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Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
(blog.ucsusa.org)
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:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
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.
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.
I'm really sorry to do this again, but did you mean tribes?
Grids*
Ducking autocorrect