Post source: https://mas.to/@advisorybriefs/110769955083302457
Data source: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/
Honestly, anyone paying attention saw this coming since 2010.
We had twenty years to avoid this: by massively switching to nuclear power in the 90s and 00s.
We missed that exit ramp. By 2010 it was clear that 2 degrees was unavoidable.
The choice now is, do we limit it to 2-3 degrees warming, or do we go straight to 4-5 degrees?
It will take at least two decades to transform our industrial world economy.
They were being conservative because they didn’t want to be accused of being alarmists.
“Nuclear power scares me”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 will be a slow death, though.
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.
