this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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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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Can we afford to be afraid of nuclear power? (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago (2 children)

This one?

If so it would supply just New South Wales for only 20 minutes. Hardly seems to be on the verge of solving grid scale storage.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Now to the word "emerging"

This was built entirely in 16 months, from groundbreaking to connection to the grid. For the cost of a single nuclear reactor you can build 30 of these. And opposed to nuclear technology batteries are still making remarkable progress in their affordability.

Edit: Btw the battery also uses below 0,5% of the area of a usual nuclear plant.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

How often do you think it would need to supply a whole state? Australian states are massive.

I'm in NSW, and from memory, I can think of a few power outages that took down a few tens of thousands of homes for a few days. Most are much smaller. That's in a state with a couple of million homes. So at most a few percent of the state. So even in a worst case scenario maybe you still get a day at full power. If you ration it out to essential services, then a lot longer.

This is all ignoring the fact that most outages are grid related, not generation related, which means that nuclear would be of no help, but a somewhat distributed battery backup system could be massively useful.