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Comment by fighterpilot | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's an absurd comparison. Nuclear is so safe and always get replaced with fossil fuels when a plant is decommissioned. The anti-nuclear sentiment is therefore detached from the reality of how safe it is relative to how damaging the inevitable alternative is, in the same way that anti-vaxxers are detached from the reality of the vaccine/virus trade-off.

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It is the same mindset: certain historical mishaps (which existed for vaccines too) when the technology was in its infancy justifying a complete rejection of its benefits even though said benefits would overwhelmingly win in any cost-benefit analysis.

But this mindset is fueled by an underlying deeper fear of progress, a fear which only searches for excuses but it exists even without them, like in the case of anti-GMO fears, another dear cause of the "green" activists.

Nuclear has killed people and caused havoc in (to be fair, a small number) of people's neighborhoods, it's not unreasonable for those people to be traumatized by it and campaign against it, even if at scale they are wrong. Vaccines simply haven't done anything like that, it's a fantasy. I think it does a real disservice to those people with genuine concerns to cluster them in with conspiracy theorists and it's bad for society to do that.

Availability bias. If you actually look at the data on nuclear safety relative to other power sources, you'll see that what you're doing is the same thing as quibbling over the safety differences of AstraZeneca versus Moderna. I am not making a false analogy here. The anti-nuclear perspective really is detached from the reality of how safe it is.

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