this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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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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U.S. Seeks to Boost Nuclear Power After Decades of Inertia | Measures moving through Congress to encourage new reactors are receiving broad bipartisan support (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for taking the time.

I'm pretty sure that nuclear power is vastly more expensive to produce and maintain. Especially when comparing to solar/wind, since fossil power isn't desirable at all due to emissions.

Solar and wind generation is so much more efficient than even two decades ago, newer designs of nuclear plants aren't really any more efficient, but safer and more expensive. So I'm still not getting the push for more nuclear.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think for me, the best argument is having an energy backbone. I, admittedly, have little evidence on this front, but I'm skeptical about the long term cost effectiveness of grid scale batteries. Batteries don't last forever, and these are fuck off big batteries, and we're going to need a lot of them by yesterday, and they have to work, and they have to not burn down the entire grid capacity if one of the batteries cooks off (something lithium is terrible at, but I don't think they use lithium at grid scale, usually). And on top of that, from what I recall, grid scale batteries are really, really, really expensive, though I'm not 100% sure if I'm remembering that rught. It just seems like it would make more sense, both in terms of logistics and economics, to have an energy backbone comprised of safer, modern fission reactors.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Yeah, I mostly agree on that. Nuclear may be more expensive and risky, but it's also very predictable. That kind of enables it to act as a sort of safety net to smooth over the variable nature of renewables, though changing the output of a nuclear power plant is a very slow process, AFAIK.

I'm not against nuclear power per se, I'm viewing it as more of a band-aid until more mature and universal grid buffers can fill the gap smoothing out the renewable input. Nuclear may very well be a necessary step for some nations to reach their climate targets, I'm not informed enough to judge that. But I fear that the money invested, lobbying and public opinion influenced by that seemingly easy alternative directly hinder the development and deployment of technologies that lead to a renewable, cheap and reliable grid.