this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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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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Massive Energy Needs of AI & Cryptocurrencies Lead Amazon, Google & Microsoft to Embrace Nuclear Power (www.democracynow.org)
submitted 3 days ago by pete_link@lemmy.ml to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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November 19, 2024

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[–] federalreverse@feddit.org 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

You're missing that no one ever invested in nuclear if they didn't expect to socialize storage cost. The premise is completely absurd too — you can't keep anything safe for over 100k years. There's no way to ensure that people won't dig up rocks, even on a 500-year horizon.

The entire history of humanity is only 300k years long, and our languages as well as our societal systems of organization are much younger.

[–] oce@jlai.lu 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Long term storage is not supposed to require maintenance over that time, the worry is rather preventing people to dig them up unknowingly in the future. Actually dangerous wastes have way smaller half lives that that.

[–] federalreverse@feddit.org 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Long term storage is not supposed to require maintenance over that time

Ideally. Though you can do a 80s Germany: Find a suboptimal storage site right next to the inner-German border, so as to piss off the other side of the Iron Curtain. Surprisingly, only a few years after you reunite (and it feels so good), except now you have a bunch of contaminated water in your storage site after mere decades.

But quite honestly — how can you predict the fate of even the "safest" storage site? Will there be a fracking boom near it in the next 200 years? Something other new technology? And in that sense, it really doesn't matter whether half life is 10k years or 100k years.