Comment by andbberger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andbberger | Hacker News Reader

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How often do you drive over a bridge? Or get a in a building that could collapse on you? Or fly in a plane?

That's not really so different than nuclear energy is except some of us have lost our collective minds and come to the erroneous conclusion that nuclear energy is _scary_.

The climate change potential of nuclear energy goes far behind the direct greenhouse gas emissions from electricity production. With cheap abundant electricity (as could be produced from nuclear energy in a sane world), industrial processes that burn fossil fuels could be switched to electricity and carbon skimmers could be run.

Not to mention your other concerns which I think can be aptly dismissed with a nice tech brain metaphor: "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame"

Adapt or die. The water's lapping at your feet and you're looking at the spec sheet for a nuclear first-gen ipod and concluding there's nothing there.

And don't even get me started on your electric vehicle hot take. Battery vehicles are not the answer. We here in the Us practice a particularly perverted form of urbanism. Gimme a fucking train. Gimme more trolleybuses. Gimme walkable neighborhoods and dense design.

I am so sick of all of this bullshit, the answers are obvious

Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? Your comment here is a noticeable step in that direction, and we're trying to go the opposite way here. I'm sure you can make your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that instead.

Edit: unfortunately, you've been doing this a ton lately, and we've had to ask you to stop before. That's not cool. We ban accounts that behave like this, regardless of how right they are or feel they are. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We'd be grateful.

You're not wrong, I've been a salty little bitch boy lately. Sorry. Not going to change any minds like that.

I do think that y'all admins have some moral complicity to wrestle with here in platforming folks making demonstrably false statements. Which wouldn't be a problem if there weren't such a vast asymmetry in the energy required to make such a statement and to dispute it.

Sometimes there are productive threads in this forum. But I'm not sure I've ever seen one about nuclear energy.

Y'all don't platform politics, presumably because the discussions turn into unproductive flamewars. Nuclear energy is in the same boat but with... somewhat higher stakes. So maybe y'all should consider not platforming discussions about nuclear energy...

Comparing a bridge or a plane to a nuclear meltdown seems pretty disingenuous. If a plane crashes at an airport that does not prevent the airport from being accessible by humans for 50+ years. If a bridge collapses that does not prevent you from building a new one at that location for 50+ years.

I don't think anything they described applies only to 1st generation plants. They all still hold true today. The thing with coal and fossil fuel power is that there was not enough planning of the entire system. The end result was the production of gases directly into the environment.

If we want to go down the nuclear route we need to design a well oiled closed looped system that can completely handle poking without any easily recoverable problems. There are many ideas in the pipeline such as molten-salt reactors. These take time to test, validate, and integrate into a cohesive system.

The biggest worry for me is shortcuts and penny-saving. How many parts of this system will be skipped do to being "to costly", "not financially feasible", etc...

I made the comparison because you are trusting your life to the government or corporation when you drive over a bridge or fly in a plane. Which is something most people do daily without thinking about it even though the death toll from collapsed bridges and plane crashes far outweighs that of nuclear energy.

Safety of later reactor designs is far improved from the earlier pressurized water reactors, although even those relatively dangerous reactors have been used widely in the navy without incident for decades. There are reactors already in use that are stable to perturbations, TRIGA reactors have negative temperature coefficients which make meltdown type accidents impossible. They are so safe, students are entrusted to operate one at Reed college. I would need to do more research to comment on perturbative stability of later reactor designs in use for power generation.

I share your concerns on the deleterious effects of economic pressure. Although my primary concern is that we will stop building them and decommission existing reactors, citing the high capital cost and cheap nameplate cost of solar.

Storage safety requires a stable civilization for a longer time than we can possibly guarantee. There is no obvious to this problem.

That problem has been definitively solved

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

There is a fundamental difference: flying isn't really dangerous (statistically) for those deciding not to fly. Nuclear is dangerous for everyone ('indiscriminately'), even for many generations to come (hot long-lived waste).

That is not supported by the statistics. Even including chernobyl and friends nuclear is the safest method of electricity production by a mile... And it's not like we only started collecting data recently

As for the past: There are many studies about the amount of deaths related to nuclear accidents, and their conclusions vary widely. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

As for the future: no specialist denies that a running nuclear reactor (using any now-available architecture) is dangerous, and the industry accepts very strict (and more and more strict) security-related requirements. According to some the probability of a disaster is very tiny, however it just cannot be 0.

Who is entitled to coerce others into accepting a risk? Especially when the maximal impact is beyond all insurance cover, and with a risk extending to future generations?

Even taking the high estimate for chernobyl at value, deaths from nuclear still pale in comparison to deaths from fossil fuels... The WHO puts at 4.2M deaths/year from air pollution [0] and there are other studies putting it at twice that.

Coal also emits far more radiation than nuclear... this study puts it at 100x [1]

Who indeed is entitled to coerce others into accepting a risk. Except I would flip that the other way... the risk I am being coerced into running face first into catastrophic climate change instead of investing in nuclear energy.....

[0] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution [1] https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...

This is not anymore about developing "nuclear vs fossil" but about developing "renewable sources or/xor nuclear".

renewables simply can't meet base load requirements, grid scale energy storage doesn't exist... which means to phase out fossil fuels we need nuclear. there's no two ways about it

plus we could have done all of this decades ago if greenpeace/the oil lobby hadn't pulled off their incredible anti-nuclear stunt.

also renewables pose significant enviromental problems. going to kill a lot of birds and pave a lot of deserts (which are useful ecology not wastelands) to make ends meet. OTOH nuclear has spectacular power density

Ivanpah puts out like 400MW using 3500 acres. It also uses a shitload of natural gas and fries birds. Oops.

Diablo Canyon puts out 2.25GW using 12 acres. And doesn't fry any birds.

> renewables simply can't meet base load requirements

We read this since the 1990's. Meanwhile the share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption in Europe reached 19.7% in 2019, up from 9.6% in 2004.

A grid-scale storage exists and is already useful: dams (pumped-storage hydroelectricity). Others appear (electric vehicle batteries, hydrogen...). The need for storage is proportional to renewable sources variability, which can be tamed (sources mix, geographic dispersion...).

The main anti-nuclear stunts are the nuclear boo-boos, interpreted as warnings (mainly TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima).

Renewable are deployed a system (many units, just as nuclear plants) and a mix (many types: wind, solar, biomass...). Analyzing Ivanpah alone isn't sound, as variability is at its max.

There are contraptions reducing the impact (bird...) of wind turbines.

Off-shore (especially windfarms) and desert relieve a fair part of the low-power density effects, and local small systems (for example on rooftops...) also are part of the solution. This leads to a quite respectable density (in terms of useful land waster), while building a nuclear powerplant in a densely populated area becomes more and more difficult (Diablo Canyon's implantation site, Avila Beach, has 1600 inhabitants... on 16.15 km2!).

Even neglecting any direct accident, Diablo Canyons's warm waste may, in case of a new boo-boo, fry many things for many years.

Dense neighborhoods kinda suck everywhere Ive seen it tho? I like having a backyard and not sharing walls with my neighbors, and having some quiet, and low crime, and not having to hunt for seats on buses and trains, etc.

Do you like having to drive everywhere, to shops with massive parking lots? Or having stroads not safe for your kids to play on where cars blast past at 40mph?

Have you been to places where they do density right? Paris comes to mind, as does the urban centers of the Netherlands.

Not everyone wants to live in the city, that's cool. But even inherently low density suburbs in the US suck. We used to have walkable streetcar suburbs [0], then the car came along and fucked everything up.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

Yes, and I really really hate dense places like Paris and Netherlands. Fun to visit but can't stand living there. I want my yard, and my individual walls, and my quiet neighborhood. I'm pretty much fine driving and don't care much about parking lots. I don't have kids so thats not really a factor, I remember going to parks all the time when I was small for this reason.

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