We’ve looked at how the land efficiency of different sources stacks up. But it’s worth considering whether the land use of energy is a big deal in the first place. Are we talking about 5%, 10%, maybe even 50% of land? I estimate that we currently use around 0.2% of the world’s ice-free land for electricity production – most of it for the mining of fossil fuels. (That’s small, considering we use 50% of the world’s ice-free land for farming.) In a world with low-carbon electricity, we could reduce this number. If the world moved to 100% nuclear, we’d need just 0.01% of the world’s land. If we
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