Hacker News Reader

Comment by rereasonable | Hacker News Reader

Technical wonder aside, the argument for using nuclear power over fossil fuels really hits a faultline in situations like this. I wonder how the majority of folk rationalise their viewpoint surrounding this situation without being seen as massively hypocritical?

View on HN

Nuclear power is vastly better in terms of emissions, so I'd argue that blowing up a plant or two is worth stopping global warming. But why target plants when a dirty bomb attack would be way easier and more effective?

Additionally, most countries don't have the resources to pull off something like Stuxnet, and the ones that do have much more to gain through corporate and government espionage.

There is some problem there though - peacefully using nuclear power creates plutonium, which could be later extracted.

Not if you use other processes. But those don't produce plutonium so they haven't been invested in enough.

The exploited software is conveniently developed and controlled by Iran’s adversaries. In another episode of the geopolitical sabotage show,

“In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline, according to a memoir by a Reagan White House official.”

True or not, the risk of software Trojan horses in the big energy game was recognized pretty early. The lesson here is, potentially dangerous technology ought to be matched by a comprehensive security protocol.

Yep, don't run your centrifuges on windows 98 is probably sound advice.

>In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions..

Ooh now you've got me thinking about Chernobyl...

A nuclear plant is just as weaponizable as any large dam...

Is it? The nuclear fallout of a plant may linger for longer than any destruction done by the water of a large dam I would say or do you mean something else?

A modern nuclear powerplant is incapable of exploding, at worst it can meltdown and leak radiation in the vicinity. This can of course have very bad results, but check Fukushima - more people died from the evacuation, and from a fire caused by a fuel tank in another city due to the natural disasters that caused the meltdown, than did from radiation. A radiation leak is easy to detect (and all areas near nuclear power plants in semi-developed countries have automated collection of radiation), and isn't an immediate death sentence.

Meanwhile when a dam breaks, immediately everyone and everything in its path will be obliterated. Vastly more people have died from dam failures than even the worst of the worst of nuclear power plant incidents, Chernobyl, where staggering incompetence met horrific design flaws and bugs. Something like that is impossible to happen today.

Certain types of nuclear reactors can be used to create fissile material; kind of super weaponisable?

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

A dam failure was caused by the nationalistic Chinese government fighting against Japanese forces in the 30s. It killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Do you have an example of nuclear energy plant being weaponized to the tune of hundreds of thousands of deaths?

Nuclear energy generation and nuclear weapons have very little to do with each other. You can do one, without doing the other.

> I wonder how the majority of folk rationalise their viewpoint surrounding this situation without being seen as massively hypocritical?

It would be useful if you could point out what exactly are you feeling is hypocritical?

This is fearmongering disguised as "just asking questions" and critical thinking. If your concerns were genuine, the answers about the effectiveness of nuclear would be easy to find.

How, specifically?

What makes this worse than Colonial shutting down from a cyber attack?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com