Moving past tipping points. With permafrost melting, sea ice melting and not reforming, and fires in the boreal forest, the feedback loop is developing. We are going to blow past 2 degrees C way faster than anyone predicted.
4-5 degrees? You are optimistic. I bet I get to see 3 degrees in my lifetime as we will blast by each and every exit ramps. Not only that we’ll also be drifting on the highway, because it looks cool.
The question on my mind is at what temp will global economy and our current civilization start to implode, as at that point we will probably stop emmiting as people, cities and possibly states literally die off…and than will probably be the new norm…
Looks like it’s happening already. Natural disasters are on the rise, costing billions, insurance companies start bailing out of some area. I was also wondering if international help would come back every year to address a fraction of the wildfire in Canada, Spain, Italy, Greece, and soon pretty much everywhere.
Pretty sure the cost of the disaster is soon going to be unbearable and we’ll start abandoning places and infrastructures instead of rebuilding (not officially, of course, we’ll just “push back until conditions allow to rebuild” and forget about it as more disasters will occur).
It would take that long for developed nations, there are countries that are still in their industrial revolution and that’s not even counting the ones that actively oppose this kind of thing like Russia and China.
Welcome to the result. It’s sad, because nuclear power was the way, but instead we propegandized against it and continued to use it as a boogie man.
Ignoring the fact that coal and natural gas still hurt and kill people daily, ignoring there’s over 400 nuclear power reactors that are still active, 93 in America… But no… “Chernobyl” and the discussion ends.
Also Chernobyl was a 50 year old design, and happened 40 years ago, involved multiple human errors … nah can’t consider things have changed since then.
Now we have people using another nuclear plant in Ukraine as an example, and again the fear rises. They’re trying to weaponize the plant, but somehow it’s “Nuclear power” and not the fact some fuckheads are planning to destroy it in a destructive fashion that’s the problem.
Somehow dams that would be devistating to destroy are given a pass, but hey Nuclear power, so scary.
Chernobyl was a 50 year old design, and happened 40 years ago, involved multiple human errors … nah can’t consider things have changed since then.
Things have indeed changed, now construction regulations are far tighter. This is good because the risk of a Chernobyl event is far lower, but at the price of extreme cost overruns and project delays
Ignoring the fact that coal and natural gas still hurt and kill people daily
So is it better to start a nuclear project and hope it can start reducing coal & NG emissions 10 years from now? Or is it better to add solar and wind capacity constantly and at a fraction of the price per MWh?
There was a time when nuclear was the right choice, but now it is just not cost effective nor can it be brought online fast enough to make a dent in our problems
Somehow Dams that would be devistating to destroy are given a pass, but hey Nuclear power, so scary.
I think you’re forgetting that once the waters from a dam break dry up you can rebuild…a nuclear accident has the potential to poison the land for generations
There was a time when nuclear was the right choice, but now it is just not cost effective nor can it be brought online fast enough to make a dent in our problems
And in ten years… it’ll be too long to add nuclear … And in ten years it’ll.
Solar and wind works in some places, it doesn’t work in all places, and the goal is to start moving away from Coal and Natural gas, it’s a long process no matter which way you go, but starting to add more nuclear capactiy so in 10 years we can use it, isn’t a bad thing.
“It’s too late” has also been a refrain about Nuclear, but hey, in 2010 if people started to go nuclear, we’d have that capacity today, instead it was too late then, and we can only go solar and Wind… and we’re still lacking.
starting to add more nuclear capactiy so in 10 years we can use it, isn’t a bad thing.
Unfortunately this is only true if the money tied up building a reactor for 10 years doesn’t take away from the budget for wind and solar projects. If it isn’t then you’re literally stealing clean energy from the present to hopefully get roughly 1/4 that rate of power production in a decade
The problem is that Solar and Wind doesn’t work as a viable solution everywhere, so if the choice is between do nothing or start nuclear, you go nuclear.
Instead America has done neither and waited as have many countries.
If Solar and wind can work, and they are as fast as you say, of course you go wind and solar, the problem is that’s not the case in many places.
I am not here to argue with you or to persuade you to change your opinion. I am only here to provide you with some information and facts that you may find useful or interesting.
You are right that solar and wind energy may not be viable solutions everywhere, depending on the availability of resources, the cost of installation and maintenance, the environmental impacts, and the social acceptance.
However, there are also many challenges and risks associated with nuclear energy, such as the disposal of radioactive waste, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the safety of nuclear power plants and fusion devices, and the potential for environmental contamination and human health hazards in case of accidents or mishandling.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, renewable energy sources accounted for about 20% of U.S. electricity generation in 2020, while nuclear energy accounted for about 19%. Solar and wind energy grew at the fastest rate in U.S. history in 2020, while nuclear energy remained relatively stable³. Some studies have suggested that it is possible to supply about 75-80% of U.S. electricity needs with solar and wind energy, if the system were designed with excess capacity and storage⁴.
Nuclear energy is not a renewable source of energy, as uranium is a finite resource that will eventually run out. Moreover, nuclear energy is not carbon-free, as the process of mining, refining, and preparing uranium emits greenhouse gases. Nuclear waste is also a major environmental problem that has no permanent solution yet.
I hope this information helps you to understand some of the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear energy compared to solar and wind energy. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to share them with me. 😊
It’s people like you who present a false dichotomy that are the really evil people in the world today.
We can do solar, wind and nuclear. One does not preclude the other, contrary to your false dichotomy.
In fact, we must build out a minimum level of nuclear - it is the only mandatory technology required to stop climate change, because it works 24/7.
We can add as much solar and wind to the system as we would like, as long as the grid can handle it.
Grids with a lot of hydro will not require much nuclear, e.g. Iceland can do entirely without it and Sweden only needs a small amount. Grids with little hydro will need a lot of nuclear, like France.
This was true in 1990. It is still true today and it will still be true in 2050.
Budgets are a real thing. If you tie up $28.5 billion constructing say, the Vogtle #3 and #4 reactors, you are taking away significant amounts of money that could have already produced working wind and solar installations that would produce far more power. Stating that reality doesn’t make me “evil,” get a grip.
Additionally, with upgrades in high voltage transmission lines and grid-level storage systems the need for nuclear or fossil fuel baseload in the future is going to be far less than you expect
Obviously, regulations must be changed to make nuclear affordable.
But yes, misguided people like you and those who opposed nuclear in the 90s are causing a mass extinction even that is gearing up to become the biggest in the history of the planet.
If that isn’t evil, then I don’t know what the term evil means anymore.
So is it better to start a nuclear project and hope it can start reducing coal & NG emissions 10 years from now? Or is it better to add solar and wind capacity constantly and at a fraction of the price per MWh?
It’s better to do both!!
Nuclear is not more expensive than solar and wind. And today’s paradox is solar and wind are cheap because oil is cheap…
Besides, comparing the 2 is totally misleading. One is a controllable source of electricity, the other is by nature an unstable source, therefore you need a backup source. Most of the time, that backup is a gas plant (more fossil fuel…), and some other time it’s mega-batteries projects that need tons of lithium… that we also wanted for our phones, cars, trucks etc. Right now, every sector is accounting lithium resources as if they were the only sector that will use it…
And then you have Germany, that shut down all its nuclear reactor, in favor of burning coal, with a “plan” to replace the coal with gas, but “one day”, they’ll replace that gas with “clean hydrogen” and suddenly have clean energy.
There was a time when nuclear was the right choice, but now it is just not cost effective nor can it be brought online fast enough to make a dent in our problems
So we’ll have very very exactly the same conversation 10 years from now, when we’ll be 100% renewable but we’ll have very frequent power outages. People will say “we don’t have time to build nuclear power plan, we need to do «clean gas/hydrogen/other wishful thing to burn»”. And at that time, someone will mention that we will never produce enough of these clean fuel but … How many times do we want to shoot ourselves in the foot??
I think you’re forgetting that once the waters from a dam break dry up you can rebuild…a nuclear accident has the potential to poison the land for generations
In the years to come, we’re going to lose much more land just because it won’t be suitable for human survival, and that will be on a longer scale than a nuclear disaster. Eliminating fossil fuel should be the sole absolute priority, and nuclear is one tool to achieve it.
Yeah, but the only way you could weaponize a solar panel is to drop it on someone. You can’t just misconfigure a solar array and render the entire area unlivable.
Like, what part about “if this power plant falls into the wrong hands it could be turned into a weapon of mass destruction” sounds even remotely acceptable as a trade-off when cheaper and vastly safer alternative techs are available?
I think we need to accept that we don’t have the technology to sustainably deliver as much energy as the capitalist economic system now demands and will demand in the future. We are, in fact, going to have to figure out an economic system that can meet our needs without ever-spiraling energy requirements.
There are other issues, too. France is dealing with issues with their nuclear plants because they designed them around the idea that river water would always be cheap and abundant. They’ve had to start shutting down nuclear reactors in summer when water levels get too low, and they expect this issue to get worse over time. They are planning new reactors around the new environment, but I just don’t see how we can effectively plan nuclear infrastructure in an environment of global climate change and reduced security. Conflicts like in Ukraine aren’t going to become less common over time.
Actually we can make nuclear molten salt reactors (working small scale stuff exist for long decades). Since the medium is liquid, it has much better utilization of the fuel, there is no pressurized radioactive water reservoirs (which is the actual issue with current reactors), to stop the reaction, you drain the fuel circulation into a container and you are done, no need to supply water to prevent criticality.
But since those molten salt reactors could not be used to create plutonium for weapons, the current reactor design was chosen during cold war era.
They have some drawbacks, like slow startup times, but the cons it provide are incredible.
Yeah, but we don’t just need technological solutions that can crank out the requisite energy, we need technological solutions that aren’t going to facilitate nuclear proliferation even more than has already occurred. The United States right now is in an insane position vis a vis Pakistan because even though Pakistan shelters the US’s enemies and is effectively a passive-aggressively hostile power, it would be worse for the US (and the world) if the current Pakistani state just collapsed. It’s a nuclear power, after all. What happens if, in the chaos, ISIS affiliates get their hands on Pakistani nukes? Or, I dunno, the Taliban? Or they disappear onto the international market and two years later the Sinaloa cartel proudly announces it’s the world’s latest nuclear power? That’s the calculus with nuclear proliferation.
This is such a drastic risk the US can’t bring itself to do anything about the people who sheltered Bin Laden and the Taliban during the Afghanistan War because that’s a lesser evil than running the risk of losing control of the nukes. Nuclear proliferation is a big deal.
MSRs and LFRs are horribly unreliable and don’t last. There hasn’t even been a successful demo reactor and the technical issues for running one safely at full power long term don’t even have proposed half-solutions.
cheaper and vastly safer alternative techs are available?
That’s the problem “cheaper and vastly safer” alternatives AREN’T always available. People continue to talk up Solar, and Wind, but they’re not viable for a majority of users of coal and natural gas plants. To produce the power that Nuclear does in square mile of land, you need 50 square miles of solar at least, and over 360 square miles for Wind. And that’s also saying you need viable places, because Wind turbines can’t just be thrown up anywhere, nor can solar.
Coal and Natural gas is more efficient by a factor of at least 10 in land space.
If you’re in the middle of nowhere, that’s viable, if you live in a big city, that’s going to become a problem quickly.
Yeah, but since there are no moving parts and no emissions, you can site solar panels in places you could never site a nuclear power plant. You can even put them on farms, which is actually of interest to farmers now since climate change means many farms are dealing with excess heat stress and water retention issues in their soil. Revenue-generating shade devices that protect their yields are of interest to farmers. There are a million ways you can creatively use wind and solar technologies because they’re not just inherently extremely harmful and dangerous.
Cf. agrisolar.
Go ahead and put a nuclear power plant anywhere and continue to use that land for anything else. Or cover a city’s rooftops in nuclear reactors. Go right ahead, I’m sure nobody will have anything to say about that.
Your argument sounds great as long as we forget literally all of the specific characteristics of all of these technologies that differentiate them other than power output. Only thinking about power output is why we’re dealing with a 10-dimensional stack of environmental problems only the largest of which is climate change.
EDIT Made some tweaks after posting sorry if you were replying.
Inkai uranium mine produces about 40W/m^2 in fuel for the actively leeched land where everything is killed by the sulfuric acid and vehicle movement.
If you include the 15km buffer where you can’t live or eat anything it’s about 20W/m^2
Solar averages 20-50W/m^2 with current tech.
Rooftop solar uses no land. Agrivoltaics can have negative land use (adding the solar reduces the amount of land needed for the crops under it). Roughly 30m^2 of roof + 30m^s of facade or wall is sufficient for the average high income country european’s final energy use.
Solar uses a strict subset of the materials needed for a nuclear plant, so land use from the uranium mining is in addition to construction.
Like every pro-nuke lie, your land use pearl clutching is the oppksite of the truth.
The statement that “cheaper and vastly safer alternative techs are NOT always available” is not accurate. Solar and wind energy are becoming more viable as technology improves, and the land requirements for these technologies are not as significant as they once were. In addition, coal and natural gas are not as safe as they are often made out to be. Coal mining is a dangerous occupation, and coal-fired power plants can release harmful pollutants into the air. Natural gas is also a fossil fuel, and its combustion releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The cost of coal and natural gas is likely to increase in the future, as the world’s reserves of these resources dwindle. The environmental impacts of coal and natural gas are also becoming increasingly well-known, and public pressure is growing for a transition to cleaner energy sources. The development of new technologies, such as battery storage and smart grids, is making it easier to integrate renewable energy sources into the electricity grid.
In conclusion, there are a number of reasons to believe that cheaper and vastly safer alternative technologies to coal and natural gas are becoming more available. These technologies offer a number of advantages over traditional fossil fuels, and they are likely to play an increasingly important role in the global energy mix in the years to come.
Theyve had to start shutting down nuclear reactors in summer when water levels get too low,
This is a fake news. Period.
Some reactors had to REDUCE THEIR OUTPUT because otherwise they would exceed the temperature increase they’re allowed to cause in the river, this to preserve life in the river. No reactor was shutdown because of a low water stream.
What happened last year is a systematic defect was found in an external protection layer, and the decision was made to fix all the reactors having the same potential defect at once. The work took longer than expected, and that caused France having very limited capacity for months, causing worries about power outage.
Not to say it could never happen in the future, but it didn’t yet.
Thanks for clarifying, but I mean, that hardly seems any better. Why does it matter if the temps “only” got too hot for life in the river and they reduced output to avoid environmental damage? Do you mean to imply stripping that environmental regulation and letting them kill off life in the river with overheated wastewater would be an acceptable tradeoff if temperatures got too hot for too long?
No, I don’t mean to destroy life in the river. I mean to highlight the difference of impact between going from 90% of your capacity to 0% in one information to reducing from 90% to 80% or even 70%. Shutting down a nuclear reactor is quite a big deal in terms of operations. Restarting it is not like turning back on a switch either. Claiming a reactor was shut down makes it sound like a much bigger deal than what it was.
The answer has been clear. The wealthy that cause this will continue to rape the planet for short term profit to feed their insatiable greed machine, the peasants who will suffer the most who could destroy the global oligarch class in a day will continue to labor for them in exchange for minimal subsistence until we die of climate change induced natural disasters, heat stroke, or starvation, and the global oligarchs will flee to the luxury bunker complexes they’ve been building to continue to live like modern Pharoahs, protected from the destruction they wrought.
Humanity chose greed and greed worship, because humans would rather daydream about becoming the greedy fuckers and living in the decadence and gluttony of their masters, than of breaking the wheel, rejecting the owners and stripping them of their wealth/power, and working together sustainably for the future of the species.
A great many of us peasants actually resent our tax dollars going to the underpaid teachers that try to foster society’s future in the face of apathy and greed. I think you’d have to be blind to have any hope for humanity getting wise without the painful, clearly needed education of civilization’s collapse. In an age where humanity’s technology can literally destroy the world, we need to learn the hard way that actions and inaction have consequences for the species.
We can’t learn that until we’re hungry and can no longer delude ourselves into believing everything is fine by staring into a screen.
I read the Fourth IPCC Assessment in 2007 and was like “wow, they have to know they’re being too conservative with their estimates”
Basically, if anyone had looked at the IPCC reports that had been produced even before 2010, it was obvious how much airbrushing and wishful thinking was going on to make it look like everything was fine. But instead of looking at the reports overall, people just wanted to read the comforting, obviously wrong even then conclusions at the very end.
If you really looked at the level of uncertainty involved in the projections, and thought about it honestly, anyone could have have realized long before 2010 that, at level best, world “leaders” were literally gambling with the future of this entire global civilization.
Oh, I know. But see how downplaying serious threats to civilization plays out. The IPCC 2007 report screwed the climate movement during likely its most critical period (earlier action is always better, but the late 2000’s-2010’s were sort of our last window for avoiding the really awful stuff, so in a way that was sort of the most important time to be ringing the alarm imho – at this point, we just get to respond to the out of control emergency that’s now starting to play out) because everybody could officially point to it and say “look? see? we’re fine! it’s fine! shut up!”
Climate denialism that merely comes from a CYA/institutional politics angle is still climate denialism.
Sadly the inflation of the 70s followed by high interest rates froze nuclear plant building, and when it could have picked back up, Chernobyl put a final mail in the coffin.
Honestly I think the only thing that will stop it is mass death and destruction of the industrial economy.
Right now my biggest hope is a volcanic winter to give us a little reprieve.
Switching >50% of the power to wind could have happened any time in the last 80 years for far less than any one of the various failed nuclear transitions.
Hell, the first commercial solar thermal installation was over a century ago and the first attempt to bring PV to market was george cove in 1906. One abandoned nuclear reactor worth of investment could have moved either down the economic learning curve to replace coal.
I live in the SW US. We could probably provide power for most of the US with all the sun we get here and all the empty space without much of a hassle. The great thing is that it would likely be far less expensive than a good number of the alternatives.
We’re going to need to make all the changes now. Energy production, energy usage, energy storage, transportation, manufacturing, carbon capture and so on. We’re going to need to do all of it, and we’re still in big trouble. My guess is that within the next 100 years the human population might take a dive because of climate change.
Actually hoping this is situational to a degree bc of the
El Niño is the “hot wave” portion of the cycle. El Niña is the “cooling” portion of the cycle. Both are involced in water surgace temperatures affecting storms, hurricanes, and more. We are in El Niño currently for the new couple years so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the routinely for a couple years sadly.
If this is really the case, then where are the movies that are intended for older audiences? It feels like almost all movies are for a younger target audience nowadays (if that’s what you want to call it). You can argue that Oppenheimer is one but besides that there haven’t been many big movies for older audiences this year.
That is not what is going on here. They are using very recognisable terms from right wing social media propaganda. These are brainwashed morons with a political agenda.
Mount Tambora was even better. But sadly volcanic winters are temporary, but release a ton of CO2 and methane that just can cause later warming, not to mention acid rain from all the hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide forming sulfuric acid in the atmosphere. Maybe we need a few in a row.
They probably couldn’t before, but it got revised in a mandela effect update.
Also the rumors that they got their name by burrowing into sleeping people’s ears is grossly exaggerated. There have been no double blind studies showing this conclusion, and the Himalayan artwork depicting earwig-zombified villagers attacking a temple has been debunked as popular fiction art from the 14th century.
The science is settled. Aside from the reports of ancient historians, rumors of earwig apocalypse are without sufficient supporting data to rule out alternative explanations.
A few of these made it into my house and my cat saved me from two crawling on the bed. I’d rather swallow a spider than have these things crawl on me. Idk what the ick factor is.
This was a huge benefit of my self-hosting. I started with just file server and mythTV, but mythTV uses mySQL, and once I had a db running, I found all kind of other uses for it. I’ve used Quicken (2012) to track finances, but then I figured out I could use my brokerage’s API to get the raw data and make my own graphs. My rowing machine has an API to get all kind of metrics, including a heart monitor. Environmental sensors. I haven’t gone as far as ‘smart’ scale, or a wearable that would track sleep. Then a bunch of python to make pretty graphs for web pages.
Honestly, I think it’s the pleasure of seeing new dots show up on the rowing graph that keeps me doing it.
If you want to lose the solace that fact has provided you, here’s another possibly also false but no less comforting bit of trivia:
spoilerLeeches after feeding would love nothing more than a dark, somewhat moist, somewhat warm, somewhat tight environment. Which a human has and is probably something you don’t want a leech to get anywhere near, be glad there’s no such thing as a Analwig. Oh and land leeches exist.
In Norwegian they are called Klypedyr. Literal translation is pinching-animal (although we call it an insect). I always though that was scary as a kid, but I see now my trauma is tiny compared to ear-infesting-wig-wearing thingy. I still don’t like them, but I tolerate them
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