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Comment by danjac | Hacker News Reader

The German Greens are slowly inching towards nuclear, now the original 1980s membership are dying off and the Gazprom funding is running out:

https://www.dw.com/en/german-greens-lay-out-nuclear-power-po...

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I don't know what are you talking about. They have literally just pressured the ruling coalition to shut down all remaining nuclear power plants.

Sigh. Oligarch money still flowing, then.

I don't think that explains it. Many Green voters experience some sort of self-hatered, they claim humanity is a disease, etc. In particular many voters do not want nuclear power at all.

They don't want it thanks to decades-long misinformation campaign waged with fossil fuel money.

The Finnish Greens are pro-nuclear, perhaps because they are not beholden to the same sources of funding as their German counterparts (and not to just blame the Greens here: look at your former Chancellor Schroeder).

The Finnish Greens have only been explicitly pro-nuclear, or at least lukewarm toward nuclear as the least bad out of bad solutions, for a few years. This is to a large extent due to a shift of power from the old guard to a STEM-friendly faction inside the party. But less than ten years ago, in 2014, when the then government decided to give a preliminary permission to build another nuclear plant in Finland, the Greens left the coalition govt in protest, as they also did in 2002.

Still no solution for nuclear waste, still depend on external water cooling, security can't handle threads like cyber attacks and airplane crashes.

That generation of power plants isn't really helping and new ones need a lot of time to build and produce lots of CO2 in the process.

> Still no solution for nuclear waste

That’s false. In France we have a project to bury them 500m underground in stable geological formations. And even if this site failed to retain the radioactive (which studies says it will not) that would be a minor issue against climate change.

As for security issues since nuclear power exists (~70 years) we can count deadly accidents in some dozens of victims while the pollution due to burning fuels kills several thousands of people every year.

At this point it’s so ridiculous that you have way more chance to die in a plane crash of anything nuclear.

Also contrary to a belief, a plane crashing in a nuclear powerplant, while creating a certain horrible mess would not be really different than crashing it in any petrochemical plant. For comparison that would be way less dramatic than the AZF of Beyrouth explosions.

>That’s false. In France we have a project to bury them

It's not a solution if it's still a project otherwise nuclear fusion and carbon dioxide capturing would be solutions too.

Here's a practical solution: put it in the second parking lot. The nuclear waste that a nuclear plant generates over its lifetime likely won't even fill up that same plant's parking lot. And some of that waste could also be reused at a later time.

Something else to consider is that the stuff with the highest radioactivity is usually the shortest. At this stage having a robust forever-lasting solution for nuclear waste is not a larger priority.

There are places in the world where you can just find uranium rocks lying on the ground.

> It's not a solution if it's still a project

Fine, take the Finnish repository as an example then.

All true, but right now those risks pale in comparison to the ongoing disasters caused by fossil fuels.

Precisely the point. It's a good test of commitment when someone is asked to give up something (in this case a very small increase of the probability of causing a problem) in return for climate improvements.

Nuclear is only an intermediate solution but many treat like the final one.

It isn't helpful averting one problem to create another one.

If you are wandering the desert, dying of thirst, and you find a bottle of Coke, you should probably drink it and not worry too much about getting diabetes.

What about a bottle with Vibrio cholerae?

Stupid analogy, but yes you'd actually live a bit longer if you drank it.

Sure. But Fossil Fuel vs Nuclear is a false dilemma

The only function nuclear has is to keep the profits flowing for the same companies that have been running all coal plants. It's really just the same people who were opposing renewables because "too expensive" in order to continue running their profitable fossil fuel plants. Now that it's clear that that gravy train is running out they push nuclear, because they would be the only ones being able to deliver (in contrast to both wind and solar which don't require the same massive investments that can only be pulled of by a few small entities). The only problem they have is that the whole "renewables are too expensive" doesn't work anymore because they are actually cheaper, so instead they make up the baseload myth. Which already has a solution, overcapacity and investment into storage. In fact due to the long energy ROI for nuclear power plants, we would actually make things worse in the short term, because we need to use a lot of energy to build the plants. Solar and Wind are both on exponential curves (with no indication of slowing down), so why would we invest in nuclear? Use that money to invest in solar and wind (especially as long as we are still running fossil fuel plants), you get much higher CO2 reduction return on your investment.

> The only function nuclear has is to keep the profits flowing for the same companies that have been running all coal plants.

Mission fucking accomplished. If nuclear simply isn't profitable they'll have to shift to solar+wind+battery eventually.

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