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Comment by user568439 | Hacker News Reader

How safe? Would you live next to a plant? And what about the residues? Do they need to be taken care during decades with the risk of a natural disaster and/or lack of proper maintenance releasing them?

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If you’re serious about any of these questions, it’s easy to do the research — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor

Personally yes, I would live next to a nuclear reactor in preference to any other form of electricity generation. Living near a coal plant is an ugly death sentence. Living in the shadow of a big damn is vastly more risky. Windmills are noisy, and tend to be in very exposed environments.

Nuclear is quiet and clean. The very few accidents still leave it as clearly the lowest-risk method of generating energy.

All cool until someone uses organic cat litter to pack up the waste instead of clay cat litter and everything blows up - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#20...

> Windmills are noisy, and tend to be in very exposed environments.

Loss of blade accidents and tower failures have been known to occur, also.

Much safer than constant slow poisoning from coal plants. Number of people that died from Fukushima (which is an older, much worse design) can be counted on hand.

What’s the math on that exactly? How many years of life did those affected lose? And is it just the coal miners or others? I would imagine modern coal mining has PPE to keep the miners safe. Plus the availability of abundant cheap coal energy may have saved lives from what it enabled (like keeping the lights on at hospitals, powering our water pumps, whatever).

PPEs are impractial for (deep) coal mining because of the temperatures down there. Be it geothermal, or heat from the machines. Just look at the whiners against masks now, and now imagine having to do that at 40°C while working hard.

It's others. The fog still kills in China.

False dilemma. I didn’t say that the alternative should be coal.

It’s not a false dilemma when it is in fact a real forced choice. Many people live next to power plants and that’s unavoidable in the world we live in. The question then becomes which type of power plant you’d rather live close to? Wind, solar, coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, or nuclear? I’d choose nuclear for sure because it is the least risky option in my assessment.

Not necessarily. Energy sources we consider as green nowadays have an immense toll on our environment which is massively understated. Take solar panels for example. They are supposed to produce energy without CO2 emissions, which is explicitly true, but implicitly they produce just as much CO2 as coal. The production of these panels isn't as sexy as it seems. Also they tend to degrade after a few decades and lose efficiency exponentially. There are many other electricity generating solutions which have similar problems. It's sad, but the least polluting source would be to go nuclear. I believe you and many others would change their mind after a little digging into the topic. I was rather sceptical in the beginning as well, but due to facts I had t o change my mind.

Who you rather live near a coal plant, a nuclear plant, under a Dam, near a copper/neodymium mine or near a cadmium mine?

Would you rather eat vegetables and meat/fish that grew downstream a nuclear plant/uranium mine or those that grew downstream a cadmium mine? Because I'm sure I would rather live near an old uranium mine (well, I do.)

IN a dam! In a stylish bond lair ;->

it ends up being the alternative in practice. just look at Germany and Japan who spun up more coal plants to replace nuclear.

I would be OK with it, especially if the alternative were living next to a beast like the old Navajo Generating Station in Page, Arizona. It was creepy to watch the emissions coming out of the smokestacks while it was still running. It felt like watching the planet burn.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Generating_Station

One of my offices while I was in grad school was about 50 feet away from an operating nuclear reactor.

I haven't grown any extra heads yet. :-)

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