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Comment by mrunkel | Hacker News Reader

So, from the article I gather that:

General Dymanics had a marketing campaign with very nice graphics In the 1950's, a lot of people believed that the power of splitting the atom was a way to pull mankind out of the darkness and provide plenty for all.

Is there something nefarious here that I'm not getting?

I think that nuclear power is still the very best way of serving the ever-growing energy needs of the planet. It's a shame that the technology has been sidelined by fearmongering and endless litigation.

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Ultimately, the fossil fuel industry is to blame.

They campaigned HARD against nuclear usually under shadowy organizations and usually supporting solar (which, at the time, was completely infeasible). [1]

Now that we've got so many restrictions in place around nuclear and solar/wind are pretty feasible, the fossil fuel industry has done a 180. They now promote nuclear over solar/wind precisely because they know it will take years for nuclear to become viable again. [2]

They got all the regulations into place to stop nuclear from being deployed and now advocate it knowing it's going to be hard, politically, to rollback those restrictions.

Personally, I think the right move at this point is renewables + battery storage and working to eliminate nuclear restrictions. It's not an either or choice, let's do both.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...

[2] https://news.kochind.com/news/2018/the-nuclear-option

Looking at outcomes and risks it seems pretty clear that we should do both. If we invest into renewables + battery storage and nuclear, and the outcome is that battery solution becomes economical viable, at worst we just spent a bit more money that we had too. If the battery solution do not become economical viable, at worst we will just have a bunch of cheap intermittent power that specific industries can use when the weather is optimal.

Put in a date when no more fossil fuel plants are allowed to be built and let the existing ones be decommissioned once they grow too old. With that as a starting point everything else will just have to be planned according to demand.

> Ultimately, the fossil fuel industry is to blame.

True. From an amoral perspective it raises the question, why did the fossil industry win?

Usually, the given answer for an upstart industry failing is "they're small and idealistic, thinking that the best idea rather than the best lobbyists determine success". But that's clearly not true here.

It's interesting to me the way consensus seems to emerge on long-tail risks. Even just looking at the very technical crowd here on HN, I bet a significant majority would agree that nuclear power is a good idea and we can manage the long-tail risks safely. But the same people would also argue that giving the government a crypto backdoor would be a terrible idea because the risk of hackers eventually gaining access to that backdoor is too high.

Why are we so sure that we know how to manage the risks of nuclear power? People just assert it like fact these days if they're on the pro-nuclear side of The Discourse, but it just seems to be that long-tail risks are really really hard for society to deal with and we get them wrong all the time. Just look at covid. Or look at plane crashes - we put a lot of resources into air safety and we have gotten really good at it, but planes do still crash once in a while.

If you want to argue that the benefits of nuclear outweigh the risks, that seems a very reasonable position to take. But insisting that the risks are truly 0 and anyone who points out the risk is fearmongering just doesn't seem that productive.

If government crypto backdoor was the answer to prevent a catastrophe the size of climate change and the following mass extinction, then government crypto backdoors might not be as bad. It would also depend on the feasibility of other alternatives.

In the absent of the threat of people using fossil fuel, nuclear isn't great. It is just better than cooking the planet and continuing releasing toxic emissions in the air and water.

Climate change is not going to be a extinction level event, but a genocide. The richer among us will probably survive and thrive. And that’s why nothing will be done to avert it

Probably not a human level extinction event, but a lot of life that we depend on might not make it.

Plus if they want to be chronologically correct they would say the atomic powerization of Disney marketing given Disney (the magic kingdom version) came to be in the 60s after atomic power.

What's that Pizza of G(reeley)(?) rubber stamp doing there?

I love nuclear too, but one issue is that it is really expensive upfront, especially if you want to do it cleanly and safely.

If you add "fearmongering and endless litigation" as you call it, it means that only nation states can develop nuclear power, and only if it is seen as strategically important. By comparison, anyone can build solar panels and wind turbines, or burn coal.

>I love nuclear too, but one issue is that it is really expensive upfront, especially if you want to do it cleanly and safely.

Only if you go under the traditional models. Modular reactors solve most of the problems with traditional nuclear power - but good luck having a rational discussion with most people about it :p

I think the fearmongering was somewhat justified at the time. We didn't know we were facing a global climate catastrophe that would make Chernobyl look like a small, local event by comparison. Now it's time to pick the lesser of two evils, and the accidents that accompany nuclear power seem like a much, much lesser evil than climate change.

Climate change was a known fact as far back as the early 80s. Chernobyl happened in 1986.

The fear-mongering was absolutely not justified given that we will soon be facing climate crises that will make Chernobyl and Fukushima seem miniscule.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...

Already has. Way more people are dead because of climate change than have died due to nuclear accidents.

We are in an ongoing climate crises, it's just normalized now because that's what we are used to.

I'm old enough to remember when Cat 5 hurricanes were something like once a decade. Now we see them nearly yearly, sometimes twice in a year.

Unfortunately, that's simply not going to stop in our lifetime. It's even likely to get worse over the next 50 years as we slowly get to the point of being carbon neutral.

There was an eight year absence of cat 5 hurricanes from 2008 thru 2015. Officially, the decade with the most Category 5 hurricanes is 2000–2009, with eight Category 5 hurricanes having occurred: Isabel (2003), Ivan (2004), Emily (2005), Katrina (2005), Rita (2005), Wilma (2005), Dean (2007), and Felix (2007).

There is no crisis. Death rates from severe weather gets lower and lower every decade, as does economic damage, relative to wealth. This trend will continue as long as we don’t gank the economy.

Allegedly, it’s saved lives: https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-heat-cold-deaths...

So far, anyway.

> The fear-mongering was absolutely not justified given that we will soon be facing climate crises that will make Chernobyl and Fukushima seem miniscule.

But isn't "either Nuclear or climate disaster" a false dillema? I mean, Germany right now has about half it's power being generated from renewable energy sources, and wind alone provides over twice the energy that nuclear does.

Why do nuclear power proponents insist in pushing the false idea that's either Nuclear or nothing?

the solution is whatever we have that works today. That is currently nuclear, hydro plus newer technologies. Rejecting one of those - the most critical component in my opinion - due to decades of fear mongering is actively making the problem worse.

You have framed the problem as a binary choice which it is not.

Only around 40% of Germany electrical energy comes from renewable resources - roughly the same as coal and natural gas.

> the solution is whatever we have that works today.

As Germany showed the world, renewables are quite capable of doing the heavy lifting regarding a nation's energy needs, particularly while phasing out nuclear.

The Fukushima disaster is still fresh in our collective memory, as is the exclusion zone around the plant that is comprised of a 20km radius around the Fukushima plant.

It's disingenuous to depict nuclear as a desirable option, of even an acceptable onr, given it's track record and very long-lasting consequences.

> either Nuclear or nothing

I've never heard that. More like everything that can help fill the gap, including nuclear.

> isn't "either Nuclear or climate disaster" a false dillema?

That's a false dilemma you've brought from somewhere else, not from this discussion, but the reason "either nuclear or climate disaster" is nonsensical is because global warming is happening already. The extent to which it happens will depend on how fast we can reduce our carbon emissions. If adding nuclear power into the mix helps us act faster and decrease the amount of warming that we ultimately experience, then we have to weigh that benefit against the risks.

There's a taboo against weighing nuclear risk against any other kind of risk, but that is a relic of a different time when nuclear accidents were the worst thing we could imagine. Nuclear isn't the scariest monster under the bed anymore. Global warming is going to result in global human suffering on a grand scale. We have to compare.

> I've never heard that. More like everything that can help fill the gap, including nuclear.

You're literally posting in a thread whose leading post is "Nuclear power is the only hope to stop climate change."

I understand that this discussion was sparked by an article on nuclear power PR efforts, but framing nuclear as the only alternative to fossil fuels and the saviour, specially as all tradeoffs are brushed under the rug, doesn't sound like a honest discussion.

Environmental activism against nuclear energy was focused on the risk of Chernobyl-style accidents long before Chernobyl. Chernobyl vindicated anti-nuclear activists in a long-running argument about whether governments could be trusted to safely manage nuclear power.

I was a kid in the 1980s, so I might not be remembering with perfect accuracy, but I remember hearing about global warming as a high-profile environmental issue sometime later, maybe the late 80s. Before then the environmental concerns you read about in newspapers and popular magazines were acid rain, nuclear contamination, nuclear winter (still in the Cold War), chemical pollution, deforestation, etc. Global warming might have been on scientists' radar screens, but it didn't hit the public consciousness until after the public had made up its mind about nuclear power.

You are correct. Nuclear is an excellent source for large amounts of energy.

Decades of propaganda have led to people mistakenly believing that wind, solar and batteries on a large enough scale are a substitute for steady, controllable power generation from sources such as coal, natural gas and nuclear.

The sad part is that while we wait for the grid transition to happen at an indeterminate point in the future, climate change is a problem from yesterday that has a very real effect today. The worse part is that the nuclear industry continues to atrophy talent and knowledge when we should instead be focussing on making nuclear power an everyday thing.

Instead of playing the blame game on pollution, i really wish the West would do the one thing that has the greatest potential to supply energy to and lift millions out of poverty - build nuclear reactors and transmission grids in Africa, India and China.

I mostly agree with the comment above, but I want to note that China does not need the US to build the reactors: they are already doing it themselves.

"As of June 2021, China has a total nuclear power generation capacity of 49.6 GW from 50 reactors, with additional 17.1 GW under construction."

per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

The more important figure is that under 3% of China's electrical energy comes from nuclear as of 2020.

That is a pitifully low number when over half their electric energy comes from coal.

According to the link I provided above, it's 6% and they are accelerating replacement of coal with nuclear.

Walt Disney was making propaganda on behalf of the (soon to be named by then-president Eisenhower) military industrial complex, having been vetted by the FBI.

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