this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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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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First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by otter@lemmy.ca to c/climate
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NuScale and its primary partner give up on its first installation.

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[–] MrMakabar 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It is basicly what France did. Built a lot of nuclear power plants and due to economies of scale you can built them cheaply. Thats how France got a nearly no fossil fuel electricity grid. However cheap is relativ and a single nuclear power plant currently produces a lot of power, but is expensive. So the idea is to downscale and built a lot of smaller plants, which are cheaper and built even more of them to get economies of scale.

The idea is not bad, just the fact that nuclear is too expensive.

[–] Auzy@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

Another problem is that small reactors increase the amount of waste produced and inefficiencies apparently too.

https://news.stanford.edu/2022/05/30/small-modular-reactors-produce-high-levels-nuclear-waste/

You also need to provide full security and such for them (so I'd be guessing more overheads)

[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago

We already tried that. France had 61GW of nuclear. The US has 95GW, but that only makes up about 20% of US electricity. That hasn't made nuclear any cheaper.

We might as well keep what we have, but building new will just be expensive and unnecessary.