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Humanity needs to be in a serious hurry to ramp down fossil fuel use and production to curb the megadeaths. Eg the US has been going in the opposite direction f

• rapsey 5mo ago
  If the green movement had any sense they would be promoting nuclear and lobbying to get plants built asap. Instead most of the green movement is against nuclear and only make things worse, i.e. germany now using huge amounts of coal.
  • psb5 5mo ago
    Well the article is saying transformers are overheating. That means the entire distribution network is probably not rated for such high tempratures and god knows how that is going to be solved even if you change the power plant.
    • rapsey 5mo ago
      The thread is about the world moving off fossil fuels.
  • sevenzero 5mo ago
    Because nuclear energy is only popular in certain circles. No, nuclear waste is not a solved issue. Given Russia was very happily attacking Zaporizhzhia they aren't as safe as you might want to believe. Especially Germany has issues with it due to having stored tons of nuclear waste in old salt mines in barrels that start to leak. Fuck nuclear power.
    • gambiting 5mo ago
      >>Especially Germany has issues with it due to having stored tons of nuclear waste in old salt mines in barrels that start to leak. Isn't highly radioactive waste vitrified(turned into glass)? How is it leaking, exactly? And isn't the entire point of storing it inside salt that it's self sealing - even if there is a leak it won't go anywhere.
      • sevenzero 5mo ago
        Leakage due to water infiltration. Its about 120.000 barrels stored in "Asse II" that were produced between 1967 and 1978. The contaminated water is reaching ground water which already got positively tested for caesium-137 and plutonium.
        • Gud 5mo ago
          Nobody is arguing we should store nuclear waste haphazardly in barrels.
          • cess11 5mo ago
            Right, nobody is arguing for the negative consequences we've had from nuclear reactors, except perhaps atom bombs, but they happened anyway. I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste. Can you name some that you find trustworthy enough?
            • gambiting 5mo ago
              >>I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste I know zero politicians I'd trust with deciding where to build wind farms either, it says more about politicians than the type of energy generation. These kinds of things should be decided following comprehensive research on several locations, which you know - is generally how it's done, example given by OP notwithstanding.
        • cess11 5mo ago
          2008: https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long-german-nuclear-leak-scandal-engulfs-country-and-disturbs-europe https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long... 2024: https://www.neimagazine.com/decommissioning-waste-management/water-leaks-reported-at-germanys-asse-ii-radwaste-facility/ https://www.neimagazine.com/decommissioning-waste-management... 2026: https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/robotic-arms-nuclear-waste-salt-mine-germany https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/robotic-arms-... Here's a timeline as PDF: https://www.folkkampanjen.se/pdf_asse.pdf https://www.folkkampanjen.se/pdf_asse.pdf Pricing in these things into nuclear energy production makes it quite unpalatable compared to simpler engineering, in my opinion. Who knows what will come of chinese fusion research, perhaps they'll figure it out and change my mind. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260101160855.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260101160855.h...
    • Manuel_D 5mo ago
      Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater. The fact that Zaporizhia was on the front lines of one of the biggest armed conflicts in recent memory and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not?
      • sevenzero 5mo ago
        Its not a solved issue. The plant still is in a state of emergency. It just shows that these plants are easy targets.
      • Mashimo 5mo ago
        > Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater. But Germany did not do it. They on purpose put it in a salt mine close to the east Germany border and now we have to dig it up again, because ground water is seeping in. A few weeks ago there were rumors that it's not possible to dig it up and we might have to flood it. It's such a cluster fuck. Finland did it well though.
      • simoncion 5mo ago
        > ...and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not? It is, yes. As was the performance of the Fukushima [0] reactors after getting hit with seismic forces notably outside their design tolerances... and -well- pretty much every commercially-operated fission power plant ever, other than the known-to-be-very-dangerous-to-everyone-even-at-the-time one the Soviets were running at Chernobyl. [0] Consider that the destruction of the power plant caused maybe one death years later and definitely caused a couple dozen injuries, whereas the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed that plant killed tens of thousands of people and injured many thousands more.
      • fileeditview 5mo ago
        > Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater. It's literally sweeping something under the carpet.. At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster. Probably it's not in your lifetime or in your area so you don't have to care about it. It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things. I am not even categorically against nuclear power, but ignoring the actual risks is just BAD.
  • f_allwein 5mo ago
    No. Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget/ where would you build?/ where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)?/ contributes little to global energy mix atm/ uranium is limited. Where do you get it from? Etc
    • rapsey 5mo ago
      Nuclear waste is a hilariously small amount of mass. It takes decades to build because of permitting and excessive regulations, the current UK plant build being one public insanity after another. Mining uranium is not an issue, it is all over the place and so on. Every one of your points is a non issue, made into a big deal because of ideology.
      • expedition32 5mo ago
        Nuclear was built in the 60s and 70s when Europe was still somewhat poor. As countries become decadent standards go up. Folks suddenly have rights and they can afford lawyers. And that house that you want to bulldoze is a half million property.
    • dotancohen 5mo ago
      > where would you store nuclear waste This is my favourite objection to nuclear energy. Why wouldn't we just burn the nuclear waste and vent it to the atmosphere? That's acceptable for the fossil fuel industry, so why not for nuclear? The fact that nuclear energy produces globs of concentrated, easily collected waste is a feature, not a problem. Air pollution from fossil fuels (including radioactive particles) is a leading cause of death worldwide.
      • rapsey 5mo ago
        Not only that, that nuclear waste is still incredibly energy dense and could be used in the future, if we actually invested more into developing nuclear technologies.
    • lloeki 5mo ago
  • ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
    Germany uses less coal now than at the peak of their nuclear output. They both trend down at a similar rate over the last two decades, coal slightly faster. https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=Germany&fuel=total&mode=line https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent... You could make the argument that they could have phased coal out even faster if they'd kept nuclear and did the massive renewables rollout at the same time but generally people advocating strongly for nuclear while attacking environmental groups or left wing political groups are wildly divergent from reality and so don't bother.
    • rapsey 5mo ago
      You are right I was mistaken. However Germany is still a basket case. If you want to move to a low carbon economy, you can not do it with renewables only and must be able to maintain equal power generation levels. Germany is producing less power than before and thus shooting their economy in the foot. Nuclear is the only practical solution.
      • fulafel 5mo ago
        > must be able to maintain equal power generation levels This is the baseload fallacy. It's not the case now and even less in the future as electricity use coevolves (eg more electricity users move to real time pricing, more storage, strengthened crossborder grid links, etc etc).
        • modo_mario 5mo ago
          And in the meantime you've been putting out insane amounts of co2 for decades.
          • fulafel 5mo ago
            If we so choose. If we want to move faster than we can mange to balance things, we can also reduce energy use. It's all just political decisions.
  • fulafel 5mo ago
    The green movement's main job is to convince the rest of the policymakers to take the bull by the horns, the rest is just technical details. Though nuclear can't do much in the near term and it doesn't seem cost competitive at any timescale. We shouldn't need the green movement for this, the catastrophe is obvious now and has been for a long time, the needed policies have been talked about endlessly in intergovernmental climate summits etc.
  • Mashimo 5mo ago
    > germany now using huge amounts of coal. I tried to look that up, but all I could find is that it trends downwards: https://emvg.energie-und-management.de/filestore/newsimgorg/Statista-Grafiken/Diverse_2025/statistic_id41511_kohleverbrauch-in-deutschland-bis-2023.orig.pdf https://emvg.energie-und-management.de/filestore/newsimgorg/... Not the best source, I think I have seen better where you can see all the different sources in one graph. Anyhow, you still can't eat mushrooms in certain places in Germany. And some wild boar meet has to be tested (they eat the muschrooms) All because of nuclear. And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem. I'm not against nuclear, I'm against nuclear in Germany until we prove we have our shit together.
    • Someone 5mo ago
      > And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem For those who wonder: Asse II is a salt mine that has been used for storing radioactive waste. That started as “place barrels in rows, leave space for inspection” but later turned into “roll barrels onto the heap”, making inspection impossible. Current plans are to take the waste out and store it in a more responsible manner. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine#Recovery_and_closure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine#Recovery_and_clos...
• sevenzero 5mo ago
  Even if we completely stopped all fossil fuel use right now it would be too little too late. We will witness water wars and mass migrations on a scale never seen before. We are very close to the RCP8.5 worst case scenario (not fully there yet) but you better make sure you enjoy your life while its still possible within this and the next few decades.
  • thinking_cactus 5mo ago
    No. This doomer position isn't helpful at all. All reductions we can get will severely reduce suffering and mass migrations, and prevent an enormous amount of biodiversity loss. We're losing species left and right every day too. From what I know it seems we're headed to about +3C (mean temperature rise above preindustrial). It's a pretty dire scenario. But it's far, far from "too little too late". It seems probably large parts of Earth will become difficult to inhabit (like e.g. Phoenix AZ is today) without things like AC, etc.. But that's very far from an extinction scenario or total doom. Every little bit we don't emit today will prevent probably several decades up to a century of atmospheric warming before it's extremely costly to remove from the atmosphere back into some reservoir. Reminder that some fossil fuel companies quite enjoy narratives of total doom and change being pointless.
    • sevenzero 5mo ago
      Doomer position? You are aware that the climate catastrophe is a known fact since decades? People in the 70s knew about it, and what did humanity do about it? Spreading propaganda about how earth always had hot and cold periods. It's a narrative many still support today. Even +3C is a massive change resulting in many many catastrophes. As I wrote, we will witness water wars and mass migrations. You can call it a doomer position, I call it reality.
      • solumunus 5mo ago
        They’re referring to your attitude around reducing fossil fuel usage. “We’re screwed anyway so there’s no point”.
      • 5mo ago
• kaliqt 5mo ago
  This has nothing to do with that.
• gherkinnn 5mo ago
  Drill baby drill. And to lighten the mood, the US has more yoga teachers than coal miners: https://www.sfgate.com/columnists/article/Yoga-teachers-vs-coal-miners-What-really-powers-11200763.php https://www.sfgate.com/columnists/article/Yoga-teachers-vs-c...
  • IdiotSavage 5mo ago
    [dead]
  • Someone 5mo ago
    Makes sense. Coal mining can be automated, and that has been partly done. If coal mining still would be done mostly manually, there would be way more coal miners, or, more likely, coal mining would be unprofitable, and be a thing of the past, Yoga teaching hasn’t been automated yet, and may never (a startup using robots to give yoga classes likely would be a hit on social media, and might initially be successful, but I am not sure that would last)
• snapplebobapple 5mo ago
  Nah, needs to be in a hurry to develop much more efficient and cheaper ac and food crops that handle extremes better perhaps, but no hurry to curb oil use until an actually better product comes along. It is uncertain if actually better product will be much cheaper batteries to make renewables actually work or government getting out of the way so nuclear can actually innovate a cheaper default design but i hope its both and quickly.
• belorn 5mo ago
  Given the recent activity in the middle east, production is ramping down. There has never been clearer, both in terms of climate and national stability, that fossil fuels need to be removed from the grid and the transportation sector. In term of politics however, that is a much harder sell. When EU got together and voted on green policies, two strategies emerged. One side wanted renewable energy that is supported by natural gas, and thus natural gas got defined as "green". From central to northern Europe it has also been a core strategy to combine renewable generation with thermal power plants that burn fossil fuels, and looking at party platforms (which obviously is public accessible to anyone who want to read them), thermal power plants are a described as critical in order to enable renewable energy. The other side calls for nuclear energy, which EU also defined as "green". In the transport sector, we also have two main strategies, that being electric and bio fuel/green hydrogen. The green hydrogen has failed to become anywhere close to economical viable, and currently the stage of the struggle is for chemical processes to change from dirty hydrogen produced from natural gas towards green. So far the progress is slow and has costed billions in subsidies, and converting the transport sector is still multiple decades away from becoming economical viable. The electrification process is developing much better, but it too is struggling under both the constraint of the grid and the cost side. Currently the best example is Norway, which strategy was to have the government subsidize car purchases by around 50%, and more than that in terms of car ownership. The grid however is still the major bottleneck when transportation converts to electric. On the bio fuel side, the way it get described is that by-products are the main ingredient, but in practice only a fraction come from that process and the rest is corn, soy and sugar beets, which in turn is produced using artificial fertilizers derived from natural gas (a common theme). This all means there is a common shared resource in most of those strategies, which is natural gas. When prices of natural gas increases, the grid cost increase in places which has a high dependencies on renewable energy. The cost of farming increase, resulting in higher bio fuel costs (and food costs). If we want to serious ramp down fossil fuel use we need to remove natural gas from the political strategies. No peaker plants and no bio fuels produced by farmers using artificial fertilizers. That generally only leaves a few very expensive options, for example nuclear, green hydrogen, massively expanded grid transmissions, and government pouring money to get people and companies to volunteer in the change toward non-fossil fueled options.
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• lopsotronic 5mo ago
  Far too late for that. It's going to take big industrial solutions, like the "L1 Space Parasol" (scary, better)[0] or the "Superdust Chemical Injection into the Upper Atmosphere" (less scary, dumber[1]). Or some scary bioengineering, which might be even dumber-er. Other techbro geniuses have talked up giant pumpships just blasting water in the air, but these techbro geniuses couldn't teach a community college intro physics, much less attempt to thermodynamically balance a planet's gas exchange. It's a dumb idea on almost every level, which is impressive in its own way. The investment upside here is basically limitless. If you make something livable, you can charge rent to everyone there. Wreck the planet, save some spots, charge rent. King of the world. Oh don't want to pay your rent? Oops now you're cooking in your own juices. I'm baffled that this isn't already a thing. But the masters of industry have a hard time doing big real things these days, so who knows. No no go ahead build your titanic ornamental fountain that'll work great. It'll come down to war, and then hucking nukes, in the end. [0] Something that stops working on its own when not maintained is probably a good design goal here. [1] "Do you want Snowpiercer? Because that's how you get Snowpiercer"