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Is the heat produced by fossil and nuclear fuel negligible? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/askscience

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

We often talk about the climate impact based on greenhouse gases, but extracting fuel from the ground and using it in exothermal processes of course also releases energy as heat.

This is mostly¹ in contrast with renewables, which make use of energy that's not long-term contained to begin with, so would end up as heat in our atmosphere anyways.

So, my question is: Does the amount of energy released by non-renewables have any notable impact on our global temperature? Or would it easily radiate into space, if we solved the greenhouse gas problem?

¹) In the case of solar, putting up black surfaces does mean that less sunlight gets reflected, so more heat ultimately gets trapped in our atmosphere. There's probably other such cases, too.

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[–] partial_accumen 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Its not the question you asked, but Nuclear plants can raise the temperature of the bodies of water they use for cooling nuclear plants. Additionally climate change is reducing water availability needed for nuke plants which is something I don't hear the nuclear advocates talk about when we're facing a dryer and hotter future. We'll have to start turning off nuclear plants right when we need them.

This is already happening occasionally in the last decade:

Lochbaum analyzes reports from the NRC showing when nuclear plants scale back generation because of warm water.

In June, nuclear plants in Georgia, South Carolina and Pennsylvania scaled back their generation multiple times because of hot temperatures warming their cooling water. The Limerick power plant on the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia has scaled back because of high temperatures frequently over the past decade, according to the reports.

The Dresden and Quad Cities plants in Illinois had to scale back because of high water temperatures multiple times over the past five years. The Duane Arnold plant in Iowa and the Monticello plant in Minnesota also reported scaling back generation because of temperatures.

source

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Yeah, I'm from Germany and we experienced this second-hand in 2022, when lots of French reactors were either in reparation or had not enough cooling water during the drought, so France imported tons of power from us and drove up prices.
This all happened on top of inflation and the Russian conflict, so hard to say how much it actually influenced prices, but those were quite high in the end, so presumably not nothing.

https://www.grs.de/en/news/situation-nuclear-power-plants-france-how-has-situation-evolved-our-neighbouring-country

Without this happening, I probably wouldn't have been acutely aware of nuclear producing much heat. Obviously, they do have those massive cooling towers and I have read before that it's just another form of steam power, but you know, never properly thought about it.