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Comment by hisfraudulency | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that the spill hasn't dampened long term prospects for offshore drilling (besides the brief push against it around 2016) whereas Chernobyl basically nerfed American nuclear power gen.

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Oil drilling helps oil companies.

Nuclear power threatens oil companies.

We used to talk about replacing transportation fuels and low-carbon shipping (global energy). Now we talk about personal responsibility and rooftop solar (residential electricity). You can find oil company PR slide decks explaining why and how. Greenwashing worked, pushing the renewable ‘debate’ worked. We missed the windows on critical infrastructure change, and seemingly enjoy an unstable chunk of desert dictating global energy, inflation & food prices. <shrug>

We're replacing ICE cars with EVs. Sales are rising every year.

For long distance heavy transport, alternative fuels or battery-electric is not feasible yet.

The transition will take decades.

Long distance heavy transport was solved in the US centuries ago using the incredible network of navigable waterways. Unfortunately the Jones Act makes it not as viable as it could be. Dredging is cheap compared to the payoff — shipping by water is 1% the cost of shipping overland.

> For long distance heavy transport, alternative fuels or battery-electric is not feasible yet.

We have this wonderful thing called trains. Many key long distance routes in Europe are even electrified already.

Trains wont work as long as taking a train is 2-3x more expensive than driving, and >10x than flying.

Where are they priced like that ? Very curious.

>unstable chunk of desert.

Ain't dictating anything. You're the ones with the guns all over who's doing that (and shaping said instability in the first place).

Taking a slice of the pie for Haliburton via force is one thing, but OPEC are ultimately the De Beers of Oil and act in the same fashion.

The UAE leaving in May'26 and now getting involved in the fight against the Houthis, while Qatar donated Bribe Force One to Trump, is quite telling as to how this is going re: the US though.

But he's right, though. We could have led the way, and instead we had the leader of the partly that ostensibly advocates for renewables dismissing the efforts as a "dream or whatever" and going claws-out at the young, upstart legislators who were championing it (likely because of her donors and personal corruption). Our very own Thatcher. Cold comfort that she'll be dead in a few years, because we will be, too.

I'd argue that Three Mile Island was more impactful to American hesitation towards nuclear energy than Chernobyl ever was. By the time Chernobyl happened American nuclear industry was already in a massive panic over TMI

TMI hadn't even entered my mind while typing out that comment which just goes to show how political the historiography of this stuff is.

Well TMI didn't kill anyone and the environmental contamination was minimal. It was just a scary few days because of the theoretical worst case outcome.

If you listen to utility executives talk (and they have to talk a lot to wall street), they have been very clear for about 30 years that the number one reason they built everything other than nuclear was cost.

Consistently 2-3x the cost of wind or gas on an LCOE basis. And new build cost is about 7x as high, which has to be amortized over an extremely long period, which rates regulators do not like utilities doing.

> Consistently 2-3x the cost of [...] gas

Surely you mean the price, because we're not nearly done paying the cost of gas and other fossil fuels we use.

There are so many open wells left behind from the 50's on. The federal gov't pays to fix them, but they can't do anywhere what they need to do. They should charge the fees upfront with drilling permits

Surely we can't make fossil fuel pay for externalities, right!!! That's not how addiction works

Well, the damage to the ecosystem from the BP oil spill will likely last a few hundred years. The damage from Chernobyl will likely last for a few tens of thousands of years.

And yet even including Chernobyl nuclear is far safer than oil and gas per kw

Sure. In the same way that flying is far safer than driving. There are massive amounts of safeguards in place to keep it as safe as possible. The problem is that when something goes wrong, it goes very, very wrong. This is why some people fear flying and nuclear power.

Way more people will die from climate change because we were forced to rely on oil instead of building out nuclear.

The executives (and more broadly, meaning this as analysis, the right of politics) are banking on that being someone else.

You don’t even have to look that far ahead, people area already dying every year due to the direct toxicity (Including radionuclide release!) of fossil fuel emissions. One relevant study for those not aware: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11301007/

Even ignoring climate change, coal kills _literally a thousand times as many people as nuclear per kWh_ (largely due to air pollution; living vaguely near a coal plant measurably shortens your life). But people aren’t necessarily great at intuitively understanding risk; nuclear _feels_ much scarier.

>But people aren’t necessarily great at intuitively understanding risk; nuclear _feels_ much scarier.

Nuclear is much scarier. Your argument fails to account for the extreme effort spent in order to keep it safe!

In the US, high explosives kill fewer people per year than painkillers. Despite this extraordinary statistic, we're not about to let anyone buy high explosives over the counter. Because we know that high explosives are in fact, much more dangerous than painkillers.

Same goes for nuclear. We have kept it safe(ish) so far, but we know what can happen if we don't.

But we can't make coal safe. We just accept the deaths.

Its not when something goes wrong, its if. And it still is much safer and a lot better for the environment than oil

I mean every single major nuclear plant accident is from reactors built in the 1960s. I think we are simply better at building them and it is no longer a question of “when”

Assuming no outside forces suddenly intentionally do something to it. Attacks against infrastructure aren't uncommon. Having infrastructure that is well known to take quite some time to spin down with the consequences being ten thousand years of salted earth is quite a big bullseye.

Which I would still argue is far from making a "when" realistic. This entire comment chain started on the matter of cost. If someone has a reactor, the enemies won't try to explode. They will go Temüjin on it and seize it.

The environment around Chernobyl has already recovered, and is now healthier than it would have been without a nuclear disaster (due entirely to it's function as a human repellent).

The area is still bad for humans; but not terrible for the ecosystem.

> The area is still bad for humans; but not terrible for the ecosystem.

The damage is terrible for the ecosystem. Just not as terrible as human presence.

The American economy didn't yet rely on nuclear power, we're long deep into oil brain.

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