Possible post-1900 POD for a significant cooler climate?

Thorium reactors instead of Uranium reactors. Thorine is more abundant than urane salts, Thorium reactors do not produce long-half-life waste and they're safer than Uranium reactors. It's just they don't produce plutonium for nuke material.
Not quite true - it's more a case that the reactor types that are best suited to Thorium are also best suited to removing the major fission poisons on-line (notably Xenon-135). Doing so permits a vastly higher burn-up from the fuel, which in turn means you can burn up many of the Actinides in the process. If used in a conventional PWR-type design Thorium would only be a partial improvement - it's still bred to Uranium (233) and you still have the resultant fission products.
 

Archibald

Banned
How about China never having its economic boom ? 1.5 billion people living from coal - miust be a hefty part of global warming.
 
And I think right now, wind power is closest to be cost effective, even on very conventional terms.

If high-efficiency power lines would have come first,

would have helped wind, nuclear, solar, hydroelectrical, and probably other sources of power as well.
 
IIRC something like a hundred nuclear power plants that were planned to go on line in US during the late 70s and the '80s were canceled because of political fallout from 3 mile island.

If they go online that's a lot of coal that doesn't get burned.

Less the political fallout and more the economics. They had been planned in an era when energy demand was projected to rapidly increase, but one side effect of the oil crises and inflation of the 1970s was to greatly increase investment in energy efficiency instead of just throwing more power at every problem. Additionally, nuclear power plants were proving to be more expensive to build and operate than had been thought when they were planned. So utilities decided to save money and avoid building expensive, unnecessary facilities.

Many of the plants you refer to were cancelled before Three Mile Island, in fact.
 
IIRC something like a hundred nuclear power plants that were planned to go on line in US during the late 70s and the '80s were canceled because of political fallout from 3 mile island.

If they go online that's a lot of coal that doesn't get burned.

That wasn't only, or even primarily, because of TMI. The slowdown in nuclear power plant construction began well before Three Mile Island because anticipated increases in demand for electricity had failed to materialize.
 
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