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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

The timing of the cold war and the climate change crisis have been unfortunate. A lot of people in the west were opposed to nuclear power, often due to the association with our struggle against the communist world.

If we'd kept going with nuclear, we'd have more investment and more experience in it and it's hard to know for sure, but you could make an argument that we'd be in less of a pickle with the carbon reduction goals. We'd know more about how to make it safer and we'd know more about how to make it better.

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Nuclear power has plenty of problems even without the association with bombs. How about the very real association with accidents with civilian nuclear reactors. And how about the fact that after each one of them the industry always said that this would never happen again and then it happened again.

I am not sure what you mean "if we kept going with nuclear". We are keeping going with it. It is a continued disaster. The last plant being built, two reactors at Vogtle are now estimated to cost over 25 billion, a massive overrun over an original estimate of 14 billion. That construction already caused the bankruptcy of one of the builders (Westinghouse), massive losses at another (Chicago Bridge and Iron). Eventually Chicago Bridge and Iron was acquired at depressed valuation by McDermott, but the valuation was not depressed enough because McDermott itself declared bankruptcy last year.

Just last month there was another 3 month delay announced at Vogtle. This will certainly increase costs even more.

There is also the VC Summer plant that was recently cancelled after massive delays and cost overruns. That plant was also partially to blame for Westinghouse's bankruptcy.

What makes these examples nuclear power problems, rather than bad organization problems? Large projects are known to have issues like cost overruns. Airports, carriers, etc are all things that tend to cost more than the sticker price.

Look at cars. People used to get run over all the time, they'd hurt themselves in crashes, etc. But so much effort has been spent investing in them that things like seat belts became a thing, we made laws about driving, and so on.

You also have to look at the tradeoffs. Putting carbon in the air is basically a bad idea, and we need to reduce it. Here's a replacement for doing that, we should put some of our chips on that. Perfectly fine to have windmills as well, not saying there aren't other bets.

> and then it happened again.

Did it happen again? We haven't had anything close to another Chernobyl, and that was 35 years ago (more than 50% of the entire history of the nuclear power industry.)

Why are these cost overruns an issue? The solutions our politicians are putting forward now are going to cost taxpayers trillions and just go to some vague idea of green energy. I’d much rather throw that at nuclear research and building nuclear plants, as opposed to some slush fund that will only line insiders pockets.

I don’t think anyone is afraid of nuclear power, I mean, some people are but no one serious.

What anti nuclear movements in my country fear isn’t the technology but rather the people who have to maintain it.

I’m not sure that last part can be easily fixed.

> I don’t think anyone is afraid of nuclear power, I mean, some people are but no one serious.

People are afraid of it, I have spoken with multiple people which are fundamentally/seriously afraid of nuclear power.

Also most idk. 5 50+ years old people (i.e. majority of people with power) in the Green German party (and other parties) have spend their "Jung political years" by being obsessed with stopping Nuclear power, try convincing them that maybe we need it. (Or try make them accept that their movement had been partially financed and instrumentalized by eastern Germany, or that most problems of nuclear wast storage in the area which once was western Germany are 100% fault of the Politician of the time choosing a known to be bad mine for petty reasons).

Also the million year commitment to storing trash.

Globally building nuclear power plants will be too slow to solve climate change. We still should keep it to solve future problems. Like conquering the universe and stuff.

> million year commitment to storing trash.

Hardly. Most of it decays quite fast. (think tens of years to get below backround radioactivity) While there is some extremely long lived radioactive waste, it is, quite frankly, miniscule in the amount.

Radioactive stuff is kinda interesting. Longer it is active less it produces radiation, more it produces faster it breaks down... Ofc, it is not that clear cut as power of radiation differs.

It is just that I wouldn't be too worried about properly stabilised long lived waste. Just like I'm not too worried about natural uranium...

As opposed to the million year commitment of having an ever-growing number of giant metal windmills mar the landscape?

There's a fine garbage dump in the centre of the solar system.

No, the sun isn't viable at all for waste. It'd take an unreasonable amount of fuel for that, https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=43694&t=l...

Along with that, we have enough geographically stable regions for long enough storage.

The premise is probably true, but that article measures the cost in dollars, not energy units. Im not yet convinced it’s a net negative.

We're from the same country, so I know a bit about it.

There was always a fear of contamination, and the Three-Mile-Island accident in the US didn't help. This was before Chernobyl. But of course it's worth remembering why everyone thought that might be such a big problem: there was a siren each Wednesday reminding people that we're in a Cold War, and if it turns hot there's a nuke somewhere with "Copenhagen" written in Cyrillic. So people understood that nuclear fallout is not nice. Plus Denmark ain't big, so basically if something were to happen the whole country could be radioactive. For the same reason, many Danes took issue with the Swedes building a nuclear plant that you can still see from Copenhagen.

The OOA (the organization that led the anti-nuclear movement) made a nice logo with a smiling sun and a "Nuclear Power? No Thanks" message that got thousands of people on the street to protest. Some of the people maintained that if we only could solve what to do about the waste, they'd be fine with it. Often the debate has been "if the tech were better I'd be for it".

I'm not sure this is a reasonable decision. Tech gets better with experience, and you don't build experience by not engaging. Much like mini-mills from Clayton Christensen, often the tech that wins looks crappy and niche when it starts.

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