Comment by billybob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by billybob | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not an environmentalist, but as a technology person, I'm extremely skeptical of claims that nuclear power can be safe, however well-designed the reactors are today. It's hard enough to tell whether my web server will be able to handle next year's traffic.

Nuclear power produces waste that is dangerous for thousands of years. How can anyone say, with a straight face, that they have a plan for that? All of us will be dead and every government in the world will have changed. Our current languages won't be spoken anymore. The location of the waste deposits will likely be forgotten. There is absolutely no way to predict what will happen to the waste, and it seems awfully selfish to foist that kind of problem on people in the future to solve our very short-term energy needs.

If there is a form of nuclear power that completely expends its fuel to the point where its demonstrably not dangerous TODAY, or if we can launch the waste into the sun, I'm all for it. But lets not pretend we can control the damage from things that will persist for thousands of years after we're dead.

Before saying that nuclear power isn't safe enough, consider where we get most of our electricity from today: coal. Coal may have been around a long time, but it is far more dangerous than nuclear power. The fly ash produced by coal burning often contains substantial concentrations of uranium (not too bad) and radium (very bad), as well as all sorts of other toxic but non-radioactive chemicals like lead.

Although there is a lot more net radiation coming from all the fly ash we produce that there is from our nuclear reactors, the EPA doesn't bother to treat fly ash as hazardous waste, so most people don't think it's scary. This means we already have a bunch of radioactive waste dumped into our landfills without much oversight at all.

While nuclear waste is very dangerous, there isn't a whole lot of it, and it's quite safe when it's stored properly in a radiation-sealed container. It doesn't end up in our landfills, or our air supply. It's a point source of pollution, which makes it much easier to take care of, and it is much nicer to leave future generations some concentrated, shielded radioactive waste in remote areas than to leave them tons of low-level waste in their water supply.

I'm an advocate of solar energy, and nuclear power is a hell of a lot less safe than I'd like. But as long as we're burning coal, we should be worried more about the risks of that, even though they may be less scary-seeming, because they truly are more dangerous.

I would also add that a lot of what we call nuclear waste in the US could be re-used as fuel if we built processing plants and modern reactors.

Excellent point. :)

That sets the bar too high, though. It doesn't need to be perfectly safe. It need only be safer than the alternatives.

The thing is, it doesn't take hordes of engineers nearly a decade to design your web server.

If his webserver goes down he doesn't need to evacuate everyone in a 30km radius.

Apples and oranges.

We're in violent agreement here.

Good point. It took hordes of engineers almost two decades to design his web server. http://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html

Sure, but those hordes who designed it didn't spend time training him to set it up and run it correctly. Just face that it is a horrible analogy and move on.

Yes, advocates are over promising on safety, but the incumbent alternatives (burning fossil fuels) have their own downsides with global impact.

"I'm not an environmentalist" What exactly do you mean by this?

I don't understand how someone can make such a bold denouncement about something as crucial the system that keeps us alive...

I think it's something like saying, "I'm not a feminist, but I think women are people too.". Environmentalism, like feminism, tends to be associated with a lot of fringe people who believe crazy things, even if the mainstream of the movements are totally reasonable things. A lot of people see organizations like the Earth Liberation Front or whatever and thing that's what environmentalism is about, when it's really just about giving a shit about something we all need.

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