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Comment by kgarten | Hacker News Reader

Downvote me if you want, yet I'm really sad about Hacker News. This is the 4th or 5th pro-nuclear propaganda article up-voted in a couple of weeks. Personally, I'm always sceptical about superlatives.

Yes right ... the safest. Especially, for our children and their children. For everybody who's a proponent of nuclear: If it is so save, why can't you get one insurance company to insure a plant against accidents? And what do we do with the waste? How do we deal it? How do we make it clear for coming civilizations that they are not supposed to dig there etc. as the the waste will stay hazardous for 100,000 years?

Please watch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(documentary)

Is there any other way to make electricity that puts that high of a burden on coming generations? Maybe I'm totally off, yet can effects from coal/water/wind/sun power plants kill people 100 years after they been shut down?

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Sure. Global warming can kill people for tens of thousands of years to come.

Newer processes produce no fission products with a half life > 100y. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Thorium_fuel_... Proper reprocessing can dramatically reduce the amount of waste produced, and the toxicity therein.

Just generally, but why would you expect insuring a nuclear plant to be any more painful then insuring a pesticide plant/etc? A leaky pesticide plant can easily wipe a town off the map. A leaky dam can wash away a city with ease.

I mean if you screw up your shale oil extraction you can end up with oil/natural gas leaking in to groundwater for hundreds of k's. Similarly with a burst dam at a gold mine, or....

There are large numbers of things that can cause massive ecological damage. A good number of them are that bad that they arn't ever really reported: http://newsdesk.org/2010/06/niger-delta-oil-spills-dwarf-bp-... as they continue on for years. It's just that some of them are easier to use to sell papers then others.

How's solar and wind power contributing to global warming? Even new, very expensive coal plants are not contributing to global warming :) See: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Schwarze_Pump...

Thorium sounds great, can you tell me how many of the current power plants the new ones planed in the US. will use Thorium? Could not find this information. Is there some plan for proper reprocessing?

I can just talk for Germany, as I'm unfamiliar with the situation in the US or elsewhere. In G. nuclear power plants are not insured, because no insurance company takes the risk. Pesticide plants however are insured and have to pay a lot for their potential risk. So in G. the nuclear power industry gets the profits whereas the risks are shouldered by the citizens (and their ancestors).

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