Comment by _a_a_a_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _a_a_a_ | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Has anyone else noticed these kind of posts appear quickly for certain vested-interest areas, get voted to the top but don't have much if any backup to them?

Let's break this down.

> rather than cost-benefit must be some sort of cognitive bias because it makes no sense

Agreed

> ...once assessing the upside nuclear is still going to be a contender for the best possible form of energy.

No justification given in the form of a cost/benefit analysis (which the poster just invoked the need for), just a flat statement that it is the "best possible". Note the use of weasel word 'best'.

> having electricity justifies taking some rational risks and is working to undo the damage caused by post-Fukushima overreaction ... there was an insistence on choosing technology ideologically rather than using practical concerns

"Rational" in "rational risks", and "overreaction", also "ideologically" versus "practical concerns" More weasel words, pure emotive invocations.

I could go on, but let's finish with

> that they are cheaper but also less effective at maintaining a comfortable society

Absolutely no justification for this, and completely ignoring the fact that climate change is now kicking in badly.

How the hell did this get voted to the top, because I'm starting to have my suspicions. If it's not shilling then it certainly against HN rules "..don't post shallow dismissals ... A good critical comment teaches us something", this being precisely a shallow dismissal and nothing I can learn from except some people are wilfully blind to what they don't want to see.

Something, somewhere is blatantly going wrong with commenting.

Yes - cost v benefit - ha!

I don't see nuclear proponents comparing potential cost (say $10T) against benefit (power produced during plant's lifetime - optimistically $10B (over 30 years). That's 1000:1 against.

By wikipedia, there are about 170 nuclear power plants and have been 6 accidents costing over $1B - approximately 1 in 30 plants have had very expensive accidents.

Those odds don't make sense for any country. Though they might make sense for an investor, knowing that they won't be required to pay those big costs - they might win and (in the event of a disaster) they only loose their investment. Perhaps if they have to guarantee the $10T potential costs, they'd look realistically at the "investment".

> By wikipedia...

This is exactly what I'm talking about – provide the bloody link so we can actually check your claims.

Provide a link! Don't just tell us, allow us to verify!

Edit: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster

"Initial estimates of costs to Japanese taxpayers were in excess of 12 trillion yen ($100 billion).[299] In December 2016 the government estimated decontamination, compensation, decommissioning, and radioactive waste storage costs at 21.5 trillion yen ($187 billion)"

I am not against nuclear power, but I am deeply worried by people like you who clearly only want to see the upside - and it is that which makes me nervous of nuclear power not the technology itself but the blindness of people around it."Costing over $1 billion" is just plain misleading.

For the record:

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

and

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

And "I do not think that [comment] means what you think it means." You seem to think that I see an upside to nuclear power. Read the comment.

Accusations of shilling without evidence are also against HN rules. If you have a suspicion, it’s best to email HN.

Seems to me it's effectively impossible to get evidence of shilling, but if this is indistinguishable from shallow dismissals – which it precisely is – this post should be dealt with in an equivalent way.

That said, the moderators are glad to delete certain kinds of posts (including some of mine, rightly or wrongly), but not this kind. And maybe they are right not to, but I'd like to know why.

Edit: I come to HN because there's a lot of good, informative posts and also descriptions of people's experience. This is really valuable stuff, but it's being drowned out by timewasting fluff and garbage to the point where I'm starting to regret coming here, and I especially regret posting something that tries to be informative when the only response I get for a few subjects (eg. drugs) appears to be co-ordinated, weaponised downvoting. Downvotes are fine, but I need to know why someone disagrees.

The HN audience is for a large part in favor of nuclear energy. There's also a group that may not like it but sees it as a quick win in climate change.

> The HN audience is for a large part in favor of nuclear energy

Maybe. Do you have anything to back that up?

> There's also a group that may not like it but sees it as a quick win in climate change

That would possibly include me, but that does not allow glossing over their risks and failures, which is exactly what the parent post did. I'm not disagreeing with it, I'm asking it to be backed up with evidence. To repeat, this isn't about nuclear energy but the quality of HN posts about various subjects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com