>Good luck transmitting it to where you need it, though...
True, but the scale of the problem we're dealing with makes it worthwhile to consider locating certain industries near nuclear plants to take advantage of low cost/free energy. Locating industries there means they can close elsewhere, freeing space and lowering consumption of electricity.
>The waste heat is also a significant limiting factor for nuclear,
It is, but the above also helps with that, consuming the waste heat to some degree as it simultaneously makes industry cheaper to operate.
Another possibility is to use the waste heat from a reactor to heat indoor farms/greenhouses. A vertical farm uses a fraction of the water an outdoor farm does, it produces food in a very small area of land relative to an outdoor farm, it produces high quality food that usually needs no pesticides to produce good yields.
One final advantage of vertical farms is that they free up land to allow it to be reforested or at least planted with non food crops that will absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere.
So many people's thinking about how to adapt our power generation to climate change is limited by the assumption that whatever we do must be a drop in replacement for what we have now. That's not the case, and in fact it's likely we'll have to change far more than just how we generate power to survive.
True, but the scale of the problem we're dealing with makes it worthwhile to consider locating certain industries near nuclear plants to take advantage of low cost/free energy. Locating industries there means they can close elsewhere, freeing space and lowering consumption of electricity.
>The waste heat is also a significant limiting factor for nuclear,
It is, but the above also helps with that, consuming the waste heat to some degree as it simultaneously makes industry cheaper to operate.
Another possibility is to use the waste heat from a reactor to heat indoor farms/greenhouses. A vertical farm uses a fraction of the water an outdoor farm does, it produces food in a very small area of land relative to an outdoor farm, it produces high quality food that usually needs no pesticides to produce good yields.
One final advantage of vertical farms is that they free up land to allow it to be reforested or at least planted with non food crops that will absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere.
So many people's thinking about how to adapt our power generation to climate change is limited by the assumption that whatever we do must be a drop in replacement for what we have now. That's not the case, and in fact it's likely we'll have to change far more than just how we generate power to survive.