Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

All of that can be true and yet still trivial in comparison to the emissions that would be eliminated by replacing all fossil-fuel electrical generation with nuclear.

Nuclear works at night and in locations that aren't good for solar or wind generation. Nuclear with a relatively small number of generating sites feeding a large distributiion network fits in with our existing electricial infrastrucure better than the widely dispersed generation that solar and wind provide.

We need leadership that will just clear the way for liquid metal, fast neutron reactors that don't need refined fuel and produce less waste. If you believe that carbon emissions are an existential threat to human survival, it's time to stop fretting about nuclear proliferation and waste disposal. The challenges of those issues are tiny compared to global climate change.

View on HN

Well, you didn't actually address my comment, which had nothing to do with solar working at night or similar. It's useful to keep separate arguments separate since jumping around if something doesn't suit your liking is not a sincere discussion style.

> If you believe that carbon emissions are an existential threat to human survival

FWIW, I don't believe that. Humans will survive, unless we do something like a nuclear weapons armageddon, but that's not because of climate change. Not directly at least. Those of us in privileged will have an easier time adapting to a changing climate, the rest of our species won't have it so easy. And later generations will need to live with the consequences as well. But they will adapt too. If they've never seen a frozen north pole, it will not be odd to them.

Even if it was an existential threat to human survival, I wouldn't care. Why would I? It's a species that mostly doesn't care about other species survival. Did you recently check how many species we have brought to extinction? Over 90% of large predatory fish are gone (shark, tuna, ...). Buffalos almost went extinct. Gorillas, sea turtles, .. I don't think the human species has much moral ground to argue it should survive and I won't move a finger to help.

> It's a species that mostly doesn't care about other species survival.

As opposed to which species that do?

Geez, I'm really worried about discussion styles here.

Nobody claimed that other species do. That has little to do with the question of why I should care about our's surviving.

Your argument is "Why care about a selfish species that kills other species indiscriminately while pursuing its own ends?"

But that is every species. So why care about any of them? Why even care that we are killing off the gorillas or fish? They are equally selfish -- only less powerful.

And if your answer is that you don't, then you're just arguing for nihilism. If you do, then again: what do you think is so specially evil about humans?

> And if your answer is that you don't, then you're just arguing for nihilism

Sure, and nihilism is a useful philosophy too.

I appreciate that you elaborated your thoughts. That makes for a much nicer discussion!

I'd turn your argument around. We seem to not care about any of the N-1 species. Why treat the remaining one specially? Because we belong to it? I don't find that convincing. Maybe we're focusing too much on individual freedom that suddenly caring about the species as a whole seems is odd. The population around me, as a whole, is giving pretty few f*ks about me. I basically just return that attitude.

Or, to formulate it differently, I'd get on board caring about not just the survival but flourishing of our species, if we'd extend that courtesy to all the other species around us.

> unless we do something like a nuclear weapons armageddon

FWIW, the only way nuclear weapons wipe out all of humanity is if they start unprecedentedly large fires that change the climate.

At peak, we had about 80k nukes (way less now). That’s nowhere near enough to kill all 8bn people (as spread out as we are).

The way nukes end humanity is blacking out the sun and reducing plant/food output.

> At peak, we had about 80k nukes (way less now). That’s nowhere near enough to kill all 8bn people (as spread out as we are).

Directly? Probably not. But the contamination from fallout is more than sufficient to poison a significant fraction of humans over a not-too-long time horizon and provide everybody else with a significant cancer risk. The ensuing chaos and resulting breakdown of civilization will do the rest. Don't believe it? Ever seen the panic when toilet paper is at risk to run out at Walmart?

Those who still remember the Chernobyl disaster are aware what that meant for Europe. A single plant, and everybody got warned and could take precautions.

I suggest you look into the decay rate of fallout and the relative amount of nuclear material in bombs vs power plants.

There’s just not that much nuclear material in a given bomb (and the whole point is to release as much energy as possible as quickly as possible), whereas Chernobyl is dangerous because the elephants foot is gigantic and still uranium.

Modern crisis research [1] shows that a sudden loss of just 10% of a population (that is, essentially over night) would have devastating consequences. Basically, breakdown of society as we know it.

Now combine that with nuclear winter and resulting consequences for crops and lifestock. We don't all need to die directly from bombs. Just a minor disruption in stability and hunger and civil unrest do the rest.

[1] It's pretty fascinating how vulnerable our societies are. Other results are things like .. 3 days power outage and you'd also be on the verge of civil war if government doesn't immediately pour in enormous resources in crisis management.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com