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Comment by bayesian_horse | Hacker News Reader

You can stop burning the fossil fuel as soon as you have an alternative or need fewer energy. You can't just get rid of a nuclear reactor and its (spent) fuel that easily.

And that doesn't take into account that occasionally you have to write off large inhabited parts of a country due to an accident, which really doesn't happen with fossil fuels.

The goal is to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, and maybe eventually some saner version of nuclear power and fusion. No easy solutions there.

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You can't just get rid of the CO2 that was already emitted either. It's going to be in the atmosphere forever.

Also, oil spills make huge tracts of land unlivable, and unfortunately it's almost always fragile marine areas. Whereas the 'nuclear disaster zone' around Chernobyl is now teeming with life. Turns out humans are worse for wildlife than radioactivity...

"Teeming with life" doesn't mean you really want to live there. Animals with shorter lifespans have less of a problems with the cancer risk, I'll grant you that. There may even be some animals occasionally dying from radiation poisoning (having wandered through the wrong parts too often) and nobody would notice.

I'm simple that way. Stuff that can kill me right now is a lot scarier to me than stuff that will raise the average temperature over the next few decades. I'd also prefer most of the governments in the world not to have ready access to fissile or even large amounts of radioactive material, just as a general precaution.

Land is valuable, but it's value is overshadowed by the massive amounts of energy production of a nuclear plant.

Not really. I don't mean the area directly occupied by the reactor facility, but rather the exclusion zone of an incident like in Chernobyl or Fukushima.

Not that many people died in these incidents - because those zones were evacuated at great cost.

Yes, I mean the exclusion zone, it doesn't matter, the numbers are still in nuclear's favor.

Certainly not in the case of Tschernobyl or Fukushima in particular.

And to try and project the risk from accidents that happened so far is just foolish. The risk is really not computable because the chance is small (fat tail) and the consequences catastrophic. Additionally proponents want/need to scale up nuclear power (and thus the risk) by orders of magnitude to make a dent in carbon emissions.

And then, on top of all that, any small amount of actually bad intentions or simple incompetence throws off all the careful risk calculations.

Nuclear power plants are an economical no-brainer. The ecomic consequences of a disaster are nothing compared to the power produced over the average life time of a nuclear plant. Fukushimas economical damage may not even be attributable to the nuclear plant, considering that the tsunami may be directly responsible for most of the damage (which would have been done with or without a power plant).

The risk of a disaster is a different matter I don't want to get in to, I think people just fear what they don't understand. By this point, the people making and running the things know what they are doing in my opinion.

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