kerry is not one of those green people. Kerry helped shut down advanced U.S. nuclear reactor research in 1994, during the Clinton Administration, but since then, Kerry admits he was wrong. In recent times, he has said some nice things about nuclear energy.
However, despite the recent talk of nuclear support, we are not really seeing a nuclear renaissance in Western countries, including the United States.
Therefore this is a Kerry challenge. If you want zero-emission companies and you’re really in favor of nuclear energy, let American businesses install their own small campus-scale nuclear reactors.
There is now cautious industry support for campus-scale nuclear. Omdia, a major technology research company, recently backed campus-scale nuclear reactors for data centers.
Small-scale nuclei are much safer than large reactors, because small-scale fission reactions are self-extinguishing. In basic physics, the surface area to volume ratio means that neutrons escape from the small core much more easily than the large core.
Unlike large cores like Chernobyl, which continue to fission even after it falls into a puddle, the small core’s physical shape must be perfect to sustain a fission reaction.
Even in the event of a small core melt, the moment of the melt failure causes the core material to deform and the core to lose its optimal shape, the surface area of the core material increases (a puddle of large surface area compared to a cube or sphere), more neutrons escape through a larger surface area and fission stops, because the small core can no longer trap enough neutrons for fission to continue.
I’m sure a lot of American companies would quietly enjoy the low-cost energy that is predictable and reliable that a campus-scale nuclear reactor can provide. The on-site campus-scale kernel will provide a huge boost to companies looking to answer Kerry’s call for Net Zero. If the cost of modular, campus-sized reactors can be kept at a reasonable level, there will be plenty of private companies looking for cheap nuclear power of their own, investing a large amount of money. large amounts of private capital into carbon-free nuclear power, to remain competitive with early adopters.
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