17
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
17 points (63.5% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5240 readers
721 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
The experts are right; there are real and serious risks with nuclear energy. However, there's one huge benefit: you can increase power generation on-demand. If it's calm and overcast, you make not be able to generate significant power from wind or solar, and nuclear can fill that gap. On days where you can generate a lot of power from solar or wind, you can decrease the amount of power that a nuke plant is generating.
I think that we're going to need more nuclear, even as we build more and more renewables.
What are you talking about? Yes, you absolutely can. The control rods speed up or slow down the reaction, which in turn changes how much heat it's pumping out, which controls how much electricity is being generated. Nuclear output isn't a single constant, always giving exactly the same number of megawatts of power.
But the amount of cycles is not limitless, thermal and pressurefluctuations lead to material weakness over time. And a steeper gradient leads to faster deterioration