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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

I was raised the same way, and the drawback is that anything nuclear gets tarred with the same brush. We're paying for that in carbon now, as will our grandchildren's grandchildren.

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Our current carbon situation has nothing to do with the public's opinion of things, and everything to do with our elected representatives representing monied interests over our own. We understood the dangers scientifically decades ago, and even without that threat, the oil crises should have made clear how important it was to not rely on a desert shipping us black liquid. But we didn't do anything, because that would have hurt the profits of extremely wealthy companies.

Remember, oil companies have been colluding and doing anti-social things for personal gain since at least the 1870s, and they had strong tendrils in government basically ever since. Their breakup was an aberration in american policy, and just like Ma Bell decades later, allowing basically free reign to just buy each other up and re-coallesce into another behemoth means trust busting doesn't fix anything, and in fact just gives a business sector the ability to restructure their businesses in a more profitable and extractive way.

The recent anti-nuclear sentiment was driven more by ecoactivism, not fear of weapons. Germany is a good example of this.

??? We don’t fear nuclear power based on the possibility of a world destroying war. It’s feared based on the consequences of a disaster like Chernobyl or Fukashima.

I'm old enough to remember the arguments against civil nuclear power that were made before Chernobyl, and to have read what were then still recent materials from before Three Mile Island. Proliferation was a big part of the fear initially. But it's fair to note that that more or less disappeared after those two incidents.

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