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Comment by vadfa | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear is clean and sustainable and can allow people to mine bitcoin and even heat their homes, which seems to be a problem currently in some regions of Europe.

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Nuclear energy may not release CO2 into the atmosphere, but that doesn't make it clean and sustainable:

- you need to store radioactive waste for hundreds of years

- "safe" permanent storage sites often end up not not being actually safe 50 years later

- warming rivers by using the water for cooling may wreck local ecosystems

The only thing that is actually sustainable is not using all the energy in the first place. Bitcoin is the opposite of that.

That all might be true, but there are ways to improve on those points. For instance thorium reactors are much more efficient in terms of waste, and they are much safer.

A lot of problems we have with Nuclear is because the tech most widely used was created with a side goal of advancing nuclear weapon production.

I'm by no means a nuclear maximalist, but I could see better nuclear being a component of a larger sustainable energy strategy.

Thorium reactors are a castle in the air

Everything is until it isn't right? Do you think there's a fundamental problem there, or is it just taking too long?

taking too long is a fundamental problem here

Some problems are complex. If you asked me in 2012 if fuel cell cars would ever exist I would have called it a pipe-dream, but now you can buy one and use it as a real vehicle in California.

and when did we think we would have got fusion? We can't rely on pipe dreams when solving the climate crisis

I'm not saying thorium is a solution to the climate crisis. But I think the balance is a bit far in the other direction: people rule out Nuclear unnecessarily as a part of a larger clean energy strategy because of bad associations with mushroom clouds and Chernobyl/Three Mile Island.

and waste

Readily fissile materials aren't just found lying around next to the reactor though. There is a non-negligible amount of CO2 emitted to get fuel, even for nuclear power.

Nuclear waste is much safer than all other waste from energy production:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/19...

I’m fine with nuclear, but producing excess nuclear waste simply to produce random bits to do absolutely nothing isn’t something I’d support.

I agree with you, but how exactly do you check for that? Put a telescreen in every home?

Treat crypto no different from stocks.

You can’t just buy, trade, and cash out stocks from some random guy online. Crypto is basically no different from stocks at this point—things change in value just because people think others expect the price to change and follow the herd.

As someone living near one of europes largest uranium deposits, i can tell you that nuclear itself might be clean, but getting the fuel is anything but. Uranium dont come in nice nuggets like gold, its mixed up with other things so that its only fractions of grams per ton of rock you have to mine. When this rock is processed we are left with big holes in the ground that shifts the level of the waterbed, and big piles of toxic rock dust that leaks all kinds of nasty shit into said ground water.

Same for the minerals needed for batteries or most other things.

This is mining.

Nuclear doesn’t produce any greenhouse gasses, but with the radioactive waste it generates it of course isn’t really clean. It’s also expensive and takes decades to build.

That waste is much easier to dispose that the waste created by "renewables" like solar panels, especially with newer generation plants that burn old nuclear waste.

I am not sure how much you have looked at these newer plants? While must can use since amount of nuclear waste (which is great), their biproducts are only somewhat less toxic than the original. These are nowhere as clean as people seem to imagine.

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