this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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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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Trump Orders Faster Build-Out of Nuclear Power Plants | Among a flurry of executive actions, Mr. Trump directed the nation’s nuclear safety regulator to speed up approvals for new reactors. (www.nytimes.com)
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It's worth noting that he also fired many of the staff who know how to ensure that they're actually safe, as well as the staff who would approve financing.

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[–] federalreverse@feddit.org 1 points 7 hours ago

97% of the waste produced is classified as low- or intermediate-level waste (LLW or ILW)

Sure, much of it is concrete and not all that noteworthy. But those final 3% are still a substantive amount of waste. How exactly do those percentages do anything about the timescales that this waste is dangerous for?

In France, where fuel is reprocessed, just 0.2% of all radioactive waste by volume is classified as high-level waste (HLW).

France is a fun example. Incidentally, their reprocessing entails shipping spent fuel rods to Siberia and having Russia bury the unusable bits there. Basic sleight of hand.

Many industries produce hazardous and toxic waste. All toxic waste needs to be dealt with safely, not just radioactive waste.

That seems like whataboutism. Am I missing something there?

But because Plutonium is part of high level waste all HLW is treated as if it's plutonium because of the overzealous safety standards.

Given how spent fuel rods contain different elements and different isotopes of elements, in what sense is that overzealous? So, indeed, every spent fuel rod contains some amount of Pu-242 with a half-life of 374k years. That that is only a small percentage of the whole doesn't really matter, unless you plan to separate all elements/isotopes before storing them.

Geostorage was implimented because of military applications of plutonium that expired and had to be stored. Over a third of all nuclear waste in the US is military waste.

Switzerland and Sweden are two countries whose plans for geological storage sites are relatively far along. Neither of them ever possessed nuclear arms. But these countries are probably just not as clever as you are.😚