this post was submitted on 17 Aug 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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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The breeder part is the production of U-233 (which is then fissioned and used to provide the neutrons for converting Th-232 into U-233 (with a chemical separation and decay storage step in between)) which although has a tight neutron economy is viable.

Working reactors for such designs were funded by the US airforce and they did operate as expected.

If you wish to argue that one will need U-235 as a startup fuel or that there are technical problems in large scale energy production it is not yet able to address, I would definitely agree on that; the technology needs more research before we depend upon it and that Uranium light water reactors are likely to be the running standard until such time and needed investment occurs. But we have enough U-235 in nuclear waste stockpiles to fuel our civilization for a thousand years to work out the details.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I know the theory and all the half-experiments. None ran a full load of fuel or reached steady state isotope mixture. None ran on what they bred. None even pretended to have a sustainable or economical separation process. It's scifi.

Accessible (ore as or more more energy dense than low grade lignite that isn't buried so deep it can't be extracted without emittingnmore than just using fossil gas) U235 resources assumed to exist (not found) are years to a couple of decades for the world's 2030 energy needs. Developing every known resource now would have zero impact on a net zero timescale. Even at current costs the raw uranium to run an SMR is at price parity with the module part of a PV installation.

Stop with the damn lies.