this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check (www.theregister.com)
submitted 6 months ago by kalkulat to c/[email protected]
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With a few SMR projects built and operational at this point, and more plants under development, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) concludes in a report that SMRs are "still too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning away from fossil fuels."

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Big overruns in budget and time for first 4 plants currently under construction, but the analysis double dips regarding "risk" as they are again talking about financial risk to investors, not risk of meltdown or other disaster.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Investment risk is a category of risk. How's that "double-dipping?"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

The investment risk is directly related to cost overruns and delays, which are already stated.

On the other hand, a major point of these projects is how they significantly reduce the risk to humans and the environment compared to other nuclear plants, so I don't think I'm alone in expecting the "risk" in the headline was referring to some rebuttal of their claims, but that is not the case.