this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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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.

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NuScale and its primary partner give up on its first installation.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Also according to the guardian the project had massive cost overruns increasing the costs by a factor of five:

The projected cost of the NuScale project had blown out from US$3.6bn for 720 megawatts in 2020 to US$9.3bn for 462MW last year.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/09/small-modular-nuclear-reactor-that-was-hailed-by-coalition-as-future-cancelled-due-to-rising-costs

To answer your idea solar costs on a MW bases 30times less today, with falling prices. Solar runs something like 20-25% of the time and you need storage, but that is still much much cheaper then this nuclear plant would be. So you are really wasting money going for nuclear today.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly. Nuclear is quite expensive compared with wind, solar, and short-term storage. The only place new nuclear might make sense is as a competitor for longer-duration storage, and then only if it's able to come in more cheaply than people know how to build it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Nowadays a big problem with nuclear is that as almost no new reactors are built the expertise to build them has disappeared so it always leads to these huge cost overruns.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

@MrMakabar @huginn @climate

Small modular nuclear reactor?

Not in my back yard, thanks. Not that these industries tend to ask.