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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand why CA is phasing out nuclear power.

Because lobby groups for environmentalism/green energy are stuck in the Cold War mentality that anything nuclear is bringing forth the apocalypse.

Nuclear is (one of) the new invisible demons flying around to be afraid of.

It's an old demon. Ironically it's one of the few things that could have prevented our current climate crisis. A great tragedy of human hubris.

It's more throwing the baby out with the bathwater than hubris.

hu·bris (noun)

excessive pride or self-confidence

I'd say it fits but yours [1] is a better known characterization.

I was using it in the tradition of [2] Greek Tragedy Hubris.

"The overbearing pride which leads humans to follow paths or projects which lead to certain self-destruction."

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_throw_the_baby_out_wit...

[2] http://theatreofancientgreece.blogspot.com/2014/11/hubris-or...?

It powers evil Bitcoin mining

it's not though. fear of flying is common enough but people accept that's not backed up the statistics. nuclear energy is in the same camp.

it is objectively the safest method for power generation

This is not why the plant is being shut down. It is reaching end of life, which means that if it wants an renewal on its license, it needs to come into compliance with modern environmental laws.

The key violation for the current plant is its cooling system, which uses once through sea water. To limit the damage to the environment, a modern cooling system would need to be built. When PG&E took bids for new cooling systems, all designs had a construction cost of many billions.

Rather than pay for such an expensive upgrade, PG&E made the wise decision to spend that money on cheaper replacements. The problem is that despite having a decade to get things in order, they haven't yet done met the capacity needs for the rest of the state, much less for this capacity retirement.

There is no coordinated plan to phase out nuclear power, the plants are just reaching end of their licenses, ans nobody wants to deal with the expense of bringing nuclear into compliance with modern laws.

What radicalized me on nuclear power was seeing the decommissioned San Onofre nuclear plants replaced with natural gas plants.

Incentive for other 'green' sources of electricity to come to market

There's nothing greener than an already built nuclear reactor.

> already built

Therefore, ineligible for pocketing green subsidies to build new stuff.

Yikes, that’s a perverse incentive they should fix.

I think the concern with nuclear energy is around the possibility of a nuclear meltdown. The media portrayal of nuclear energy is that it's very dangerous, even if that's not really true.

Same as Germany: politics.

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