Climate Change(d)?

[Shadowy Man]

And this article also addresses the kind of doomerism that TSwizzle has fallen prey to:

Doom-mongers do more harm than good, the United Nations' new climate change chief has said.

Prof Jim Shea, the newly elected head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warned that apocalyptic messaging merely “paralyses” the public and fails to motivate them to protect the planet.

It comes amid a growing backlash to activists such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, who have disrupted events from Wimbledon to Pride parades.

The Scottish physicist also said that the world warming 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, to which the 2015 Paris Agreement pledged to limit global temperature rises, was “not an existential threat to humanity”.

“If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyses people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change,” he said.

Well demonstrated here...

He added: “Nevertheless, we should not despair and fall into a state of shock when the world exceeds 1.5 degrees.

What the experts are saying.

“The world won’t end if it gets more than 1.5 degrees warmer. However, it will be a more dangerous world. Countries will struggle with many problems, there will be social tensions.

“And yet this is not an existential threat to humanity. Even with 1.5 degrees of warming, we will not die out.”

 

[robnisch]

Of course the world(earth) is not going to end, look what happened 66 million years ago.
However, it will get harder to live the way we do now.

MSN

If you live in Florida or California, good luck!

 

[Elixir]

the Oil industry research (as cited in this thread) implied unmitigated CO2 related global temp increases were (as researched in the 1980s) were irreversible and given 100 or so years, potentially "catastrophic".

Bunch of libtard doomsaying end timers trying to sell more doom, is all that is. Nobody else would hire them so they bid the oil company contract way low, and that's the only way they got the job.

“If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyses people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change

We ARE all doomed to extinction just like some 99.999% of all species that have ever lived.
But we're only arguing about the timetable.

 

[TSwizzle]

Do not pursue nuclear energy;

You would be forgiven for thinking that the debate on nuclear power is pretty much settled. Sure, there are still some naysayers, but most reasonable people have come to realise that in an age of climate crisis, we need low-carbon nuclear energy – alongside wind and solar power – to help us transition away from fossil fuels. In 2016, 400 reactors were operating across 31 countries, with one estimate suggesting roughly the same number in operation in mid-2023, accounting for 9.2% of global commercial gross electricity generation. But what if this optimism were in fact wrong, and nuclear power can never live up to its promise? That is the argument the physicist MV Ramana makes in his new book. He says nuclear is costly, dangerous and takes too long to scale up. Nuclear, the work’s title reads, is not the solution. The problems with nuclear are so “obvious”, he wagered, they do not need to be spelled out. Perhaps most urgently, the risks of nuclear are too great, he says. Though major malfunctions are rare, the likelihood of them happening is exacerbated by “extreme weather patterns due to climate change”, says Ramana

Teh Gruaniad

"Fossil fuels" will remain our main source of energy for quite some time yet.

 

[Shadowy Man]

“The problems with nuclear are so “obvious”, he wagered, they do not need to be spelled out.”

This is the language of someone arguing without facts but relying on a fallacious appeal to emotion.

This is as much extreme language as the doomsayers of climate change you so despise. The only difference is that it comports with your beliefs.

Nuclear may not be the panacea but it certainly is part of the solution as are continued, but limited, use of fossil fuels.

We need reasoned discussions about the future of energy use and its sources and neither this nor the climate apocalypsers are discussing in good faith.

 

[bilby]

He says nuclear is costly, dangerous and takes too long to scale up.

He is factually wrong on all three counts.

The first and last are functions of obstructionism, and are in no way inherent to nuclear power; "dangerous" is an absurd way to describe the safest way of making electricity yet implemented.

Major malfunctions are not only incredibly rare; They also have consequences far less severe than major malfunctions in other technologies. There have been three "major malfunctions" in the entire history of the industry, and two of them resulted in zero fatalities. One resulted in zero injuries. The outlier, a woefully inadequate Russian design that was being abused by incompetent operators, led to a fatality and injury toll in the mid-range for industrial accidents; It was less serious than the contemporary Union Carbide isocyanate leak in Bophal. Non-nuclear industrial "disasters" of this severity occur typically several times a year.

Solar power is very safe. Yet, more people die every year in the USA alone in accidents directly related to solar power, than have ever died, worldwide, in the seventy-plus year history of nuclear power.

 

[TSwizzle]

“The problems with nuclear are so “obvious”, he wagered, they do not need to be spelled out.”

This is the language of someone arguing without facts but relying on a fallacious appeal to emotion.

This is as much extreme language as the doomsayers of climate change you so despise. The only difference is that it comports with your beliefs.

Clearly you do not know what my beliefs are on this subject. Maybe that is my fault but just to be clear, I am in favor of nuclear energy. I have complained about insufferable prick Newsom closing down nuclear facilities in California although he did relent on closing one facility in the medium term.

We need reasoned discussions about the future of energy use and its sources and neither this nor the climate apocalypsers are discussing in good faith.

That's Teh Gruaniad for you.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Phoenix, which set a 110+ consecutive day record last year with 31 straight days of 110+ highs, trashing the old record, has now crushed it's consecutive 100+ degree day record this year by reaching it's 100th straight day of 100 or higher high temps. The record was 76 days.

Pretty much any way the data is parsed, 2024 marks another record-breaking summer of heat in Phoenix. It's been the hottest meteorological summer, which includes the months June, July and August. And it's the same story throughout the western U.S. with several locations in California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico setting records or coming close.

Just about anywhere in the SW but Coastal So Cal (article going into that already posted).

 

[Shadowy Man]

“The problems with nuclear are so “obvious”, he wagered, they do not need to be spelled out.”

This is the language of someone arguing without facts but relying on a fallacious appeal to emotion.

This is as much extreme language as the doomsayers of climate change you so despise. The only difference is that it comports with your beliefs.

Clearly you do not know what my beliefs are on this subject. Maybe that is my fault but just to be clear, I am in favor of nuclear energy. I have complained about insufferable prick Newsom closing down nuclear facilities in California although he did relent on closing one facility in the medium term.

given this is a discussion in a thread entitled “climate change(d)”, the main reason to desire more nuclear power is as a way to address anthropogenic climate change caused by emissions from fossil fuel consumption.

Since you don’t seem to believe in anthropogenic climate change, it is not clear to me what your interest is in supporting nuclear power in this discussion.

Perhaps there are economic reasons to be in favor of nuclear energy but that would seem to be more relevant in other threads.

So I apologize if I inadvertently mischaracterized your position.

 

[Elixir]

Perhaps there are economic reasons to be in favor of nuclear energy but that would seem to be more relevant in other threads.

Why? The economics are the ONLY attribute of nuclear energy that gives it any foothold whatsoever. If fossil fuel interests (lobbies) were unable to fetter the industry with borderline prohibitive regulatory costs, its cost per watt would be a fraction of that of generation by natural gas or burning other hydrocarbons, including costs and lives lost in the fuel extraction process.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No one here has predicted the “end of times,” ALTHOUGH, the release of methane hydrates, precipitated by the melting of the permafrost caused by current human-caused climate change, would fill the atmosphere with a greenhouse gas ten times more portent than carbon dioxide. Some scientists have speculated that this COULD precipitate a runaway greenhouse effect, such is believed to have happened on Venus. That would make the earth uninhabitable.

But there is no one PREDICTING this end-times scenario, only suggesting that it is POSSIBLE. Still far short of that, what we have now, and will have in the decades ahead, is and will be increasingly be devastating.

I very much doubt that even the worst case scenarios would render Earth uninhabitable, although large portions of it could become effectively so.

The wars that would result from the displacement from those uninhabitable areas might render the Earth uninhabited, though.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Phoenix, which set a 110+ consecutive day record last year with 31 straight days of 110+ highs, trashing the old record, has now crushed it's consecutive 100+ degree day record this year by reaching it's 100th straight day of 100 or higher high temps. The record was 76 days.

Pretty much any way the data is parsed, 2024 marks another record-breaking summer of heat in Phoenix. It's been the hottest meteorological summer, which includes the months June, July and August. And it's the same story throughout the western U.S. with several locations in California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico setting records or coming close.

Just about anywhere in the SW but Coastal So Cal (article going into that already posted).

The Great Shattering of 2024 is the sulfur dioxide issue and doesn't indicate that the underlying problem has accelerated. But neither is there any reason to think it will return to it's prior state.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Perhaps there are economic reasons to be in favor of nuclear energy but that would seem to be more relevant in other threads.

Why? The economics are the ONLY attribute of nuclear energy that gives it any foothold whatsoever. If fossil fuel interests (lobbies) were unable to fetter the industry with borderline prohibitive regulatory costs, its cost per watt would be a fraction of that of generation by natural gas or burning other hydrocarbons, including costs and lives lost in the fuel extraction process.

"Borderline"??

ALARA is fundamentally prohibitive--because any success will be met by moving the goalposts.

The only way to fix things is to rethink our regulatory environment. (And not the way the Republicans want!)

Do not do safety analysis in isolation. Population safety is about the combined safety of all reasonable substitutes, not of any given item in the group. The desired good is the kwh, we should be looking at the safest way to make them, not how safely each technology can be made.

Codified regulations make a lot of sense in stable situations. Say, the national electric code. What you need in order to prevent fires is pretty well understood. But it fails badly in unstable situations. There's a huge vested interest in the status quo even when it's inferior to the proposed change. The burden should be on the proposers of change to show that it is superior, but once that has been demonstrated there shouldn't be a million little fiefdoms with the power to interfere.

In the case of nuclear--it's safety profile (even with Chernobyl) is considerably superior to it's closest meaningful competitor: natural gas. Either natural gas is underregulated or nuclear is overregulated. (And note that the same thing applies to gas vs oil and applies to oil vs coal.)

 

[pood]

Scientists looked deep beneath the Doomsday Glacier. What they found spells potential disaster for earth.

Note to Swizzle: It is SCIENTISTS that did this, not “Al Gore.”

 

[Swammerdami]

... a woefully inadequate Russian design that was being abused by incompetent operators, led to a fatality and injury toll in the mid-range for industrial accidents; It was less serious than the contemporary Union Carbide isocyanate leak in Bophal. Non-nuclear industrial "disasters" of this severity occur typically several times a year.

During the 1990's rational observers might have concluded that the Chernobyl disaster was a good thing! It exposed the incompetences that the Soviet political system fostered; this led directly to a more-or-less voluntary dissolution of the Soviet Empire. This was thought to be a highly desirable result more than compensating for the smallish damage caused by the Chernobyl disaster.

However the downfall of the Soviet Empire turned out to be unfortunate. As we see clearly with today's hindsight, Soviet power had a stabilizing effect on geopolitics. Without it, we see fascism gaining strength around the world, especially in Putin's Russia and Trump's Amerika. Human rights are in decline and the world has never been closer to the threat of nuclear war.

 

[TSwizzle]

Three Mile Island, the site of worst nuclear disaster in the United States, is reopening and will exclusively sell the power to Microsoft as the company searches for energy sources to fuel its AI ambitions. Constellation Energy announced Friday that its Unit 1 reactor, which closed five years ago, is expected to be revived in 2028, dependent on Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval. Microsoft will purchase the carbon-free energy produced from it to power its data centers to support artificial intelligence. Reopening of the Unit 1 reactor will add 3,400 direct and indirect jobs and add more than 800 megawatts of electricity to the grid, according to Constellation. It’s also expected to add $16 billion to Pennsylvania’s GDP, where the plant is located.

CNN

Good old CNN, start off with the fearmongering.

 

[steve_bank]

Three Mile Island, the site of worst nuclear disaster in the United States, is reopening and will exclusively sell the power to Microsoft as the company searches for energy sources to fuel its AI ambitions. Constellation Energy announced Friday that its Unit 1 reactor, which closed five years ago, is expected to be revived in 2028, dependent on Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval. Microsoft will purchase the carbon-free energy produced from it to power its data centers to support artificial intelligence. Reopening of the Unit 1 reactor will add 3,400 direct and indirect jobs and add more than 800 megawatts of electricity to the grid, according to Constellation. It’s also expected to add $16 billion to Pennsylvania’s GDP, where the plant is located.

CNN

Good old CNN, start off with the fearmongering.

I an confused, where is the fear mongering? The main issue with nuclear power is we still have no permanent waste storage site as pointed out in the link.

The climate issue is AI requires more energy in servers. Bit Coin also is an nergy hog.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Three Mile Island, the site of worst nuclear disaster in the United States, is reopening and will exclusively sell the power to Microsoft as the company searches for energy sources to fuel its AI ambitions. Constellation Energy announced Friday that its Unit 1 reactor, which closed five years ago, is expected to be revived in 2028, dependent on Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval. Microsoft will purchase the carbon-free energy produced from it to power its data centers to support artificial intelligence. Reopening of the Unit 1 reactor will add 3,400 direct and indirect jobs and add more than 800 megawatts of electricity to the grid, according to Constellation. It’s also expected to add $16 billion to Pennsylvania’s GDP, where the plant is located.

CNN

Good old CNN, start off with the fearmongering.

I an confused, where is the fear mongering?

Presumably by calling the Three Mile Island incident a "disaster".

Of course, this depends highly on what one defines "disaster" to be. Typically, we would associate that word with natural events, like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes, and specifically those that results in large numbers of deaths and/or property damage. I am not particularly familiar with the details of the Three Mile Island incident to know if it should be categorized as a "disaster" or not; it's clearly going to be a subjective line that is drawn.

 

[steve_bank]

The prenary issue is contamination and waste,

Rocky Flats
Hanford
Brookhaven National Lab waste tank leaked for years getting into flora and fauna
A few oter plces

Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987,[2] is a proposed deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste in the United States. The site is on federal land adjacent to the Nevada Test Site in Nye County, Nevada, about 80 mi (130 km) northwest of the Las Vegas Valley.

The project was approved in 2002 by the 107th United States Congress, but the 112th Congress ended federal funding for the site via amendment to the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, passed on April 14, 2011, during the Obama administration.[3] The project has encountered many difficulties and was highly contested by the public, the Western Shoshone peoples, and many politicians.[4] The project also faces strong state and regional opposition.[5] The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.[6]

Three Mile Island put the kibosh on nuclear power, it scared people.

 

[bilby]

Three Mile Island, the site of worst nuclear disaster in the United States, is reopening and will exclusively sell the power to Microsoft as the company searches for energy sources to fuel its AI ambitions. Constellation Energy announced Friday that its Unit 1 reactor, which closed five years ago, is expected to be revived in 2028, dependent on Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval. Microsoft will purchase the carbon-free energy produced from it to power its data centers to support artificial intelligence. Reopening of the Unit 1 reactor will add 3,400 direct and indirect jobs and add more than 800 megawatts of electricity to the grid, according to Constellation. It’s also expected to add $16 billion to Pennsylvania’s GDP, where the plant is located.

CNN

Good old CNN, start off with the fearmongering.

They neglected to mention the death toll, and the number of injuries. Bias by omission.

If they had been talking about "Romeoville, Illinois, the site of the worst oil refinery disaster in the United States", surely they would have added "...which killed nineteen people and seriously injured ten".

They might have reported "Middletown, Conneticut, the site of the worst Combined Cycle power plant disaster in the United States", to which they might have appended "...which killed six people and injured at least fifty".

Or had they written about "Willow Island, West Virginia, the site of the worst Coal power plant disaster in the United States", I would have expected them to continue "...which killed fifty one construction workers".

Perhaps the editor and/or author of the CNN report were unaware of the impact that reporting "Three Mile Island, the site of worst nuclear disaster in the United States, which caused zero deaths or injuries, but led to the closure of the number 2 reactor only thirteen months after it first came online", might have on public ignorance of the event.

I wonder how many Americans could correctly guess the death toll from their nation's "worst nuclear disaster"; and how many could correctly name Three Mile Island, but would be unable to name any of the three (more serious and more recent) industrial disasters I mention above.

Solar power accidents kill as many people every year in the USA alone, as nuclear power accidents have ever killed worldwide, in their 68 year history. That's not because solar power is dangerous (it's one of the safer ways to make electricity), but because nuclear power is almost unbelievably safe.

Yet, due in large part to irresponsible reporting (or failure to report, like this example), most people believe it to be highly dangerous and risky, and oppose it on public safety grounds - inevitably thereby increasing the risk to the public from the electricity generation industry.