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Comment by blitzar | Hacker News Reader

> the only clean sources of energy are nuclear and water

> Solar panels are generally pretty toxic to the environment

Nuclear waste is famously clean and Three Gorges Dam has caused the Earth to alter its rotation.

Lunch is not free and never will be free. Part of the problem is pretending that it is or that my one true solution will solve all the problems of the world.

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Yes, technically there is nothing that is 100% clean. But with nuclear and water, you more or less control the area of contamination and you don't have a permanent production of toxic waste that goes everywhere and is impossible to get out of the environment again.

I have heard 4th generation nuclear is pretty clean.

> I have heard 4th generation nuclear is pretty clean.

You heard wrong. 4th generation nuclear doesn't actually exist anywhere but on paper.

I hear nuclear fusionand perpetual motion machines are pretty clean.

This is considered 4th gen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM

Has the war in Ukraine changed your perspective at all? A stray missile could irradiate all of Europe; no other form of energy can lead to such widespread damage. Perhaps mega-hydro projects, but the damage there is at least localized.

No one develops 4th generation nuclear simply because nuclear waste is a minuscule problem. On grand scale, even with all the security measures, it's actually pretty easy and cheap to just bury all the nuclear waste. So it's not really worth to recycle it, or make 4th gen reactors.

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