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Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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