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Comment by SSJPython | Hacker News Reader

> As far as I’m concerned, the verdict is in for nuclear plants generating highly radioactive long-lasting waste: people don’t want them. You won’t be able to overcome their opposition. What more is there to say? Let’s move on.

Why should public opinion override the need for energy security, which is a national security issue? Sometimes, the public makes the wrong decision. The public generally has trouble when it comes to differentiating between the short-term and long-term. Energy sovereignty should not be subject to the democratic will of the populace. Leave it to the experts and the technocrats, not the average Joe and Jane who operate with asymmetric information.

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Putin threw half the world into recession with an economy the size of Italy's. That's how little our technocrats cared about energy security - we sleptwalked into that entirely thanks to them.

Energy security would be better served by throwing the same amount of money at carbon neutral alternatives that are proven, deployed and already 2-5x cheaper. Solar, wind, pumped storage, batteries, etc.

For technocrats, civilian nuclear power is just a means to support the military nuclear industrial complex, which represents the apex of hard power. Energy security is of secondary if not tertiary concern to them.

Why solve the problem today when you can hype a solution that will solve the problem in 20+ years and book some of those sweet profits from fossil extraction in the mean time?

> Why should public opinion override the need for energy security

Ah, you've made the mistake of believing politics is rational. There's no reason for this other than "politicians would be punished otherwise". Is the public wrong? Yes. What are you going to do about it? You can go round and round about the way things should be. That doesn't make them so.

> Leave it to the experts and the technocrats, not the average Joe and Jane who operate with asymmetric information.

This is going to be an extremely tough sell. Godspeed.

The public has no right to object to piles of nuclear waste?

Because we live in a democracy?

A democracy that is also a product of the availability of huge amounts of continuous energy for quite a decent price.

Insert blackouts or raise the price of energy to get access to it, day-to-day life, society and economy will not look like quite the same.

So a democracy which wants to survive the primary energy turnout ahead (oil has to go, and we are all deeply, highly dependent on it), takes the means to transform its energy usage on one side, and to sustain its energy needs on the other.

Removing nuclear-based electric energy will only sustain, at the time being, the production of carbon-based electricity. Fusion looks definitely better than fission, but it's 10s of years away still.

But that's my point: just because a society has a democratic political system does not mean everything has to be run through the same mechanism. Sometimes, the experts need to override the people, no matter how much of a fit they throw.

This is already the case. Unpopular decisions are made regularly by all three branches of the Federal government, as well as by local governments at every level. But even if you can get unpopular policies through, there's still the risk that you'll face consequences at the next election.

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