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Comment by Arn_Thor | Hacker News Reader

The whole takeaway from that is "it's difficult and I, the author, doesn't think it'll work because it's difficult". With lots of hand-picked examples of shortcomings of implementation loosely collected into a semicoherent justification for nuclear energy.

I'm all for nuclear energy, if it can be done safely. (The cost might be too high for it to be commercially viable, but if it's worth doing the state can subsidize for the good of humanity).

But that blog post does not succeed in making any sort of case for why solar and wind won't be enough.

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Nuclear is safe. It's safer than coal, solar, wind, and pretty much every other form of energy. And cleaner too. But it's "nuclear" and "radiation," which means half the public enters a state of paranoia.

Do investigate the relative dangers of energy production.

The Fukushima disaster almost got to the point where they had to evacuate Tokyo.

I support nuclear power, but to say that it is without risks and the public is just irrational is disingenuous.

Nobody has nor anyone will die from Fukushima. Tokyo wasn't evacuated.

I didn't say nuclear is without risks, but it is safer than other methods of producing lots of electricity

This is just plain wrong.

Although only one person has died from radiation YET, over 2000 died during/from evacuation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

It's obviously poor evacuation or, more likely, the evacuation was unnecessary. The fault is of bureaucrats not nuclear technology.

Well unfortunately we live in a world of imperfect bureaucrats instead of perfect ones.

If someone tells you there's a 1% chance that if you don't evacuate millions of people would be exposed to dangerous radiation, would you give the order? 10%? 50%? these are not easy questions

One worker HAS already died from radiation exposure: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-45423575 , and many more face increased cancer risk. And that's not to mention the cost of disaster response and cleanup in terms of money, manpower and opportunity costs. The cleanup cost will be more than US$187bn by an official estimate a few years back.

Furthermore, with Fukushima we got lucky! Had it not been for the rapid response nuclear pollution could have affected one of the biggest metropolitan areas and economic engines in the world, and vital fish stocks. The tail risk was real, and the consequences would have been earth-shattering for Japan. In any calculation like this, it's not only the odds of an event occurring that needs to be taken into account, it's the impact of that low-odds event too

I agree, I support nuclear power, but their are legitimate reasons to be wary of it other than just ignorance. Being anti-nuclear isn't just a case of being uneducated, some intelligent people who understand the technology are anti-nuclear as well

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