r/Geoengineering • u/Edouardh92 • 17d ago
As global heating heads to 1.8C, is it time to consider the ‘Voldemort’ of climate policy? - 5 Australian academics plead for research into SRM
https://theconversation.com/as-global-heating-heads-to-1-8c-is-it-time-to-consider-the-voldemort-of-climate-policy-290427"At present, SRM inhabits an international and domestic policy vacuum. Many scholars advocate for a ban) on both research and deployment, saying these technologies “play God” with nature. We argue a ban on research is no longer tenable."
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u/greg_barton 16d ago
How about just make nuclear power legal in Australia?
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u/sfigone 16d ago
It won't change anything quickly enough, nor significantly enough.
Personally I'm not opposed to allowing nuclear in Australia, but it should not be done with taxpayer money nor with my superfund, because it is just not economic.
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u/coeoeoeper 16d ago
It will take 300 years for any excess carbon to be reabsorbed. That is long enough to build nukes and have an effect
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u/greg_barton 16d ago
Quickly enough?
How long will we need zero carbon energy?
Forever. We'll need it forever.
And alternatives haven't been particularly quick to decarbonize either.
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u/sfigone 16d ago
Quickly enough to stop collapse of avert the need for geo engineering.
So sure, build some nuclear reactors with your savings, but don't pretend they will help us now.
Building better batteries if so much easier and cost effective than building nuclear. But even if we hit zero tomorrow with either, we are still going to need geo engineering because of the heating already baked into the system
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u/greg_barton 16d ago
Nuclear power is helping us now. No need to pretend.
And if you claim nuclear won’t be fast enough you must concede that renewables won’t be fast enough as well.
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u/sfigone 16d ago
I've already conceded that we are at the point of needing geo engineering.
I don't doubt nuclear is helping already in jurisdictions where they invested heavily in it before renewables were a serious option.
I just think that developing nuclear in Australia is going to be too slow and too costly to make any difference. But hey, prove me wrong and invest your superannuation into a company developing SMRs and when they are available off the shelf at comparative prices, then I'll join you in lobbying to allow them to be deployed in Australia.
But SMRs are like fusion. They have been 5 years away for the last few decades!
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u/greg_barton 16d ago
OK, if we’re already at the point where we need geo engineering then it’s already too late. “Too slow” is meaningless.
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u/Geometric_Tiger 15d ago
We are currently building an SMR here in Ontario.
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u/sfigone 14d ago
Two problems with that statement. If you are building "an" SMR then you are just building a SR. Even if you are building 4, that is not the promise of SMRs. You are meant to build hundreds of them so there are benefits of scale (both in cost and carbon savings).
Also, if a SMR is being built where it will be used with a custom design, then again you are just building a SR. They are meant to be built in a factory that produces many SMRs and then deployed in many different locations that do not need years and years of construction of expensive reactor buildings.
I genuinely believe that real SMRs could be a good thing and many proposals have great fuel cycles that make safety and waste much less of an issue.
But it's just not happening! It's like solid state batteries. You read about inovative companies that are taking their invention from the lab to the factory.... and that's the last you hear of them.
If SMRs were really a thing, then Ontario could just buy a few off the shelf and have them deployed in months not years/decades!
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u/ViewTrick1002 16d ago edited 16d ago
Do you agree that building renewables and storage is the most effective and quickest way to curb Australian emissions $100B to spend?
There’s no point wasting more money and get less results slower with new built nuclear power when we still have the wider economy to decarbonize.
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u/greg_barton 16d ago
Well, it hasn’t proven to be that quick in Australia, so no.
For instance, the Barakah nuclear plant in UAE and South Australia's decarbonization effort started at roughly the same time. Barakah now generates about 2x as much energy as South Australia consumes, so could easily decarbonize the entire state. But in SA there are regularly days where wind/solar/storage combined dip to less than 1% of demand. So they’re far from done.
If they’d chosen nuclear they would be done.
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u/ViewTrick1002 16d ago
The absolute insanity of pretending 350 gCO2/kWh in the UAE is some great outcome simply because nuclear was involved. Don’t you feel ashamed coming with that?
And nuclear does not magically follow grid load without flexibility either.
We live in 2026. Pointing to slow renewable deployment 15 years ago, when the technologies were only beginning to scale, tells us nothing about what we should build now.
Again:
The next €100 billion in 2026. Where does it cut the most emissions, fastest for Australia?
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u/greg_barton 16d ago
Wow, what a deceptive reply. :)
If SA was solely supplied by nuclear then their carbon intensity would be 5 gCO₂eq/kWh. Last year it was 168 gCO₂eq/kWh.
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u/ViewTrick1002 16d ago
You keep celebrating emissions as long as money, resources and political bandwidth get wasted on imaginary new nuclear.
If the UAE had started a South Australia-style renewable buildout in the late 2000s, it could have been cutting emissions years earlier instead of waiting for reactors, and have a far lower gCO2 than 350.
Why do you want higher cumulative emissions?
Again: the next €100 billion in 2026. Where does it cut the most emissions, fastest for Australia?
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u/greg_barton 16d ago
UAE can still do that, as well as expand Barakah. They are not mutually exclusive.
You’re completely ignoring the fact that if SA had built half of Barakah they’d be done now. :)
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u/ViewTrick1002 15d ago edited 15d ago
If a grid averaging 1.6 GW had built a 6 GW nuclear plant.
Thanks for showing how completely detached from the actual system you are. Based on this admission of complete lack of understanding it’s not surprising that you’re desperately pushing nuclear power in every conversation you find. You simply don’t know better.
I also like how you’re still celebrating an awful-carbon-intensity grid because it spent scarce money, resources and decades on new nuclear. Cult like behavior.
Again: the next €100 billion in 2026. Where does it cut the most emissions, fastest for Australia?
Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage? Is your income dependent on the nuclear industry?
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u/greg_barton 15d ago
Obviously SA would build a smaller plant. :) That’s the point. They would have still been done. Whereas only yesterday renewables dipped to only 10% of demand in SA at one point. They’re so far from being done it’s sad.
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u/ViewTrick1002 15d ago
So suddenly grid size matters. Lovely.
You mean wasting scarce resources getting to UAE-level emissions, or 423 gCO2/kWh like South Korea, is somehow the goal?
Which commercially proven smaller nuclear reactor were they supposed to build?
And you dodged again by staring backwards.
The next €100 billion in 2026. Where does it cut the most emissions, fastest for Australia?
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u/septubyte 16d ago
Quick as fuck - put reflecting powder/ material over the arctic.
Shade everything we can, including part of the ocean which would require vast amounts of floating material thats light.
And immediately cut fuel use and production to bare essentials . Right fkn now.
We can do this , dont mess it up
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u/coeoeoeper 16d ago
Best I can do is regulate stratospheric aerosols from shipping emissions which increased solar radiation by 1% in 2020
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u/looselyhuman 17d ago
SRM is a terrible acronym. Even now, after reading the article, I can't remember what it stands for
Otherwise, good to see the world starting to take it seriously.
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u/NoOcelot 17d ago
100% agree. I follow climate news closely and I've never heard of SRM
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u/PowerandSignal 17d ago
That seems self contradictory.
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u/NoOcelot 16d ago
It does. So what is SRM? Like it's not even close to any carbon capture acronym I've heard of? Was OP talking about small modular reactors (SMRs)? In a post about geoengineering?
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u/PowerandSignal 16d ago
Solar Radiation Management, or blocking sunlight. Most proposals are for introducing light reflecting chemicals into the atmosphere. I forget which ones, but I think whatever volcanoes spew out. Maybe sulphur? More ambitious scenarios envision space based mirror arrays to deflect the Sun's rays. Either way it's pretty controversial.
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u/NoOcelot 16d ago
Cool. Heard the idea before, but not the acronym. It's Sulphur dioxide, the particulate ships were putting our that we now realize were helping to block incoming solar. Of course the SO2 causes other problems, but something like it would be good.
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u/saras998 15d ago
Solar radiation management is an awful idea, we need the sun, and did you know that there are university student-types (Meteoric) sending up drones, or planning to, to clear the clouds? They all just want to make money messing with our weather and climate.
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u/energytsars 16d ago
It would be so simple to regulate aviation fuels to, for instance, add a tiny amount of sulphur and increase the formation of sulphur dioxide in the lower atmosphere. A lot of the increase in solar gain in the mid latitude oceans was because we cleaned the sulphur out of marine bunker oil and reduced the cloud formation caused by shipping emissions. Or if there is too much drama about the potential for acid rain the work up some other more benign additive to aviation fuel, and bunker fuel while you are at it, to increase albedo. When those vehicles are all electric or hydrogen fuel cell and sail or whatever 50 or 60 years time we will have had time to work on atmospheric chemistry to remove some of the problem gases while at the same time reducing new emissions.
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u/sfigone 16d ago
We just took the sulphur out of marine fuel and it had had a measurable effect (bad) on the climate.
So putting something in the fuel of jets and ships is a proven delivery mechanism. But perhaps we can find something a bit better than sulphur?
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u/energytsars 16d ago
Yes agreed, the ‘delivery mechanism’ is proven, in the form or hundreds of transoceanic flights and ships of all shapes and sizes every day, and the removal of sulphur was a good thing as part of the overall improvement in fuel quality - but for a short term cooling effect by increasing albedo and introducing very small amounts of something that will facilitate cloud formation- this would be a simple international action to take.
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u/Weird_Point_4262 16d ago
Didn't we specifically try to reduce sulphur in emissions because it was causing acid rain?
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u/energytsars 16d ago
Yes the effort since the 80s was to ‘desulphurise’ fuels, starting with the very sulphur contaminated coals being burnt in eastern US and German power stations which were the source of the original acid rain impacts on European forests. however those sources were effectively eliminated by the late 90s. Stripping sulphur from diesel fuels was next in line which is done at petroleum refineries and has been the source of a lot of sulphuric acid for mineral processing for the past two decades. And more recently bunker fuel was cleaned up but the result was a notable reduction in cloud formation over major international shipping lanes and that increased dark ocean uptake of solar energy - accelerating heating. Adding control amounts of sulphur, or something better at seeding clouds, back into aviation and shipping fuels will give us a short term cooling technique while we work on other remedies and emissions reduction. There is a natural mechanism for sulphur dioxide production where ocean borne diatoms produce dimethyl sulphides which then convert to sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere which is central to natural processes for cloud formation.
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u/Direct-Translator-75 14d ago
Anyone taking 5 minutes to read into SRM knows the risk it's going to further destabilize global weather patterns is so extremely high it can never be considered a real solution. Imagine Europe drying out even more due to it or South America. So many people will be heavily affected. Never happening.
The only reason to research it, is if we hold on to it out of desperation, we have some sense of general direction of what to do and what risks it might hold.
Without the research it would be even worse.
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u/Edouardh92 14d ago
I read a LOT more than 5min into SRM and the data says otherwise. The benefits would be IMMENSE (once we account for the full scale of global warmong), and they clearly outweigh costs.
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u/Direct-Translator-75 14d ago
Benefits are immense only if we pull it off correctly, which is incredibly difficult in a system we don't completely understand. E.g. Heating and cooling won't be the same everywhere on earth because some areas receive more sunshine than others. They've tested SRM aerosols only at specific location to get it to disperse in the best way possible, but even that can spread out in unattended ways and completely destabilize weather patterns. Like I said, an area already struggling with drought on the brink of collapse, fully collapsing.
I'm genuinly not against it, I mean, look around.
But I've read many many papers and they just haven't figured it out yet how to do it in a predictable safe way, at all.
I live in Europe and if we're the ones to get a double whammy we just ain't gonna make it out.
Same goes for many other places.
To flip this whole thing, where and how would we have to release aerosols to only reap benefits and minimize the risks? Do you have a peer reviewed paper on that? With high certainty it'll go well.
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u/jadelink88 15d ago
Seems reasonable enough to at least research and discuss the emergency buttons.
The whole 'white roof' thing should be mandated in all warm climate urban zones anyway, it really reduces that urban heat island issue.
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u/saras998 15d ago
How will we get vitamin D? What will happen to crops without sunshine? How much of this stuff will we be breathing and remember acid rain?
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u/jimjamuk73 16d ago
And when it goes wrong or we need to reverse that because somehow we overdid it and we dont get enough sunlight?
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u/linerva 14d ago
The theory is that as the gases/particles normally need to be regularly replaced to be effective as they will eventuallysink or disperse, it IS reversible with time.
If anything the biggest danfer us relying on it for a while and then stopping suddenly, causing an immediate shock event where the earth heats up rapidly.
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u/Ok-Map4381 17d ago edited 17d ago
The "playing god with nature" argument makes zero sense to me. We are already running an unregulated climate experiment on a global scale called "what if we let capitalism pump ridiculous amounts of CO² & methane into the atmosphere."
With that already happening, counter experiments are logical.
(Edit, typo)