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Comment by Pietertje | Hacker News Reader

Does somebody know if nuclear power will actually be an improvement for the environment (only considering temperature here)? Essentially you just release heat which is stored as mass.

A quick calculation shows that if you only consider heating up our atmosphere and assume an entire switch of all our energy consumption to nuclear energy you end up with a temperature rise of 0.1 deg C per year. I know it is a worst-case scenario - energy will be stored in land/water as well, dissipation etc. - but still.

Compared to fossil fuels, the plus side is you do not produce any greenhouse gases. However, I'm unsure which contributes more to global warming, could well be the former is negligible. Would love to hear an expert on this.

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Not an expert but the temperature of the earth is the equilibrium temperature between the amount of energy received and the amount of energy emitted into space. Human energy consumption is four order of magnitude smaller than the energy received from the sun, so the anthropic effect is not really important. Greenhouse gases on the other hand have a significant effect because they prevent radiating a fraction of all the energy, no matter whether received from the sun our set free by human activity.

Thanks, makes complete sense now to me.

All energy sources carry the same essential thermodynamic burden. The difference is that nuclear doesn't also emit green house gases.

I highly doubt your first statement. Solar, for example, is no burden since if you do nothing it would land on earth anyway.

For fossil fuels you release chemically stored energy as heat. The same applies for nuclear power. Which is an additional thermodynamic burden...

That is true but human energy consumption is still insignificant compared to solar radiation - about a factor of 10,000 according to numbers I just looked up on Wikipedia - so even if we get everything from fossil sources that doesn't make a big dent in the energy balance.

Greenhouse gases matter. The heat generated by power plants etc is irrelevant.

Venus and Earth receive (very roughly) similar amounts of sunlight. They generate similar amounts of heat through radioactive decay in their core. The reason Venus is a hellhole and Earth is, well, Earth - greenhouse gasses.

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