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] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I wouldn't go that far, but it's fair to say that small nuclear is unproven, both in terms of operational reliability and safety, and also in terms of its economic viability. The economic viability of large nuclear generation plants is also questionable, once you remove all the explicit and implicit subsidies that have kept the industry alive since its start.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

It's a more competitive if you remove the fossil fuel subsidies.

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

Also the thing with nuclear power is, that all those experts that build our older generators are now dead. There isn't really any expertise on how to realise nuclear generators. Different country's are building new power plants, but they are all over the estimated costs and delayed by years. When they are done with building they will produce the most expensive energy you can think of.