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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

I think future generations will look back and think we were morons for choosing coal over nuclear. The radiation from particulates released by burning coal actually kills more people each year than the radiation from nuclear accidents has ever killed. Plus we also made a nice little climate change disaster on our little space ship Earth that's hurling through the Milky Way.

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No need for future generations. Lots of people in this current generation think it's an absolutely poor idea to choose coal over nuclear.

How moronic would it be, when the actual solution, renewable energy sources, are not even discussed?

Choosing nuclear energy bears the same moronic behavior. It's unsustainable and, compared to coal, we have much less options handling it's waste on a much larger time scale. "Not beeing able to handle the waste" is the same problem category and nobody cares. This is not just short-sightedness, it's also a propagandistic master piece.

Decades of a lacking energy transition plan and now, when the situation gets more dire, the debate goes between non-solution A and non-solution B. But at least we have status quo going for _us_.

Renewables weren't an option in those days. They've only recently started to become viable, and are not really viable at scale until the energy storage solution can also be solved at a combined cost equivalent to coal or nuclear. I do think it will get there, but it's not fair to look back at the last 70 years and say why didn't we do more renewables.

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