Climate change has doubled the frequency of ocean heatwaves | Hacker News Reader

Climate change has doubled the frequency of ocean heatwaves

nature.com

33 pointsdigital5512 comments

One more nail in the coffin.

What can we do?

Nuclear. That's the point of the endless drone of climate change articles. To convince you that something must be done, and that maybe Blinky the three eyed fish is actually kinda cute. They really don't have any other solution waiting in the wings. Renewables have never been enough to meet global demand. It has to be nuclear. You're okay with radiation, right? Cool, let's do it. Nuclear.

Totally cool. I would rather live next door to a nuclear reactor then a Facebook, Amazon, Apple or Google.

New Zealand is almost entirely run on renewables. Iceland is 100%. Sweden is almost there. The UK and Germany are close behind. This is totally doable with renewables. No need for waste that is radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.

This is the part where I'm supposed to shill for lower cost nuclear to win the argument, isn't it?

If we have a choice between a swimming pool worth of material that's violently radioactive but can be reprocessed, and a planet that's choked to death from coal pollution because nuclear has radioactive waste, I'll take nuclear every time.

Wind, solar and geothermal should be able to fill the gap, but this technology takes time to devleop and deploy. Nuclear's been around since the 1960s, and it works. If we need 20-40 years to switch to fully-renewable energy, nuclear could get us there.

Hmm... Yes we have large amounts of hydro, some geothermal and some wind but we use coal to supply the peaks.

The missing piece seems to be network level storage so usage times can be decoupled from generation times.

There is also the problem that hydro is not recognised as renewable. At least as far as carbon credits go. NZ landed in hot water after that was announced. We expected to come out in a good position on carbon trading, that was not the case.

There is still fusion, which seems to be almost within reach (first energy positive reactor ITER which is planned to produce 500MW of power with 50MW of input and the follow up, DEMO, might come as early as 2033)

While I hope your right we have been claiming fussion power was 15 years away for the last 70ish years.

For the last 70 years we didn't have a fusion reactor with Q>1 being actively designed and built. We have that now.

An Australian perspective on nuclear..

Basically that whenever someone posts pro nuclear responses to climate change issues they are directly or indirectly (and it doesn't really matter which) supporting the coal lobby.

Thus argument might not be directly applicable where you are from, but chances are its probably not far off.

https://johnquiggin.com/2018/08/13/coal-and-the-nuclear-lobb...

Watching the renewables and nuclear proponents fight each other is interesting, isn't it? Divided they fall.

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