this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
383 points (92.8% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5186 readers
614 users here now
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.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm pro nuclear as well but we absolutely can maintain this level of energy consumption on renewables alone.
The question is cost and risk - I'm for diversification of our grid which includes nuclear.
But it is getting to the point where renewables with backups will be cheaper than coal. That's absolutely something you can run the entire grid off of. You can balance storage requirements with excess production capacity that gets shuttered over the summer etc etc
The backup is nuclear.
I don’t really care what it costs. We’re trying to save the habitability of the planet. Damn the cost.
OK, then we just deploy a whole lot of storage capacity as fast as we can to support solar and wind. Nuclear only makes sense if it's cheaper than that, and it's not.
Cheaper long term, yes. Higher upfront cost.
Not quite sure which way you're pointing. Nuclear is ridiculously expensive up front. It has to run for a long time at 100% to make any kind of economic sense.
I’m not concerned about economic sense. I’m worried about keeping the planet habitable.
And we have another path for that. We really don't need nuclear at this point.