this post was submitted on 17 May 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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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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[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I'm sorry, I think you may not be using 'baseload' correctly. We will absolutely always have to meet the requirements for baseload power generation, otherwise we aren't making enough power and we will have brownouts.

If what you meant was that a grid relying on solar and wind for primary generation and supplemented with battery facilities can make up the deficit at night/on calm days, then while that would be ideal it is extremely unlikely to happen in the next several decades. Battery technology is not anywhere near ready for this solution, and while ESS are making extremely impressive advances, they are such a new technology that it would be intellectually dishonest for me to list their shortcomings here. They are simply too new to know which problems are inherent to the concept, and which are due simply to flawed engineering of a new technology.

For matters of logistics, a few large generating sources linked together are much more desirable than a distributed network. In fact the issue with economies of scale in power generation is one of the arguments against SMRs made by the above linked article's author. One of the biggest concerns with truly distributed power generation is safety - namely, how can you safely work on a downed line when every single house has the independent capacity to energize the lines? But those large power generating stations run into the same issue that SMRs are in vogue to solve; what do we do about crypto miners ~~besides grinding them all up into dog food, which gets my vote.~~ Their drain, and those of industry and data centers and so on, on local power infrastructure remains despite the source of the power in the system.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

At temperate latitudes, you can actually get something like 95% of the way there using wind, solar, and reasonable amounts of storage in addition to existing hydropower.

This leaves a fairly small chunk which needs either long-duration storage or firm generation. Nuclear might be able to fill part of that, but only if it comes in at a lower price than currently seems likely. Other technologies, such as induced geothermal and sodium-ion flow batteries are a lot more likely-looking right now.

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Yes, exactly! Err, but I'm not sure where the 'actually' comes in. It looks like we're agreeing. Am I misunderstanding? I can try to be a little bit more belligerent if that would help! This is internet commenting, we're supposed to be at each other's throats by this point in the comment chain....

While battery technology is making grand strides, it's my understanding that we're not to a point where we can even speculate on how to renovate our entire grid with them for a vast host of reasons. Using them to cover while switching to other higher-capacity ESSs seems to be the role they are best suited for, and outside of a few experimental exceptions that looks like the role they're stepping into in the current industry. I have high hopes for the future, but we still have a long way to go, especially in longevity. I'm not advocating for SMRs nor expansion of nuclear, solar or wind, just that we should not limit ourselves to considering a subset of our options because of ideological beliefs.

(And I'm sorry, but I have no idea what induced geothermal is. Sounds potentially volcano-y though, so that's always a plus in my book.)

(I don't really see any possible downsides to giving IBM a small nuclear reactor. They seem so nice.)

[–] huginn@feddit.it 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

No need for power generation dedicated to the base load.

Nuclear power generation is base load only: it does not full the role of a peaker.

Battery + renewable technology is already the primary source of power on many grids and the trend continues accelerating in that direction.

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm really sorry to do this again, but did you mean tribes?

[–] huginn@feddit.it 4 points 6 months ago

Grids*

Ducking autocorrect