this post was submitted on 17 May 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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Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors (blog.ucsusa.org)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 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] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

These are not my points, they come from the article. So for example in relation to your question on the

SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power...

they have a couple of paragraphs that give an explanation.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

My first issue with this, is that he's still using his information from 2013. For instance, he claims that the spent fuel is just as dangerous. Yet we have proven time and time again, that the spent fuel rods can be used in other nuclear facilities to generate even more power off of them. We have the technology (theoretically of course, you need to actually build the facilities for this to work...) get even more energy off this "waste", in turn also making it far less dangerous!

Second issue being he says the reactors would need a secondary power source in case of emergency. Duh? Thats his reason, is that they would need a backup power source to keep the coolant system running... Duh.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Not to mention that nuclear waste is a ridiculously small problem.

France has mainly worked off of nuclear for 40+ years now, and the entirety of our nuclear waste takes about a swimming pool worth of volume... I think we should be able to handle that kind of output for a while.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

My first issue with this, is that he's still using his information from 2013.

That's actually a thing against nuclear power. For decades it's the best thing. But often drawbacks are only solved in a new design that isn't in a lot of nuclear power stations. And if they're actually build then the cost overrun by a factor of 2 and more.

It's always the next iteration that'll solve things. It seems to be like a costly way to produce power if it'll be built. Existing ones can be cheap, but then there are often several technical versions out of date.