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Comment by merpnderp | Hacker News Reader

If people really believe +4C is likely in 80 years, why aren’t they out marching and demanding a move to nuclear power? It’s the only option that doesn’t decimate the poor and drastically increase the price of food, and this magnitudes more likely to be acted upon. Yet the overlap between people against nuclear power and terrified of climate change is a massive majority.

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People are out demanding changes.

I'm terrified of climate change. I'm also terrified of nuclear power. I'm not really against nuclear power in theory, but I'm afraid about how we're unable to think about, plan, or prepare for longer than an election cycle. If we're heading for a collapse then a lot of abandoned nuclear power plants are going to cause a lot of damage.

Not everybody is looking at the same statistics you are, and not everyone is as hopeful about our ability to store nuclear waste safely indefinitely.

I'm pro-nuclear power, but it's foolish to act like their motivations or beliefs are less real than yours because they have a different risk assessment.

Wind and solar just can't scale to what is needed to stop climate change, and if they did scale that high, would become active in increasing climate change themselves. Never mind the complexity of keeping power on 24/7 when your predictions of wind and solar availability are off.

It isn't statistics, but cold hard math.

> it's the only option that doesn’t decimate the poor and drastically increase the price of food

This is an unsupportable assertion. Nuclear power costs far more than the alternatives (mainly Wind/Solar), none of which impoverish people nor drastically increase the price of food.

The difference is that one (nuclear) can deliver energy consistently, while the other (wind/solar) simply cannot. Wind/solar just aren’t comparable at this point. If an energy source isn’t producing energy when you need it, it isn’t an energy source.

As GP said, nuclear is the only option.

You'll have to help me out. The assertion is that all things that aren't nuclear "decimate the poor and drastically increase the price of food".

Can you suggest some reading material that would tell me how wind and solar do those things?

Wind and solar just aren't viable at the scales needed.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/10/large-scale-w...

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