this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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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.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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NuScale and its primary partner give up on its first installation.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thoughts on nuclear? Sounds good to me but I'm so somewhat ignorant.

[–] venoft 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Cleanest energy generation around. It produces a handful of waste per year (the whole US generates around half a Olympic pool per year), which could be further reduced by using some of that waste too in newer generation plants, like in European countries.

The traditional nuclear plant has a design that (on purpose perhaps) produces plutonium, which the government like as they can build nukes with it.

And of course there have been accidents, but mostly due to incompetence or negligence. And don't forget coal plants produce a huge amount of nuclear radiation too and they just expel it from their chimneys.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel

https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear-waste-and-what-do-we-do-with-it.aspx

The worst part of renewable energies now is the waste. Wind power blades are not recyclable and literally just get buried in big fields (a problem for the next generation I guess..) and solar panels are "not commerically interesting" to recycle, so around 90% of them too just get dumped.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills

https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

To put down the bad site of things:

  • cost nuclear is significantly more expensive then renewables. For the US and this project is was 30 times more per MW.
  • it takes about a decade to built a single plant, with cost overruns being common
  • single plants are so expensive that they can only be built with government support
  • total certralization of production, so basicly only big companies and governments
  • nuclear is baseload althou the production can be varied it is hard to turn off a plant quickly and turn it back on again
  • very real dangour of terrorist attacks
  • huge failure points in the grid, if you have a problem. Since they produce as much as they do, it causes huge problems, if they do not work properly for any sort of reason and there are a lot of them.

Important to mention the downsides as well, so I thought I help out a bit.