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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

I will rail against Jane Fonda.

This person is the most responsible person for the situation we're in right now. She conspired with others to derail (literally in some cases) Nuclear power.

This is what happens when you follow uninformed advocates from Hollywood. People should learn to despise "influencers." They know little but aim to move people to action based on poor or very poor understanding of the things they propose and base their positions on emotion, mostly.

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You let the oil industry off the hook pretty easily. Renewables research have been hobbled for ages because of powerful lobby. It's only in the last decade that it was pushed to the front stage. Nuclear power is not some magic safe thing. It can and will cause horrible disaster and consequences if run the same way we run our energy economy for most of the last 100 years, by pure greed.

But yeah, blame Jane Fonda....

I'd also consider the possibility that the generations-old and well-connected fossil fuel lobby also had a hand in it. In fact, I'd wager a much larger effect than Ms Fonda and co.

They could not have done it and would not have gone over with the public without her critical (no pun) marshalling of the movement. She was key and deserves blame.

It's like expecting C&H would come around and denounce anyone who said, "ice-cream is great, I love sweets, let's all celebrate with sweets". Sure, if they were ethical, they'd mention how sugar is bad for human health and undermine their company.

Agreed. Jane Fonda was a useful idiot.

The anti-nuclear cause wouldn’t have nearly been bolstered as much if the Three Mile Island incident hadn’t occurred.

I don’t know, Windscale for example did not seem to have much of an effect, and it was much worse. The way it’s spun in the media has much more weight than the actual risks in most people’s mind.

Maybe because Three Mile is actually American? Perhaps Windscale garnered less coverage because it happened in Britain.

I am not writing from an American perspective, this is true in European media as well. In any case, you’d think that an accident releasing radionuclides all over Europe would be a better example of the dangers of nuclear than a security system shutting down a reactor as expected in case of emergency. It’s all academic anyway, these discussions are not exactly rational.

The incredible irony being that nobody died and no evidence has been found of health problems in the affects population. Nuclear energy is about 1000 times safer than getting energy from coal.

The level of ignorance in the general population is astounding.

> The level of ignorance in the general population is astounding.

In 1979? Years before the Internet? Yes, people were ignorant.

Don't get me wrong, I'm the last person to defend ignorance in the general population, but you're speaking from hindsight.

Ok, but Fonda and the environmental groups that supported her and the media could have looked at facts and spoken to the experts before disseminating false information, fear, and in general FUD to scuttle the technology.

You're armchair-quarterbacking events of forty years ago.

For the sake of discussion, let's grant your point: Jane Fonda and co. delayed clean nuclear energy by four or five decades.

So what? What do we do about it today? How does that help convince the holdovers that we can actually make and run clean nuclear power plants?

(Just to be clear, I'm not against nuclear energy. Especially, I'm really hopeful about molten salt reactors and (eventually) fusion power.)

Those same actors and their heirs/replacements could agitate for Nuclear and explain how wrong they were in retarding the technology.

Use the same cloud they used to scuttle the tech to revive and invigorate the technology.

They should also stress people to seek facts by themselves and to not rely on mouthpieces and emotive arguments when making decisions and choices. To be critical and seek your own information.

Whatever harm the anti-nuke lobby did towards contemporary fission power, the biggest loss imo was the federal government keeping research funding for future fusion power at perpetual sub-"fusion never" levels. And this was before The China Syndrome!

http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg

Source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...

Each dollar spent on fusion is a dollar not spent where it can have any useful effect before 2050.

That was as true 30 years ago.

A Tokamak fusion plant would cost at least 10x fission, and fission is already far from competitive. So, absent aneutronic, fusion has no prospect ever.

Have you heard of the Polywell design for fusion reactors? If so, what do you think?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

Dr. Robert Bussard (RIP): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU He claimed that it would only take about $200M of engineering development to become viable.

Most people who have looked at it say x-ray emission losses would prevent achieving breakeven. I am not equipped to evaluate the assertion, but private investors have favored other designs.

There is a split between thermal-equilibrium designs, like Tokamak, and those relying on non-linear plasma fluid effects to achieve much greater compression in selected places and/or times where fusion should happen. Plasma fluid dynamics is tricky. Plasma fluid radiology is harder.

Cheers!

I'm not equipped to evaluate it either, just hopeful. :)

There's no reason why 2050 has to be the target year other than the numerical roundness lends itself to sci-fi futurism. This isn't Sim City 2000.

It could have been earlier had there been more effort put into it in the past. Just look at that chart- even if the projections were wildly optimistic, it still seems like there was no political will to even try.

Because there was no point. It was already known it would be radically more costly than fission.

So, money spent on fusion is welfare for the military contractors who build the test articles, and for hot-neutron physicists who might be needed for weapons work.

It is good that a few plasma fluid dynamics physicists and their grad students get the odd bone or two, because it is a too-neglected field. It would be better to give them the whole budget.

So you say.

It was and is a speculative technology, but what is the harm in reallocating funding from say, fossil fuel subsidies, into fusion R&D? Even as a purely scientific endeavor, who knows what kinds of useful knowledge and applicable by-products might be found along the way. If fusion is such a dead end, why have there actually been new discoveries made over the past several years, even if they might be hyped? Do you believe MIT/CFS, TAE, JET, or ASIPP are just burning money or something? Who are you to claim that a technology is impossible? Skepticism in fission does not have to convert to the dismissal of fusion.

It is not impossible. It just would cost way more than fission, which already costs way more than renewables, and the gap widens daily.

I also do not back orbital, beamed solar power. That, too, could work. But it, also, would cost more.

Things that cost more displace less CO2 emission, per dollar spent. We have a need to maximize displacing CO2 emission.

What happened at TMI was wildly exaggerated by anti-nuke activists. Obviously they took full advantage of the public's ignorance to instill fear into the public such that Nuclear was DOA in the years and decades after their agitative activism. And, so here we are.

TMI has been consistently lowballed by nuke advocates.

In particular, its very large "venting" of radioactive krypton gas that ran down to the river and spread out in neighborhoods on the riverbanks is never counted among its impacts.

With an exposure of 1.4mrem, as opposed to an X-ray which gives a 3.2mrem dose. So a nothing sandwich.

Maybe, but its effects and after effects were also blown out of proportion by nuclear power opponents.

Closely followed by Bechtel screwing up TMI and destroying public faith.

Why Jane Fonda? I know she protested arctic drilling during the Obama years, but other than starring in The China Syndrome, a work of fiction she neither wrote nor directed and was not the only actor to star in, what did she ever have to do with nuclear protesting?

After starring in The China Syndrome she became a huge anti-nuclear zealot and would hold protests and drew lots of attention and bent many ears her way with her stardom and her Hollywood “expertise.”

> This person is the most responsible person for the situation we're in right now

You can't possible mean this. She is more responsible than Putin? It's her fault that German politicians ignored all the warnings and choose to depend on Russian fossil fuel? It's her fault that we did not start the massive move away from fossil fuel we needed to do 10-15 years ago, and which would have stripped Putin of his fossil power?

Not sure you're pretending to miss the point of parents comment or not, but in case you're not:

They're obviously not talking about the current war waged by Russia but instead talking about the lack of nuclear reactors in the US.

Thanks, by "the situation we are in now" I thought he meant the global energy crisis and the situation in the EU particularly.

I can see how OP means just that. Nuclear construction went from skyrocketing to free fall after Ronda’s starring in The China Syndrome led her to become an anti-nuclear hyperevangelist. People listened to her and the Three Mile Island incident shortly thereafter could plausibly be said to have been blown way out of proportion with her amplifying voice.

It’s not unreasonable to think that if that movie and Fonda’s anti-nuclear bent never happened, nuclear would have become so profligate that nothing Putin did would have given him a hold over the Western energy sector.

The catalyst is not the cause of the reaction.

Rail against people that put her in spot.

Jane fond is like everyone else. But someone put her in the spot.

That would be the general public by buying any newspaper with pictures of Jane Fonda on the front page, and giving undue weight to whatever she said.

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