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Comment by SonOfKyuss | Hacker News Reader

The activists of the 60s-90s were witnesses to the nuclear bombing of Japan, domestic nuclear accidents, as well as a nuclear arms race that threatened to wipe out all of humanity. It is unfortunate that we threw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to nuclear power generation, but the people who had issues with nuclear in that era did have good reasons to be afraid.

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Were they good reasons or did they just fell victim to their feelings?

Not creating nuclear power plants because you're afraid of some bombs is good reasoning?

What about the millions of deaths to fossil fuels every year? Are they better than the nuclear accidents we had?

I don't think good reasoning is why they felt that nuclear power was bad.

How about understandable reasons then?

It is. And also because of Chernobyl and Fukushima. But you don't care do you

We’re going to look back and realise that the destruction wrought by global warming was far worse in every way than at Chernobyl.

I don’t know if you quite realize how close to a major climate change event Chernobyl almost became.

You might want to elaborate?

That's not supported by physics. Even at the worst - if the other reactor had somehow also melted down, that still wouldn't have caused a major climate change event. It would have been absolutely terrible, regionally, but not globally. Nuclear reactors aren't atomic bombs.

I don’t understand. Plenty of climate change related developments are regional. See: the increasingly devastating hurricanes forming in the Gulf of Mexico. Not every single thing that we attribute to climate change has to span the entire globe.

Yep. Also, the pro-nuclear techno-utopians of that era promised that nuclear electricity would be too cheap too meter, nuclear-powered cars would be common, and quite a few other things.

If the public doesn't understand complex new thing X, and advocates for X have obviously told them all sorts of lies - yeah. Don't be surprised if the public becomes extremely skeptical about X.

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