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Comment by brucethemoose2 | Hacker News Reader

Good!

I'm surprised the government is even pushing this. Nuclear is such a long term investment, and is so politically toxic among loud extremists in particular, that it doesn't make any political sense to push. Yet it is happening.

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The US still does a ton of nuclear energy and weapons research. Policy is generally made by the people doing the actual work - who influence politicians - than by the politicians themselves. We live in a high technology society, and make a lot of policy based on scientific R&D. There is plenty of populist rhetoric, but aside from that the Western world is largely run by scientists and technologists, for better or worse. Nuclear power will never not be on the table as long as humans have nuclear capabilities.

> There is plenty of populist rhetoric, but aside from that the Western world is largely run by scientists and technologists, for better or worse.

Germany says hi

>There is plenty of populist rhetoric, but aside from that the Western world is largely run by scientists and technologists

Lobbyists and campaign donors who donate 10s of millions of dollars would strongly disagree.

I don't know. The US has the biggest public support for nuclear power amoung all western nations and even amoung the world is close to top. Also a lot of public figures that are vocal advocates of nuclear power are Americans. The most powerful group of voters (due to the two party system), the independents, favor more investment in nuclear power. So I don't see this at all.

The price is what kills it.

It's the regulations that kill it (which drives the cost and timelines so high/long).

And it's the NIMBYs that kill it.

The last US nuclear renaissance wasn't killed by NIMBYs. The plants had plenty of local support. It didn't help.

Have you specific examples? The biggest failures associated with the last nuclear “Renaissance” were project/budget failures - e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal - same in Europe where the “new generation” ERP has been a budgetary and timeline disaster.

History, forgotten. Chernobyl happened just 37 years ago. RBMK had a flawed design, this could've only happened in a corrupt socialist country, you might've said, but then we got Fukushima 25 years later. Now you might say that the new generation reactors will never misbehave in such a way, that we've learned from these mistakes, but accidents happen, negligence and corruption happens, wars and terrorist attacks happen, and any reactor, if mishandled, has a potential to irradiate half a planet.

I'm familiar with both sides of the debate and am not strictly against new nuclear power plants, but you comment is a microcosm of what I think is wrong with the pro-nuclear side of the debate. We do have a history of devastating accidents and close calls, so why dismiss our concerns as those of loud extremists?

I think this is a valid, serious concern, and I was thinking more of the unreasonable nuclear pollution/waste fear and the "why bother" pro fossil fuel attitude.

But when it comes down to it, I think the metdown risk is worth modest investment in new and existing reactors, in reasonable locations, using low risk designs. The scenario where the world leans too heavily into fission seems impossible.

Ok please state total nr of people that died bc of nuclear plants disasters(direct and radiation) After that, pls state total people that died bc of fossils pollution+ disasters+ radiation from coal Pls also total nr of people that died bc of hydro disasters(we can add those to solar and wind since hydro is used as backup for them by storing excess) Not debating, just interesting how numbers differ in context of you mentioning chernobyl and fokushima, world should already have stats

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