this post was submitted on 02 Mar 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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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)
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[–] drknowledge@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Soley relying on renewables to get us off fossil fuels is taking, and will continue to take far too long. I'm sure you're aware based on how much climate scientists have been sounding the alarm (even more so recently).

It's dangerous, expensive, and its waste is also dangerous and expensive. That fear only works in the favor of the fossil fuels industry. They love pushing this notion. https://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/Nuclear_Fear_2021.pdf

For example, the leaks at the Hanford site are from military weapons research and production, not from the power plant.

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-73.pdf

But things like this get conflated with power production.

nobody knows how to deal with long term storage of nuclear waste Another ignorant statement. You keep using absolutes.

Not to mention that there isn't enough uranium in the entire Earth for the whole world to shift to nuclear. Again, stating things as factually inaccurate absolutes. It's more than capable of supplementing base loads while renewables continue to scale. This has never been an "only nuclear" vs "only renewables" argument.

Breeder reactors would massively reduce waste.

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/fast-reactors-provide-sustainable-nuclear-power-thousands-years

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01986-w

There's way more going on that you're obviously completely unaware of and are sticking to your preexisting conclusions no matter what is presented to you.

I used to hold very similar opinions in my 20s. It's amazing what education can do. I do hope your views soften a bit in the near future as we're gonna need everything we've got to get off of fossil fuels.

[–] mambabasa@slrpnk.net 0 points 8 months ago

My opposition to nuclear isn't merely because it is dirty, deadly, and costly but also because it relies on a specific technology of power to implement, a specific technology of power that has always been highly authoritarian. As part of the green movement of my country, we also push for denuclearization precisely because the 300mW nuclear power plant was built without democratic oversight. (Imagine risking non-zero chance of meltdown for a measly 300 mW!) Democratic movements are more likely to oppose nuclear energy, so it's no wonder countries who are poor in democracy like China, USA, Russia, and France build and maintain nuclear power plants despite the public opposition.

Not only that, but nuclear power fuels the valorization process under the capitalist mode of production. Even if the whole world shifts to nuclear energy, the same technology of power that constructed the nuclear power plants would also go about oppressing people.

Nuclear energy can only operate under a specifically authoritarian technology of power. A free society—whether that be anarchist, communist, or radically democratic—simply cannot use the violence needed to construct a nuclear power plant.

But you probably don't care about that. For you, this technology of power is probably a desideratum as long as you get your damn iPhones and airconditioning.