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Comment by corin_ | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who doesn't know that "nukes" refers to weapons not power sources should perhaps steer clear of offering opinions on the subject.

I stopped reading after this line:

  Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution.

Firstly, "some greens"? A surprisingly snide remark from someone who only just become pro-nuclear.

Secondly, that's not even the point he then goes on to make? His argument is that what happened in Japan is below the safety guidelines. The worry of people who are anti-nuclear is that there is a possibility that something could happen to put the radiation levels above what is safe.

I'm not anti-nuclear personally, but the worry I have isn't that, if a small amount of radiation leaks for some reason that it will have worse effects than believed by scientists. My worry is that the accident/whatever could cause the leaks to be far higher, if that happens it will be a very real problem.

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I don't see what's so snide about 'some greens', the Greens are a political party in Australia, they have a strong anti-nuclear stance as I recall(might be wrong).

We have a Green Party in the UK too, but "some greens" would generally be said in a negative way, and referring to people with environmental concerns rather that just Green Party supported.

Even about a political party - if someone who until just now was a tory MP said "some tories think..." and then went on to dismiss their views I'd make the same point.

Maybe I took it the wrong way, but that's how it read to me. Either way seems like a fairly nonsense article.

You can't argue that because 'some greens' is offensive in the UK, an article written in Australia saying 'some greens' is offensive.

You are free to feel offended, but that doesn't mean the author is at fault.

To nitpick, the article was written for a British audience, by George Monbiot who is a columnist for the Guardian.

The SMH (and the whole Fairfax group) don't really write articles any more.

Yes, until I realised it was a British piece I was really confused by his expression "high latitudes like ours" (par. 9).

Guardian original here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nucl...

Isn't the point that it took a pretty major natural disaster (or two, depending on how you want to look at it) to even cause a problem like this in the first place? And STILL the radiation levels are below the safety guidelines? I'm sure plenty of bad things can happen to coal and natural gas power plants given a natural disaster (or two).

There's a certain point where you just have to accept the fact that in the most extreme of circumstances, bad things can happen- that doesn't mean nuclear power is bad overall.

It's not nuclear power that scares me, it's the seemingly inevitability of incompetence of human beings. I am a very big advocate of nuclear power, and the Japanese are a very pre-prepared culture, yet this got way out of hand.

Yes it was a huge and unprecedented earthquake, but in my opinion, there were so many totally unnecessary failures, even under these extreme circumstances, that I'm a lot more leery of nuclear power than I was before. Or, to be more precise: I'm not leery of nuclear power itself, but of humans ability to form societies advanced enough to harness this power properly.

Can you elaborate on what was so incompetent on the part of humans? From my understanding, it seems like they got the crisis under control without any major radiation exposure, unlike some previous nuclear disasters, such as Chernobyl. This seems like a huge step forward and a vindication of nuclear power. If we can manage the risks (and this incident may prove that), nuclear power is our best hope to get off of fossil fuels and enter a world of zero carbon emissions. This sounds like a win to me, what am I missing?

That the backup cooling was an utter failure. From what I understand, there is backup battery (8 hours, which worked), backup diesel onsite (which failed), and backup diesel offsite (from what I've heard, arrived properly, but they didn't have the proper "connectors") - I don't know for sure.

That we didn't have an absolute catastrophe doesn't win points in my book. It seemed to me that there were several points in this incident where the people in charge were a bit iffy about what might happen next.....inexcusable under the circumstances. None of this should have happened.

This makes me feel like someone who ran across a few lanes of a freeway survived, then proclaimed, All freeways are safe. I didn't get hit!.

Dictionary.com:

nuke [nook, nyook] -noun 1. a nuclear or thermonuclear weapon. 2. a nuclear power plant or nuclear reactor. 3. nuclear energy: to convert from coal to nuke.

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