this post was submitted on 17 May 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.

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

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Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors (blog.ucsusa.org)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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A realistic understanding of their costs and risks is critical.

What are SMRs?

  1. SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.

  2. SMRs are not generally safer or more secure than large light-water reactors.

  3. SMRs will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste.

  4. SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production.

  5. SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.

[Edit: If people have links that contradict any the above, could you please share in the comment section?]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Why not use one of the safest and cleanest ways of producing power?

The wind doesn’t blow all the time, neither does the sun shine all the time, and not everyone is around thermal or wave sources.

Battery tech is coming along, and we are building more gravity batteries, but nuclear can close right in and replace most fossil fuel plants.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

New reactors are expensive. New reactors are late. New reactors can basically only be built by nation states but not privately. Nuclear is not insurable. Nuclear produces waste with excessive half-life. Nuclear steals resources and mindshare from other options. Nuclear energy output can't be moderated well (basically for economic reasons, it runs full steam all the time and for safety reasons, you can only moderate output a little), so it does not effectively augment wind and solar, rather leading to wind/solar having to be turned off.

Wind and solar meanwhile can be built cheaply, quickly, privately, locally, site sizes easily scale between kW or GW of output and they only produce a little regular waste at the end of their life. (Okay, granted, Neodymium mining does produce some nuclear waste too — but definitely nowhere what uranium mining produces.)

Wind+solar+hydro+better national/continental grids+batteries+flexible demand is a much better combination.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

You’re right that is a great end game

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I was very pro nuclear but in the past few years, solar+batteries have become cheaper than nuclear. We can go 100% solar + batteries for less than building nuclear and save the uranium for important things like spaceflight.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's not just the financial cost though. Going solar+batteries requires a significant increase in lithium production which has all kinds of environmental downsides. New battery tech is in the world to use just sodium and such but we're nowhere near large scale for that yet. Nuclear (alongside other technology and reducing our power usage) could bridge the gap to the new tech.

Either way, good luck getting anyone in charge to agree on anything, let alone that hurts their coal and gas profits.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Lithium production has dramatically less environmental impact than coal mining.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster

Sodium just went large scale grid installed:

https://cnevpost.com/2024/05/13/china-1st-large-sodium-battery-energy-storage-station-operation/

But for grid, even ancient nickel iron batteries are fine. Lithium is only needed for mobile device (car/bike/laptop/phone).