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Comment by throwawayboise | Hacker News Reader

"Believe the science" seems to be the rationale for many other things we are told to do, so why not this?

Well, in part due to the nuclear weapons programs, the US and Soviet governments told a lot of lies about nuclear energy in the 01940s, 01950s, 01960s, and 01970s. A lot of the science on things like nuclear fuel enrichment isn't actually available publicly, even today, only to people whose families have been interviewed to make sure they will lie if the government orders to.

So the US Secretary of the Navy is in a position to make an informed decision about nuclear reactors—and he's chosen to run a significant part of the US Navy on them—but the voting public is not.

I'll bite, what's up with those zero prefixes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

Preparation for the Y10K problem. Five-digit years is something the Long Now Foundation started using to encourage people to think longer term:

https://longnow.org/about/

lol that's ridiculous. We'll either have wiped ourselves out by then or be so far beyond problems like Y2K that it's a ridiculous thing to worry about

More fun than worrying about global pandemics or nuclear meltdowns!

Holy hell, talk about premature. That's 100 lifetimes away.

Is it still April 1st?

> That's 100 lifetimes away.

Such a pessimist!

Fine, 0100 lifetimes away.

It’s promoted by the Long Now Foundation, as a way of encouraging thinking on 10,000 year time scales.

https://longnow.org/

That's so -idiotic- short term thinking. 10k years is nothing in the timescale of the universe.

You’re missing the last bit, though. It’s “believe the science, when the science agrees with my ideas”. The truth is, a lot of those people claiming IPCC should be listened to conveniently ignore the bits in the IPCC reports that don’t align with their opinions. Also, nobody has time to read the reports and spend years training to actually understanding them.

We are overall woefully uninformed about these things, to the point that the majority of people in some recent opinion polls in Europe believe that nuclear power plants emit greenhouse gases.

Because NIMBYs

This argument is facile. We have a for profit energy sector that doesn't want to invest billions of dollars to see returns in over a decade when they can build wind turbines next month and start making money immediately. If you want nuclear power it needs to be a national investment (see France). No amount of NIMBY can stop coal plants. It seems silly to think that's the thing holding back nuclear adoption.

The "BY" in "NIMBY" gets larger with nuclear imo. Nobody cares if a coal plant is built miles out of town, but sentiment is big that nobody wants a nuclear plant in their state

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