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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, poster has a point, if it weren't for the likes of Jane Fonda and company who take up a cause without understanding it just for political points, leads us to where we are now. There is no reason we could not be where France is in terms of nuclear power.

This is on those activists who blindly followed anti-nuke dogmatism. Thanks guys and gals.

This is why the public should by and large disregard opinions by celebrities who have no expertise in what they are advocating.

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I think the engineering and decision making at Three Mile Island had a much bigger impact on the current state of nuclear power in the US than Jane Fonda.

Only because Jane Fonda used it as a tool to promote her anti-nuke activism. The atmospheric release was insignificant but she scared Americans away from nuclear-generated power.

She could have used her activism to promote better processes for example, or incremental improvements rather than kill the industry.

Within 12 days of the movie Jane Fonda made about nuclear power, the biggest accident in the USA occurred. Within 10 years, we had Chernobyl.

Blaming the lack of nuclear power on a celebrity for her activism and not the fact that decision makers saw the results of real catastrophic failure seems wrong. Sure, Jane Fonda didn’t help nuclear energy. But we should have started by never letting any of the major nuclear failures happen. If we can’t do that, we should work on solving that problem and not blaming critics.

And in the meantime we continued to use fossil fuels.

TMI had little to no impact on the environment and public.

Chernobyl was the result of a corrupt political system which skimped on safety (e.g., no containment building/vessel) because of costs—something that isn't present in any developed country.

That leaves Fukushima.

I'll take the low odds of maybe one incident in 60+ years of industry over the certainty of climate change. And I say this as someone who lives 50km from a nuclear power plant.

Corruption is still a big problem all over the world, if that was the cause then you're arguing against more nuclear buildout.

If the impact of the coal industry wasn't so gradual but was released in a sudden event every 10-20 years, we would outlaw coal mining, with prison times for anyone who burns it. But with the impact being diffuse in time and space, we don't really mind. It's the same effect as nobody caring that deaths from car crashes in the US increased by 3000 people between 2019 and 2020, but kill 3000 people at once and it's a tragedy that will be remembered for decades.

Our skewed perception of threats is maybe one of the most destructive psychological quirks of humanity. It makes fighting gradual events like climate change or disease outbreaks incredibly difficult.

We should make nuclear safer and learn from the accidents that have occured in the past, but at the same time we have to accept some risk of we are to generate power. If we build a hydroelectric dam, we know there is a risk of overflow, cracking and flooding. That is just a fact dealing with the extreme amount of energy stored in water that is elevated.

We should make sure that maintenance is handled with the understanding of the human lives depending on it, and managers and politicians need to respect the powerful natural forces of both water and nuclear bonds. That said, stopping to use either in favor of fossil fuels is bad for the planet and bad for the people living on it. Living near a nuclear plants or downstream of a hydroelectric power plants is preferable compared to living near a fossil fueled power plants, and its the role of advocates, learned people and politicians to inform the public of this fact.

Critics should be held to blame for misleading the population, just as politicians should be when they chose to build fossil fueled power plants in favor of safer technologies.

We probably get a Chernobyl worth of premature deaths every year from hydrocarbon-fired power plants that would otherwise have been replaced by nuclear plants. Only nobody cares because it doesn't look all cool and dramatic and scary on the news.

Fonda et al. have blood on their hands, albeit invisible blood. The best kind, I guess.

Wondering where we would stand if we had dumped all the funding and subsidies that went into nuclear fission and fusion research and into coal subsidies into solar panels.

Guessing dependency on oil and gas would be much much lower which also frees up a large chunk of the military budget.

Democratization of resources also reduces the chance of war.

A fair amount the second world war can be told purely in attempts to control access to fuel:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II

What is your opinion of Bill Nye? He's been anti-nuke since BNtSG.

Definitely a hero for getting a generation of kids into science with the science guy, but if anti-nuke then definitely wrong about nuclear, and his newer stuff is kind of weird and less interesting.

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