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Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

I think the greatest irony of our age is the progression of climate change due to environmentalists protesting against the development of nuclear power. While nuclear power admittedly has risks, the tradeoffs are clearly worth making if you look at emissions and deaths per megawatt hour. We didn't curtail energy demand, and future generations will pay the price for using fossil fuels instead of nuclear.

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Nuclear hasn’t suffered because of environmentalists protesting.

Nuclear has suffered because it is expensive and uneconomical. The only way it is even feasible is by having laws that protect the owners from liabilities caused due to catastrophic failure.

Blaming environmentalists gives them way more power than they possess. Environmentalists have struggled to even stop pipelines running through the US whose sole purpose is to make Canada richer. Far more than environmentalists it’s NIMBY folks who have affected nuclear (but still not as much as basic economics).

Western countries are desperately trying to keep 1960s and 1970s reactors open for as long as they can because the prospect of building new ones is a financial and political nightmare.

One of the reasons it is such a hot NIMBY issue is there has been so much fear mongering about nuclear power.

For existing sites local people tend to be in favour and see the benefits. You would have difficulty building a new site, but that is true of any large scale development and is hardly unique to nuclear. Some people are just opposed to any development and will use whatever argument makes sense to try and stop the scheme. But with political support that opposition can be overcome. But that political support needs to be economically viable for the government involved, and that is the problem.

This idea that existing data on nuclear disasters amounts to a sufficiently large and representative sample to extrapolate a hazard trend from - shouldn't really float in statistically literate conversation.

Estimation of the likelihood and error bars on different classes of potential nuclear disasters, involves confounding complexity and argument. The worst conceivable nuclear disaster types have thankfully not been realized to date. The problem with the "death rate" measure is it simply assumes they never will be realized. A most flattering assumption that is widely taken as granted along side genuine hope and enthusiasm for a nuclear solution.

> and future generations will pay the price for using fossil fuels instead of nuclear

IMO this is pretty short-sighted and ironic in itself - I really don't think future generations will be thankful that we left them huge chunks of radioactive waste.

All the pro-nuclear folks seem to miss another important thing - uranium isn't growing on trees, the mining is probably as destructive as coal mining, and the worldwide supply is finite - we simply couldn't mine enough uranium to power the entire world for a long time.

We have plenty of uranium. For all intents and purposes, we have an infinite supply of uranium that would have minimal environmental impact to mine, at roughly 2x existing prices of ore mined from the ground.

As for wastes, all the truly nasty stuff will be naturally decayed in a hundred years or so. And we have real solutions that we don't use for political reasons.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

I’ve seen wildly divergent estimates for how much uranium we have. Personally I’d rather use renewable and storage for the ground, and keep the atomic fuel for spacecraft just in case we can’t make lightweight fusion engines.

I've noticed a lot of nuclear advocates talking about climate change but having a poor grasp of the actual issues involved. The aim isn't the unrealistic goal of going to zero emissions, it's to cut emissions such that carbon ppm stays below 450 (or 350, if we had acted sooner). If you look at serious comprehensive plans to fight climate change, nuclear doesn't play a big role for a variety of reasons (time to build, cost, production bottlenecks, etc.). Conservation usually plays a much bigger role (as do renewables).

People blame environmentalists, but nuclear fans acting like nuclear is the one and only silver bullet while ignoring much more important components hasn't helped the fight against climate change.

The goal is zero emissions, as soon as possible. The IPCC assumes we’ll have to have negative emissions, into the indefinite future.

The goal is not a certain level of emissions, as you say - negative emissions would be desirable. A 50% reduction will be a great improvement, a 90% reduction will be almost as good as 100%. 110% even better...

Our task is to reduce emissions as fast as possible. But what is "possible" still entails economic, environmental and safety limitations and priorities.

There is a carbon budget that countries have agreed to (though the budget is too optimistic, and countries aren’t really committed to it). Either we stick to the agreements we made, or we keep doing whatever we feel like doing.

The UK's agreed carbon budget is to achieve 80% reduction by 2050, and the US administration is no longer even officially interested in its own.

Those agreements are bust on their own terms never mind the idea of zero emissions. Don't over rate their importance, we should and can do much better, much quicker.

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