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Comment by fatcat500 | Hacker News Reader

Safetyism in regards to nuclear power is nothing more than the environmental lobby attempting to derail the only viable solution to climate change. They will lose an excellent source of political capital if climate change is solved, so they will always fearmonger nuclear power.

Fewer than 50 people have died from nuclear power in its entire history, meanwhile an estimated 8.7 million people die each year from fossil fuels [0].

[0] https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-are-the-ef...

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I wish there were a way to both upvote and downvote your post:

The environmental lobby does not exist, but pressure from NatGas producers to "orient" the Greens towards fear of NP did & does.

However the idea that climate change is political capital for them is ludicrous: clearly their activism totally failed...

>The environmental lobby does not exist,

does the renewable industry magically not have the same politico-economic incentives to lobby politicians like every other industry?

The renewable industry is still incredibly nascent and does not wield (much) power (yet). In the future, that may not be the case, but to compare this with the existing fossil fuel industries is really quite disingenuous. There's orders of magnitude difference between the two as of yet. Will they become similarly corrupt? Perhaps. Likely, even. But it will shift the profit from massive, world-changing effects to something different, and we're already more tuned into the issue that energy production, consumption, and use has serious side effects.

they already conspired with the fossil industry to kill nuclear power in germany. their minister for energy is "Green" and they're busy reopening coal plants and opening new coal mines to make up for the shortfall of russian gas. they wield immense, malign power.

Does political lobbying have to be done by business, or do the efforts of religious groups to influence policy count as lobbying? If there is a Green lobby then it has more in common with the, I dunno, "Christian lobby" than lobbying from big business.

Ah yes, it’s a sinister plot by the evil “environmental lobby”…

No, it’s just that the roots of the green movement are mixed with the nuclear disarmament movement, and the rejection of nuclear unfortunately got carried on to civilian power plants :(

This is an important point. The green movement agenda is obviously mixed with something other than environmental concerns, or they would embrace nuclear.

> nothing more than the environmental lobby attempting to derail the only viable solution to climate change

How about the oil and gas lobby?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...

the environment doesn't have any money to lobby with. we make money out of it.

fossil fuel lobby though... they have billions of reasons to lobby against nuclear, to the point that they may give eco-terrorists money to do their work for them. can't say this happened, but see Germany - it's the least effort rational explanation.

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