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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with the pseudo-scientific stance Greenpeace and other similar organizations have about nuclear power, but saying they're to blame for our use of palm oils for biofuels is ridiculous.

Sure they campaigned against nuclear, but that doesn't mean they approve of whatever other means the EU has been using as an alternative, as they themselves say on their website[1].

I'm sure if they got their way we wouldn't have nuclear or "bad" biofuels, and would just be paying a higher tax rate to scale up our sustainable energy production. That the EU has been dropping nuclear power without that investment in sustainable energy isn't Greenpeace's fault.

1. https://www.greenpeace.org/archive-eu-unit/en/campaigns/Clim...

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We can shuffle the numbers around all you like, but if we don't use cheap energy then more of our resources go to energy production and standards of living will drop. A "higher tax rate" is slight of hand argument for "we'll make the costs so convoluted that no-body will understand the cause". It isn't a solution to the problem of making people's lives more materially comfortable and satisfying.

It is all very well to say that orangutans _should_ be more important than a standard of living, but in practice people will say one thing and vote in a completely different way when they are actually tested. Orangutan are not important compared to keeping families struggling between financially viable and non-viable on the good side of the margins.

I'm ok with taking a hit if it means more wildlife.

I'm ok with going early 1900's if it means we can get down to 1-2 gigatons of carbon a year instead of nearly 40 this year, and probably more than 40 next year, so we can buy some more time until we can start sequestering excess carbon we've put into the environment before stuff starts getting really bad.

We are generating 4x the electricity we were in just the early 1970s, that sort of increase isn't sustainable and we're already seeing consequences of our actions. Unless a fleet of alien ships show up in orbit and charitably give us a bunch of fusion reactors... we've got to start making some pretty radical changes in our lives.

In the UK for example the electricty usage has gone up from 192 TWh to 300 TWh, which is not great but not 4x either. The increase is mostly down to the developing nations around the world. So we'd have to go back the 1950s to see a 4x reduction (73 TWh in 1956).

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historic...

Yet if you look at the data, western countries are responsible for way more carbon per capita than the rest of the world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

I'm not ok with going early 1900s. Most people aren't.

I keep saying "nuclear", you keep saying "no". So I'm not going to consider myself part of the problem.

>I keep saying "nuclear", you keep saying "no".

Uhhhh, I never said no to nuclear. I said at best it's a bandaid.

We have a few decades to make some very considerable changes, maybe two centuries to find alternative means of energy (fusion, mining asteroids for PV and battery materials etc as there's a very finite amount of the materials needed for manufacturing batteries and panels on earth too).

People like to say nuclear is our savior but, at current energy production levels, with a moderate estimate for continued growth, there's maybe 100 years of fuel there. Nuclear just isn't a solution for the world's energy needs, it however is a GREAT solution for generating considerable amounts of power in small spaces (ice breakers, submarines) and for portable power for emergencies like with the Russian floating nuclear power stations (Google the Akademik Lomonosov).

> there's maybe 100 years of fuel there

At least you have not made the mistake of inclusion "waste" as a problem in the same post.

Breeder reactors solve this. Yes, fuel will be significantly more expensive because of them. But all these "issues" with nuclear (except capital intensivity, that will likely stay) will go away.

it's not the average HN user that would be meaningfully impacted by such changes.

Honestly I find the arguments about dropping standards of living unconvincing. What do we need all these energy for? Mining bitcoins? Powering online ads? After I stopped driving car every day my standard of living has only gone up. I am sure stricter limits on energy consumption will only unleash untapped creativity and spawn the whole new industries and create tons of new jobs.

I find it similar to arguments that try to scare me with "but then we won't be able to eat meat for every meal."

"Well, good," I think, "sounds like exactly what we need."

Well, we use different sources for different things, but as a rule literally all fabrication and industrial activity uses energy. Eg, some big ones,

* Producing aluminium (Apple products) * Producing & storing food (Haber process is energy -> fertiliser @ ~1-2% of worlds energy, refrigeration will also be a big deal) * Transport (of food and goods) * Heating (probably a bigger deal in places like Europe)

Energy is secretly quite fungible - eg, we can burn fossil fuels directly for grid electricity and use grid electricity as a substitute for fossil fuels if the price differential between the two gets large.

If general energy costs go up, food prices go up. That is the most obvious link between energy prices and poverty, but there are other less clear ones.

Nuclear is not a cheap source of energy these days; the strike price for Hinkley Point C is higher than that offered to most wind farms.

Look at the guarranteed price of electricity from those wind farms.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41220948

Two firms said they were willing to build offshore wind farms for a guaranteed price of £57.50 per megawatt hour for 2022-23.

This compares with the new Hinkley Point C nuclear plant securing subsidies of £92.50 per megawatt hour.

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