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Comment by icelancer | Hacker News Reader

There is essentially no actual ecological or serious fear about these devices. The weapons ban was meant to help avoid nuclear exchange between nations; there's very little scientific data that shows there's added cost or risk of thousands of reactors falling to Earth and causing radiation poisoning.

Nuclear is exceptionally safe and all the recent accidents (and ones in the past, really) are all due to human stupidity and bypassing several failsafes. You can argue that's an issue that will never go away, and that's true in the absolute sense, but it's not a nuclear problem. It's a human issue. We're holding ourselves back for scientific research because of arbitrary issues; and the weapons test ban didn't even solve nuclear proliferation anyway.

Solar won't be held back because nuclear is finally an option. They serve two different purposes entirely.

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> It's a human issue.

Which could be applied to any challenge that humanity face. This basic human weaknesses is always what holds us back in any endeavour. It is dangerous to just dismiss it as "arbitary". You have to deal with these issues if you want to make big projects achieve their objectives.

It's fine to put yourself to a danger willingly. It's not fine to put your neighbors to a danger without their consent.

The problem with many pieces of large-scale tech is potential harmful side effects on unrelated people who did not ask for that.

Yes, I agree. People are often nonchalant about those low probability dangers. But a single death from Cancer is just as bad as the death of an astronaut, perhaps worse as they have not consented to the risk or understand it. We should care about that, especially as space exploration is such an optional undertaking which people don't have to support. That is why there is a range safety system and why anything radioactive needs to be treated with caution.

Hi, just to point out a hole in your reasoning, if these reactors are so safe then why even a small portion of the radioactivity escaping the containment shell can cause such a big disaster like Fukushima or Chernobyl?

Now, I understand there are differences in size and the level of radioactivity used (they won't be driven as close to prompt criticality as the power reactors) and they may be designed to be less reliant on active protection (pushing a lot of water as required means to prevent disaster).

But still, this is radioactive material in Earth orbit where stuff tends to fall back after some time and we don't always control when and where it reaches us.

> small portion of the radioactivity escaping the containment shell

The Chernobyl reactor was very unsafe by modern standards, it did not have a containment vessel and tens of tons of reactor material was blown into the air, not a small amount.

To actually blow the Chernobyl reactor, the personnel explicitly disabled quite a few safety systems that otherwise would not allow for a runaway reaction which led to a mighty (thermal and chemical) explosion.

Yeah, that's what happens. Tons of reactor material gets released. Not by humans, but by physical processes.

And your comment conveniently ignores Fukushima.

Modern nuclear power plants are relatively safe. However, there is not enough data to determine how safe nuclear power is in general, because you have to take into account the whole production cycle including all long-term storage of nuclear waste.

Half life time of nuclear waste ranges from 30 years to 24,000 years, so it's possible that hundreds of people die in 30,000 years from now by being exposed to nuclear waste from our time.

If you're taking that kind of thing into account you need to take the same time range into account in other power sources.

How many hundreds of billions of people will die over the next 30000 years from coal effects? How does that compare to your 'hundreds'?

I completely agree and don't think coal is better than nuclear power at all. Reduction of energy waste, renewable energy sources and nuclear fushion are the obvious way to go, but it may make sense to temporarily accompany them with nuclear power.

Sure, I didn't mean to imply that. I just meant that whatever long term damages are done need to be put on a timescale that actually helps us compare alternatives.

If hundreds of billions of lives are saved in the time it takes for nuclear to do real damage, maybe that's just worth it.

It is also worth to estimate how quickly nuclear production can scale up and deplace coal. I personally think wind and solar can scale up much faster economically and socially and more easily deplace coal and gas than nuclear could in the best case.

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