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Comment by yocheckit | Hacker News Reader

Until I see environmental groups/parties embracing options to mitigate the harms of climate change which are politically toxic to them (i.e. Nuclear power) I'm not buying it. If it is as serious an issue as you are claiming (i.e. the world is ending) but you are still not willing to upset your base, I call bullshit.

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Nuclear is too expensive, too slow to build, and not suitable for all countries.

Perhaps things would have been different if more countries had been like France and built a large network of nuclear power stations to fuel their weapons program; but even France is regretting it and had not built a new one for decades.

https://www.ft.com/content/c7421fbe-f326-11e8-9623-d7f9881e7...

It's possible to both accept climate change and to legitimately be concerned about the hazards of nuclear power.

But not if humans were facing extinction, which is what the parent was talking about. Nuclear power hazards would not matter in that scenario.

We don't need nuclear power to prevent our extinction. Yes, having like France a large set of active nuclear reactors helps keeping CO2 emissions down. But from a pure financial point of view even, it is far more efficient to use solar and wind (and water etc.). For the same amount of money you get a lot more energy produced than with nuclear.

this. nuclear power is hardly foolproof and even countries like UK don't have local expertise and have to rely on France and China to build and operate nuclear facilities

The hazards of nuclear power are less than the hazards of not having cheap and plentiful energy.

"My leg is trapped by a rock."

"We could move th..."

"We must cut my leg off."

"But we could move the ro..."

"WE MUST CUT MY LEG OFF."

How serious or dangerous climate change is has nothing to do with what your opinion of the activists is. I tend to agree that nuclear is probably an important part of the solution, but your position is a non sequitur.

Precisely. The powers that be are apparently intent on forcing mass immigration to high income countries, creating a need for new infrastructure and housing, but somehow apparently all that concrete is magically carbon neutral because diversity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The fuck kinda metric is that? Politicians have no say in the legitimacy of climate change. You're calling bullshit on facts because a dozen people don't have a clue?

The metric for whether people in power really believe the world is ending, as opposed to climate change being another problem they have to deal with while considering the political ramifications.

Unfortunately, nuclear seems to be toxic in Germany. There's no way any of the parties are ever supporting it, much less the green party ("Atomkraft nein danke"), which is gaining a lot of political ground in parliament and across the country.

It’s already dead here, and I would argue that it is not unfortunate at all. It’s also a distraction from dismantling coal power and the large car lobby here.

It's not a distraction. We're two decades away from replacing coal, we could've replaced it today. As always, we're putting off optimal solutions for some solution that might materialize in the future while we slowly wean ourselves off of the stuff that's destroying our habitat right now and having visible effects right now and from which tens, hundreds millions of people will visibly suffer in the coming decades from what we're doing right now (no, I don't mean the poor Bourgeoisie in France, I'm talking about everybody in Africa, South America, Asia, the Middle East). It's insanity.

https://www.axios.com/environmental-group-keep-open-nuclear-...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/environmental-groups-change-tun...

In Australia a pro-nuclear government commisioned a report on nuclear power (https://newmatilda.com/2006/11/22/part-three-switkowski-repo...). It found it would reduce emissions by 18% at best but more interestingly it concluded that nuclear power could not compete without a steep price on carbon. Even that was before renewable prices plummeted.

It's not environmental groups that are against a price on carbon, until you can convince conservatives to get on board with one then nuclear can't even get passed the first hurdle.

I don't know about Australia but in the United States nuclear is cheaper than fossil based energy by >30% : https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_04.html

And as far as I know, conservatives are pro-competition and not against nuclear at all in the States.

in the United States nuclear is cheaper than fossil based energy by >30%

For existing plants? The problem with expanding nuclear, at least in Europe, is not the operational costs but that the cost of building new nuclear power stations is so high that they'll never pay for themselves without massive subsidies.

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