this post was submitted on 22 Feb 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.

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Why Britain Is Struggling With Nuclear Power | The government wants more nuclear plants to help tackle climate change, but delays and soaring costs are complicating the effort. (www.nytimes.com)
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[–] wildcherry@slrpnk.net 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

ah yes, "in many case", very reassuring.

[–] federalreverse@feddit.de 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

"In many cases" in this case means that safe parameters depend on the specific reactor model. Most reactors are made to safely scale output down to a certain degree, within certain timeframes. However, you can't use reactors like you would use gas plants -- powering them up from 0 to 100% output within a half hour. You also can't use them like batteries that can switch between charging and discharging in sub-second increments. Rather, e.g. here in Germany, many reactors (now defunct) could, with some planning, scale between 60-100% within about a week. And e.g. the proposed SMR from Terrapower was supposed to just run full steam but be able to buffer energy as heat, so electricity output could still be modulated (Terrapower's first SMR build was cancelled iirc, because of massive cost overruns). But in any case, that still means the Terrapower SMR would not provide "base load"; it would augment what's needed (you know, if it had actually worked out).

[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 2 points 8 months ago

Last I heard (seminar in Summer 2018) NuScale's SMR was supposed to be able to do load following, but still needed some work analysis and design work to handle the effects of shadowing from control rods to prove they were safe for any power output history. I haven't followed up since then, but I imagine that's a bit of a complicated thing to simulate.