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Worldbuilding

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    $\begingroup$ Not entirely true, as you don't really need fossil fuels for mining if you have abundant electricity. Even today, a lot of mining equipment is electric. WRT nuclear power, there's a reason the main Manhattan Project production facilities were located at Oak Ridge and Hanford: access to abundant hydroelectric power from the TVA and Columbia River dams. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 28, 2020 at 5:15
  • $\begingroup$ @jamesqf I think you missed my point : power isn't enough. You need masses of other resources. You don't just burn through fossil fuels when you do that, you also use up all the resources needed to build an industry. Power alone won't bring them back. Everything would be orders of magnitude harder to make and access and maybe even completely impractical or impossible. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 28, 2020 at 5:40
  • $\begingroup$ Not really, because given enough energy, most of those other resources can readily be recycled, or substituted. E.g. rather than using coal to heat your iron smelters, you can use electricity, so you only need enough carbon for refining, and can get that from biological sources. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 29, 2020 at 6:44
  • $\begingroup$ @jamesqf I do not agree with this idea. It's an abstraction of idealized physics, but it's not the way things work in practice. In practice that level of recycling is extremely difficult. Many of the processes (which we don't really know how to do on an industrial scale and would be tricky even in a lab). We've be burning fossil fuels for a long time and undoing (i.e. reversing) the chemical effects of that on our environment is not something we know how to do now even if we had energy surplus to try. Reversing things is just not as easy as you make out , it may be impossible in practice. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 29, 2020 at 9:45
  • $\begingroup$ We must be thinking about different things. I'm thinking about things like iron, copper, aluminum, and other things that are mined. All of those could be produced without the use of fossil fuels. They're already recycled to some degree today, and that could be considerably increased if the economic motivation was there. Nothing to do with reversing the effects of burning fossil fuels. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 30, 2020 at 16:34