Comment by henearkr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by henearkr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I hear you, but the real argument against nuclear fission is not the economic one, it's the safety one.

The safety during the (peace time) use of nuclear plants has been hugely improved, so I agree that's not anymore the main concern.

But nuclear fission facilities are very cumbersome to dismantle, and they are liabilities during and after their commissioning.

You can see that in Ukraine for example, Zaporizhia plant has been taken into hostage.

Chernobyl was too, briefly.

This kind of liability is especially concerning in our era of crisis (triggered by the global warming), that we could even suspect to be the beginning of a civilization collapse, which is a big word to say simply that situations of conflict, including internal conflict (civil wars and guerrillas) will multiply everywhere. Imagine the 6th January folks marching to a nuclear plant...

There is still also the problem of the nuclear fuel: now West Africa and Sahel are providing a sizable part of it. But what will happen when they do not want to cooperate anymore with the Western world? (Russia is working very hard to push to this situation)

Nuclear safety in war time is unproven sure but I would argue that a nuclear power plant is much less dangerous than a hydro dam. Imagine a strike on Three Gorges Dam, at minimum millions would die, without needing to use a nuclear weapon.

Sure it's a tough pile of concrete, but that is exactly what a nuclear power plant is too.

Nuclear fuel is a non-issue if it was profitable to mine it. Australia has vast supplies of very high quality Uranium deposits and a substantial portion of the worlds supply of Thorium so the "West" will have ample supply to fissile material for the next several millennia.

Spent fuel is also really a non-issue. It gets talked about a lot but even if we were to supply 100% of the worlds energy on nuclear (which we never would, solar and hydro are too good for that) we could still store all of it in probably a single facility in a desert in Australia far from where anyone could give a shit about it. Australia is -extremely- large and -extremely- sparsely populated, especially the interior.

I get why people don't like the sound of nuclear but the arguments just don't stack up against the facts, cost really is it's only downside and I'm certain that can be fixed with mass production of reactors and designs that don't need active cooling in failure scenarios.

Nuclear definitely has a PR problem and I don't have enough background in the science to claim how unfounded the problem actually is. But what I do have are memories of how people react to anything nuclear related. All it takes is one high profile incident and all the political capital spent on selling nuclear as an attractive option to the public vanishes instantly. I don't know why other energy sources don't seem to have this problem. Not to the degree nuclear has, at least.

For the same reason why people turn a blind eye to oil, coal, guns, alcohol and cigarettes yet have a problem with cannabis, abortions, nuclear power, gun control and until recently electric cars.

PR/marketing trumps all because people aren't sufficiently educated in science and statistics to understand what represents risk vs what is feasible, etc.

Because they can't interpret the data themselves they defer to media and public figures and unfortunately in our world those people aren't incentivised to present things honestly - even in the rare cases they are educated enough to do so.

Well it depends on the country.

In France for example, people who are anti-abortion, anti-cannabis, anti-EV, etc (most often those are Conservative people) are also anti-wind-turbines and pro-nuclear.

The specific issues aren't the point.

The point is that most people don't have informed opinions based on fact but rather just regurgitate whatever is fed to them in whatever media they consume.

Us sitting here having an educated debate on the merits of nuclear vs hydro aren't the problem, we lie in the relatively informed group. We have concerns about nuclear (and other technologies no doubt) but those come from a place of reason, not of group-think.

Side note:

Nuclear and it's relation with Green's parties around the world is also special as it was the platform on which those parties were created. So otherwise rational people, i.e environmentalists are irrationally against nuclear power because of long-standing historical reasons that probably don't hold anymore but can't change the very basis of their platform - or at least are unwilling to.

No amount of facts changes that as it has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with politics.

Sorry to pick up on your specific examples, but I don't know why you are classifying alcohol deaths as under-estimated and abortions as over-estimated(?).

For the record, the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics reports there are about 95,000 alcohol-related deaths in the United States annually[0], while the CDC reports over 600,000 abortions per year.[1]

It's true that someone who reads PR/marketing material is more likely to die from being hit by a drunk driver than by being aborted, but I don't think that's the point you're trying to make.

[0] https://drugabusestatistics.org/alcohol-related-deaths/

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/24/what-the-da...

Abortions aren't deaths. Even if they were I wasn't looking to draw comparisons, these were just examples of things people don't have informed opinions on.

> Abortions aren't deaths. ... people don't have informed opinions

Well, you've definitely proven your point.

No, you have proven mine.

Abortions aren't deaths any more than pulling out constitutes murder. It's just a bunch of cells like any other until it becomes able to sustain life independently at which point abortion is essentially illegal everywhere in the world except in seriously extreme circumstances.

Attempting to define it otherwise takes some fairly substantial mental gymnastics. If I have to amputate my arm did I "kill" my arm? Or did I remove a piece of myself that was malfunctioning? Sure it was a bunch of cells and those cells are "dead" I guess. Is a baby part of the mother or is it special because some of the DNA was donated externally? If it's special is it a parasite? What distinguishes it from viral infections that introduce foreign RNA?

So no. I don't think I'm uninformed. It's fairly clear cut at this point but apparently most of the world thinks we should declare it ambiguous because it goes against cultural indoctrination of a significant portion of the population.

Exactly the sort of pandering that has led us to the edge (or potentially past) of no return on climate change.

> until it becomes able to sustain life independently

You mean get a job and earn a living, or just forage in the woods for berries?

> at which point abortion is essentially illegal everywhere in the world except in seriously extreme circumstances.

Assuming you mean "at fetal viability" (the RvW standard), I think you may be surprised to learn that 6 states plus DC allow abortions at any stage of development and for any reason.[0]

> If I have to amputate my arm did I "kill" my arm?

Does your arm have distinct DNA from the rest of your body? Was your arm going to naturally develop into a healthy individual with their own rights and desires?

> Is a baby part of the mother or is it special because some of the DNA was donated externally?

Thank you for correctly using the term "baby". I ask your question back to you in the context of a hypothetical law allowing the abortion of newborns. Would your answer change if this hypothetical law only applied to newborns with life expectancies less than 5 years?

> What distinguishes it from viral infections that introduce foreign RNA?

The baby has human DNA (and RNA). That seems relevant if we are asking whether the baby should have human rights or not.

> I don't think I'm uninformed.

It seems like you've thought about your position a lot, which is great, but I'm not sure if you've fully considered enough of the possible counter-points to it. Thank you for sharing your position with me, though.

[0] https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/state-indicator/ges...

I concur that, for this kind of near-civilzation-collapse risks, dams are less desirable than wind/solar facilities.

But I can't compare the risk posed by a dam and the risk posed by a nuclear fission plant.

One is an instant and relatively local disaster, the other is a long term and wide-spread (before containment) pita.

However, I suspect that dams are much harder to turn into a catastrophe than nuclear plants. While for a nuclear plant you just have to disable the cooling and move all the fuel rods all the way outside of the boron dampener and keep it this way for enough time to overheat, for a dam you would have to throw a really huge lot of explosives on it to physically destroy its concrete. There are several types of dams too, some of which are probably as strong as a natural hill.

About spent fuel: there are probably many reasons (that I don't know) why the actively-cooled-pools are not all in the middle of deserts, but right now they are just next to the plants. Of course we could put them on the Moon too, I would consider it a definitive solution (for this part of the problem).

"One is an instant and relatively local disaster, the other is a long term and wide-spread (before containment) pita."

And then the flood crashes into a chemical plant or two and suddenly the problem is very long term and wide spread.

>However, I suspect that dams are much harder to turn into a catastrophe than nuclear plants.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-deadliest-dam-failur...

This is an important point. Nuclear can be very safe in theory. Under the right circumstances, all risks can be accounted for (except long term waste storage, apparently). Problem is, in the hands of profit-seeking companies and aggressive and/or corrupt governments, those circumstances will not be right.

Remember that both Fukushima and Deep Water Horizon were caused by companies cutting costs in the face of warnings of the risks.

Why can't the waste just be ejected into space. SpaceX has made launches a lot cheaper than it once was and once you push it into the solar system it'll never cause problems again.

Launching large amounts of nuclear material comes with its own risks, and if it orbits the sun in an earth-crossing orbit, we will eventually encounter it again. Launching into the sun would be nice, but that's way more expensive.

Putting few tons of radioactive material on top of dozens of tons of highly explosive rocket fuel... what could possibly go wrong?

Compared to keeping it on earth, or putting it in the ocean, where there are also many things that can go wrong? Yes, launches can explode, but it's very rare, getting rarer and presumably these rockets could be launched from small islands where if there's an explosion the fallout would mostly be over the ocean.

I once read that 1 kg of plutonium burning up in the higher atmosphere would be enough to kill the entire population of the earth. I'm not enough of an expert to know if that's really true, but I suspect there's a good reason why experts don't consider this a good option. Or at least not yet.

I assume you mean nuclear fission.

Big oops!

Yes, thank you!!

I fixed it in the comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com