Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear energy is spurned by many (most?) self-styled environmentalists. That alone could win it favor in this administration. If Republicans could be persuaded to "own" it and Democrats could be persuaded to go along with it, we might just wind up doing something good for the planet.

That's probably optimistic, but there's a lot more hope in that idea than in fighting a pitched battle about solar panels, China, and "clean coal" in the current political climate.

View on HN

This is the most cynical, but probably the most pragmatic perspective.

I'm not a fan of Gates, but if this is his gameplan, I'm all in.

If we can ditch coal and fossils for nuclear, we'll have a new set of problems, but nothing as dire as "12 years before we all cook to death".

Nuclear has such a terrible reputation, and rightfully,people will always have legitimate complaints about it. We can never fully guarantee that a plant is free from the potential of catastrophe, not to mention we still don’t have a great solution to nuclear waste other than bury it in a mountain. It’s definitely a lot better than slowly suffocating ourselves by injecting hydrocarbons into the air, but we really need a revolution not evolution in energy.

Pretty much every other viable source of power - renewable or otherwise - is just as bad once you factor in all the externalities. Solar panel manufacturing ain't exactly pollution free. Nuclear would give us more time to solve those problems in an economical and scalable way.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Nothing is ever free of a potential for trouble. Solar panel could fall from the roof and hit someone over the head, and I'm sure that happened already, but nobody makes a huge deal out of it. Nuclear incidents are made huge deal of. It's a fight between Jane Fonda and Edward Teller, and Fonda is winning because a movie actress is apparently more trustworthy in a questions of nuclear energy than actual nuclear physicists. It's a highly irrational approach and it's way past time to come back to rationality on it - yes, nuclear plants can be dangerous, but the risks can be managed as all other risks are and the benefits of working nuclear industry are huge, especially compared to burning hydrocarbons, which is how we still get the majority of energy.

Sure, but a very bad nuclear incident (accidental or not) could more or less kill millions of people pretty quickly. Obviously hydrocarbons will kill more than that, but the optics of a nuclear catastrophe are in my opinion far worse than global warming which to many people is pretty abstract.

That's really the crux of the issue. Nobody cares if a thousand or two additional jobbers die falling off of roofs while installing solar panels, but if one person is exposed to sub-lethal quantities of radiation, everyone cares.

For killing millions of people quickly, you'd have to use a thermonuclear bomb (Hiroshima bomb killed about 100K people over the period of several months). No nuclear accident has ever happened that done anything like that. Chernobyl accident - where a lot of things went very wrong - killed about 40-50 people. Fukushima Daiichi incident so far has one known victim. To kill millions "pretty quickly", something very extra-ordinary - and probably impossible with current nuclear station designs - should happen, to the term of explosion of most powerful military device purposely built for mass destruction. In other words, you'd have to put an actual hydrogen bomb there - by which time, where you put it is less important.

Don't get me wrong - there are dangers in nuclear energetics. And the long-term effects of radiation incidents are still hotly debated. But as you just demonstrated, the dangers are way overestimated in public imagination and discourse. You use as an argument an imaginable incident that is at least five orders of magnitude worse than any accident that ever happened, and that is pretty much impossible given current technology, and are comparing it to very real dangers of the alternatives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com