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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

The problem here is that the term "green" means nothing and anything.

It is always much better to define objectively what is the issue and what is the aim. It seems to me that the main issue is emissions and that the aim is therefore to reduce them as much as possible.

In that context, nuclear is a perfectly valid option and probably unavoidable as things stand.

Gas is 'bad' since it obviously does produce emissions but it's the least emitting among fossil fuels so realistically it could also be allowed as a last resort (with 'last resort' underlined 3 times in red).

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The term 'green' in the headline means everything and nothing, but...

The things that are allowed by this law are fairly tightly specified, as even the article gives various details on:

> new nuclear and gas-fired plants built through 2030 will be recognised as a transitional energy source as long as they are used to replace dirtier fossil fuels such as oil and coal.

So, limited to the next 8 years, and only in places where they're not going to displace cleaner options.

> gas projects should only be financed if direct emissions are kept under a maximum cap and they switch to fully renewable energy by 2035

I've not read the legal text but this latter part likely refers to gas turbines that can run on methane or hydrogen or some mix of the two, which is a fairly standard part of forward planning.

There's some political shenanigans involved, but overall it's a fairly sensible compromise and another small step in the right direction.

Thank you for your voice of reason in this bubbling sea of uninformed nonsense.

The problem is that now there is less money for developing a grid of green energies and we need it for yesterday. Because nuclear will take a chunk of the grants, as is much more expensive to build and much more time consuming.

So green energies, delayed in the last decades for political reasons, will need to wait, again. And this delay could turn to be a very bad decision in a few years.

That is just fear mongering. We have no evidence of nuclear being built in-place of cheaper renewables. Until we do it's just FUD.

> Until we do it's just FUD.

And when we will do, it is too late to change our mind

Too late, to little and, with bad luck, a very expensive error.

Money is a limited resource. The only reason to tag nuclear as green is to grant nuclear access to subsides for green energy.

Who says money is a limited resource? I'd think only key things it can pay for (skilled human labour) are what're limited - you can "print" as much money as you like. We need far more people skilled in and dedicating their time toward developing low carbon energy sources. Given the number of us doing all manner of BS jobs, that doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve (even if it will necessarily take a number of years).

If money is unlimited, then just give solar panels for free to everybody. Put it in every roof of the country and you will achieve your goals much faster

Indeed, governments should probably be subsidizing solar panels more heavily than they have been. As I said, obviously it requires the available skilled labor and capital investment to produce/install vastly more than we are currently but there are really no physical limits stopping that currently, just economical ones because the price signals are wrong.

Well, there is at least one study[0] (using data from 123 countries over 25 years) which found that investment in nuclear energy tends to reduce investment in renewables, while not reducing carbon emissions as much.

More research is probably needed, but I wouldn't say we have "no evidence".

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00696-3

Is it less emitting once you account for leaky wells and infrastructure?

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