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Comment by jacooper | Hacker News Reader

> The reason why housing is expensive is the same as what the article said about nitrogen emissions, new housing construction is limited to try and not exceed emissions even more.

This is honestly just dumb. Many of the climate actions taken in European countries like stopping nuclear energy are really really dumb.

> As for schiphol airport lines, I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist but having informed myself a bit on the subject and having been on those queues many times this year, I think it's again a self inflicted problem, as the government wants to have less flights overall, and I believe they found a reasonable escape goat for it with the "staff shortages".

But why? Is it also to reduce emissions? They don't want to actually do something meaningful, so they cause havoc in the Airport to reduce emissions? What is going on?

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> This is honestly just dumb

Yes, but in an indirect way. At some point, nitrogen deposition was identified as harmful to nature, and emissions targets were put in place. Politicians then did everything they could not to be the one having to introduce unpopular legislation, until they couldn't anymore. Now the government has painted themselves in a corner and cannot give permits for building projects anymore without breaking the law.

I think we'll see this more often in the future when the consequences of ambitious targets will need to be reckoned with.

I suspect it might also be trying to avoid targeting the base.

If you can fit your compliance push into something that seems minor and distant for most voters, it's probably less politically toxic than going for the direct problem that might be controversial.

"We need to scrap gas guzzlers" is a direct attack on your voters, but "We might not be able to issue construction permits in 2025" is distant and doesn't necessarily affect anyone you know personally.

It probably comes from the same mindset that says "let's pay for a lot of (programme) with a high surtax on hotel rooms because that pretty much only impacts external tourists who aren't going to vote us out over it."

And yet, these "ambitious targets" as you characterize them, are insufficient.

I don't even need to know the target or the efficacy. The static political situation and power structures versus the actuals of three decades of climate science have not significantly changed. The only improvements have been solar/wind/battery changing the efficiency and emissions game, but REDUCTIONS are still effectively nothing.

All "emissions targets" are "compromises" between political ignorance/denialism and reality. Everywhere. Until the rich realize they are directly affected (not their children, the elite care nothing for their children), real policy won't emerge.

I suspect nitrogen remediation with carbon capture using fast-growing plants like bamboo might be part of the solution.

One thing eludes me, though: the Netherlands' highly productive agricultural exports are mostly due to growing vegetables like tomatoes in greenhouses, where th effluent can be controlled. Nitrogen pollution is typically more the result of large-scale livestock or pig farming. The sector actually impacted by the restrictions might not be the most productive one.

> climate actions taken in European countries like stopping nuclear energy

It's not a climate action. It's an environmental action, which there's an overlap with, but which is not the same thing.

What's the difference?

Nuclear energy is actually good for reducing climate change. It’s environmentally undesirable because of the failure mode, the difficulty of cleanup, the fact that the waste is basically forever and we have no real plan for storing or processing it.

Two of these are flat wrong. First, the waste isn't basically forever. Part of it can be reprocessed and part of it does indeed decay down to very low or nearly null radioactivity sooner rather than later.

Secondly, (it's such an absurd myth that keeps being repeated), there are plenty of effective, perfectly functional, usable, right-now-being-used plans for storing nuclear waste. It's not even much overall: The total amount so far produced by humanity to-date is just over 400,000 metric tons (this is very little physical volume on any industrial scale of things) and of that only about 4% is highly radioactive. The rest is low-radiation and one third of that total is suitable for reprocessing..

Bottom line, there is NO major problem with storing it if even minimal intelligent effort is applied to the task.

At this point, I have to wonder how inherent those problems are to nuclear and more to the specific designs that were built over the years, in part due to various military priorities.

The right time to develop a different nuclear platform was 40 years ago, but the second rightest time is today. Where is the bold, government-level messaging and big research grants saying "here's a completely new architecture, it's simply not capable of the same failure modes as Fukushima or Three Mile Island."

I guess that's why people were boosting Thorium a while back, but I haven't heard much news there. Seemed like microreactors was the latest sexy thing.

It's this. If we got one of the molten salt reactor ideas functional it would be a total game changer for the economics of electrictity and the environment because they are not giant pipe bombs waiting to explode and their safety systems are extremely simple while being difficult to screw up (most spec a fan powered by the reactor blowing on a tube causing a solid plug. Reactor goes into failure mode and fan turns off, plug melts and everything flow into a second chamber designed to absorb all the neutrons and shut the reaction down. You end up with a mildly radioactive slab of rock that you can recycle in another running reactor. Also, since everything is liquid it makes continuous cycling and cleaning reaction products out much easier.

There have been hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars spent on various efforts at breeder reactors over the years.

Most of them catch fire every month or dissolve themselves from the inside after a year. Turns out the idea probably needs materials that don't exist yet (but might soon?).

The Russian BN 800 is the closest if you believe their government, and the chinese LFTR project has some promise.

Even with the basic possibility issues solved there are a bunch of economic, resource and political issues to work through after that.

> Bottom line, there is NO major problem with storing it if even minimal intelligent effort is applied to the task.

There's the problem. Even if we only have the 300 year stuff, sooner or later someone is going to put a Jeffrey Immelt in charge of the process and the effort will be neither intelligent sufficient to be called minimal.

Different set of utopian authoritarians forcing people to act against their own interests.

Climate is basically long-term weather. "Nitrogen" doesn't affect the temperature or rain or clouds, so it isn't climate.

FYI when they say nitrogen they don't mean it literally – it's a code-word for nitrogen oxides (NOx) and ammonia (HN3).

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