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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

Without disagreeing per se, some of the reasoning is dubious.

Studying something in grad school likely makes you familiar, not an expert. I would be skeptical of anyone without at least a decade of industry experience. No one becomes an expert by going to grad school; you have to build real things under real constraints. I went through a selective hard sciences program (coincidentally including nuclear chemistry) and industry people forgot more than we ever learned.

School creates confident sounding opinions but it rarely creates deep domain expertise. I would put more value in the opinions of people that have built or worked on real systems.

And to be clear, I am broadly pro-nuclear. I think it is a critical part of the energy mix that has been maligned on anti-scientific grounds by parties with an agenda separate from providing clean, inexpensive energy.

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> I would put more value in the opinions of people that have built or worked on real systems.

+100. It took me a while to internalise Nassim Taleb's point of skin in the game. Now that I exactly know what he means I've learned to more or less disregard opinions of non-practitioners.

Interesting. Which of his books do you refer here to?

This one[1]. To be clear I haven't read the book. However, I have read quite a bit of his articles and watched his talks all of which I highly recommend.

The crux of the argument is simple enough. One should attach more weightage to opinions of who have stake in what they talking about. For instance, an a bond trader will have more realistic picture of economy than someone like Paul Krugman. Bond trader earns his wages by being more correct about economy. Paul Krugman on the other hand can change his opinion at the drop of a hat with zero negative impact to his earnings.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36064445-skin-in-the-gam...

Just be aware that you very easily talk yourself into believing that someone does or doesn't have skin in the game on accident or to maintain a certain opinion.

Measuring expertise is particularly tricky with the nuclear industry.

Is it enough to be an expert in the underlying physics? Should you be an engineer with experience in any one of the dozens of disciplines? Do you need to be familiar with the specific design of a reactor (that is probably confidential)? Everyone is an expert but no one has a holistic view of everything. It's complicated!

In this particular case it's rather simple to define who is an expert: if you want to challenge government report, you have to understand the challenged topics very well, have to have a lot of factual information about the state of the German nuclear industry and have to understand how possible solutions will work.

Do you think the politicians who made the decision were any more qualified?

Not to argue the case, but they surely had ample opportunity to be briefed by persons who were very qualified-- and if they failed to get those briefings they were failing in their duty.

Chancellor Merkel holds a PhD in quantum physics, I think she knew how to read scientific papers, statistics, probabilities.

So any other countries’ pro-nuclear decision was made by politicians only, not knowing much about the topic?

Ah yes, completely unscientific... Like the Russian soldiers who dug trenches in the "red forest" near Tschernobyl, got radiation poisoning and scattered the stuff all over the place where people still have to work to contain the impossible accident that happend decades ago.

Yes, things like that and "Oh, from now on nothing will happen, science says so!"scares the shit out of people. Anti-scientific? There is just no public support for storing the waste anywhere near where people live. And there isn't a safe site in Germany anyway.

Safe nuclear reactors may be decades away from broad commercialization.

I don’t think any nuclear supporter would call Chernobyl impossible. Rather inevitable. Same as what will happen if we don’t go nuclear.

I've heard a lot of supporters who generally disregard the possibility of future such accidents happening. Certainly you wouldn't want it to happen anywhere near you?

And there is no clear, scientific reasoning that nuclear power is safer than the best mix of alternatives. First of all, any calculation to that regard is horrendously complicated on the nuclear side. Second of all, it always depends on the likelihoods observed in the past. There better be nobody sabotaging a nuclear plant, or stealing waste material for a dirty bomb and so on. Because that's impossible to calculate, so it is entirely reasonable to err on the side of caution.

You realize that this is not a coherent and rational response, yes? You don't address anything, you just throw out oddly random straw men. Maybe I am incorrect but nothing you wrote would contribute to that discussion.

In my opinion the opposition to nuclear power is not anti-scientific. It is bullshit to just label all the proponents scientists and the opposition non-scientists. There are two factions arguing on scientific grounds.

That there is another level to the discussion, the fear of nuclear disasters is another topic. It is impossible to say where the "rational" level of fear is. Scientists have been wrong about the risks too often. With the huge downsides, people will gladly err on the side of caution.

My arguments are examples why the "anti-scientific" argument is just BS. The fear is not always rational, but always legitimate. It is all about risk tolerance.

GP might have ranted, but after decades of searching a suitable place for long-term storage of nuclear waste in Germany, the list of candidate sites is empty. And the willingness of anyone in Germany to tolerate a nuclear waste storage facility in their neighborhood is non existant. That is the reason why nuclear is unpopular in Germany. On the other hand, Germany also imported most of its uran from Russia. So that would have to change as well if Germany where to return to nuclear.

The original article also treats all sources of electricity as interchangable. Some kind of plants are slow to turn on and up (e.g. nuclear plants) whereas others are very fast to turn on, off, up, or down (e.g. natural gas plants). The latter kind of plants is needed to compensate the unpredictability of solar and wind energy. Nuclear plants cannot fulfill that role.

In my opinion Germany should have started to invest way more in the last two decades in synthetization of natural gas from thin air and cheap solar and wind energy. That would provide us with huge storage facilities for energy. And we could make huge amounts of natural gas heating unit eco-friendly without having to replace them. And even ten or fifteen years back it was clear that not being dependend on Russia would be a good thing.

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