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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

Do what?

Normal people can't do anything worthwhile.

Unless you're in a position to personally bankroll the research and buildout of fusion power (hi, Jeff) the only thing you can do at this late date is get in the face of your government representatives: Jam up their phone lines, sit in at their offices, back primary challengers who will address the problem.

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We could just build fission power plants, they're reasonably safe, not too expensive and we know how to store the waste safely, heck - we've built a place to store it, but until there is political will to overcome the NIMBYism of not wanting to live in the next potential Pripyat (no matter how remote that risk is) nothing will change, except the climate of course.

We could also just build renewables.

We're moving fast, but not fast enough.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaiian-electric-finalizes... (Hawaiian Electric finalizes largest-ever renewables procurement)

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-awards-record-1700... (New York awards record 1,700 MW offshore wind contracts)

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/regulators-unanimously-appr... (Regulators unanimously approve Georgia Power plan, increasing renewables 72% by 2024)

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/aep-plans-2b-15-gw-wind-pur... (AEP plans $2B, 1.5 GW wind purchase in Oklahoma)

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/5/1812692... (Xcel Energy, one of the biggest utilities in the US, committed to going completely carbon-free by 2050 (and 80 percent carbon-free by 2030).)

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/09/eon-uk-to-s... (E.ON UK to supply 3.3m customers with 100% renewable electricity)

I'm not convinced that 100% renewables will actually create a resilient network

Good thing we have a long, long, long way to go to get anywhere near to 100% renewables.

I was mostly being facetious. We probably don't have enough time left to build fission power plants (and certainly not fusion) before the level of CO2 in the atmosphere will lead inevitably to catastrophic consequences.

According to the IPCC, we have to cut global CO2 emissions by 50% before 2030. So your vast fleet of nuclear power plants might just barely be coming online by then. Maybe. If you started getting regulatory approval yesterday and nothing goes wrong at all.

The answer is some sort of sequestration tbh, I've long felt that the idea (even in say, 2005) that we could reduce our carbon output by 50% was unworkable - the only thing that is easy to move to zero carbon is electricity generation, everything else is an order of magnitude harder.

> We could just build fission power plants, they're reasonably safe, not too expensive and we know how to store the waste safely

I'm not convinced this is true. Obviously there is Chernobyl, but the failures and shortcomings seem to not only be understood but popularized by Western media and we can say "oh that was just the Soviet Union." Then Fukushima happened, in a country which seems to be far better than the US at building efficient, safe infrastructure. We could say that was a fluke and we will learn from it (and I'm sure we will), but how many more times will we need to learn to avoid the literal fallout of another nuclear disaster? Shit goes wrong sometimes and you can't predict it.

You can argue that it's still safer (obviously there are lots of nuclear power plants in the US that have had no huge disasters), but why not look at alternatives that are even safer?

The fukushima plant had a poor safety factor, in re the backup cooling power source. It's not as if the disaster happened in a vacuum, there was also a tsunami and the plant was not build outside of a potential tsunami zone.

What in America's past suggests that we would build and maintain plants better than Fukushima? Is it our mismanagement of waterways? Our disaster preparedness and response as evidenced after Hurricane Katrina? Our laser-sharp focus on energy policy in government?

Yes, Chernobyl was especially bad, and yes there were issues at Fukushima. I think we would avoid Chernobyl-level disasters, but I'm not convinced we would avoid Fukushima-level disasters.

All are systems engineering failures, we have a pretty good history of building resilient systems. I won't say that a fukushima couldn't happen in the US, but I'd say that the particulars of that disaster are unlikely to happen here (or anywhere else again).

We have very few nuclear plants in areas that are even seismically active anymore, much less have any meaningful tsunami risk.

As another commenter pointed out, a lot of the knowledge for developing nuclear power plants has faded since they were mostly built decades ago. And while they're smaller projects, looking around where I live (San Francisco) I see a leaning skyscraper, a bridge that was way, way overbudget and many years late and an ongoing debate about its longterm safety, and a transit center (also late and overbudget) that still hasn't opened due to safety concerns.

It seems obvious that it's possible to build safe nuclear power plants - we've done it. But I think it's like building airplanes. Despite flying being the safest way to travel, all the planes were built decades ago and our attempts to change that in the US, ie the 737-MAX, have shown obvious examples of corruption and incompetence that have led to unnecessary deaths.

I think where we disagree is whether or not the US government is competent enough to build a nuclear power plant today, not whether or not the project itself is viable. I realize my original comment doesn't reflect that, so I apologize for the poor communication on my part.

> not too expensive

The evidence does not bear out this part, unfortunately. It's not NIMBYism that has killed the reactors in South Carolina, or is on the way to killing Vogtle's expansion in George, that's just mere construction incompetence.

The time to start building nuclear was in 2000-2010; we started, perhaps too small to make a big difference, but in the end it was good that more weren't attempted because it was a gigantic failure and drew far too much money away from better projects.

The problem with nuclear power aren't accidents during operation, or NIMBYism, the problem is that we no longer know how to build it. (And once you start looking into the history of construction in the US, it was also often the case that we didn't know how to build them 40 years ago.)

I agree that changing your lifestyle is not terribly useful compared to pestering politicians, but you can actually do a number of things to delay the catastrophe. The easiest are probably eating less beef and flying less. Not taking that transatlantic flight saves about as much carbon as the average European emits in a year.

I’ve been to a number of museum presentations, general audience scientific talks, etc recently where the speaker presents the evidence for climate change, future predictions, etc., and their main takeaway is “try to drive your car less and check out this website to see how you can curb your CO2 emissions!”.

It makes me so mad.

They're not wrong, though.

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