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Comment by nickpp | Hacker News Reader

There must be a name for the fallacy when one is focused on avoiding a single risk while completely ignoring much larger and closer dangers.

Nuclear energy has a minuscule list of total casualties throughout history. Casualties per megawatt produced? It's practically zero. At the same time burning hydrocarbons kills every single day through pollution. It kills millions yearly. Burning coal even spews radioactive ash into the air!

And above all, climate change is looming as a civilization-ending danger, closer and closer.

So which one should we regulate more?!

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The black swan big disasters have to be taken seriously too.

A nuclear accident creates a big and costly disaster suddenly. People don't like sudden big problems but can live with continuously growing ones.

Burning hydrocarbons is much more acceptable in that regard. CO2/dust pollution is accepted by society, because it is continuous and dilutes well. Killing millions is socially acceptable when it happens randomly all over the planet. Radioactive pollution due to coal burning is/should be negligible, most is(should be) filtered out in the smokestack scrubbers.

I don't like fossil power plants, but they are much easier to build and more acceptable to people than nuclear ones. That's why regulation and security have to be high with nuclear, to make it acceptable to most of society.

> civilization-ending danger

I don't think climate change is a civilization-ending danger in the coming decades. It already creates political problems, migration. If we keep pumping CO2 then maybe in hundred years.

> The black swan big disasters

We had 2 huge ones. They resulted in a few thousand deaths and some uninhabitable land. Nothing compared to pollution damage.

> accepted by society [...] socially acceptable

I'd rather decide based on reason. And I doubt many people find millions of deaths due to pollution every year acceptable. They just don't know they had a choice. Choice stolen from them by rabid anti-nuclear fear mongering.

> I don't think climate change is a civilization-ending danger

Yet you think a few black swan nuclear disasters are? Can I borrow your crystal ball? You are pretty sure about the future but most experts I read disagree: nuclear experts consider it extremely safe while climate experts warn of dire futures.

I did not say black swan nuclear disasters are a civilization-ending danger. I said people are afraid of them much more than of climate change.

Nuclear experts consider it safe because of existing regulations and because it is hard for sketchy company to launch a new plant.

> I did not say black swan nuclear disasters are a civilization-ending danger. I said people are afraid of them much more than of climate change.

That may be, but you're coming off as mongering the same irrational fear.

That is surprising view to me. I tried to explain why naive anti-regulation talk is not helpful for getting more nuclear energy. The way to have more nuclear energy is to embrace and strengthen the state interest in nuclear.

When discussing nuclear vs coal, it's always funny to point out that coal power plants produce several times as much radiation as nuclear power plants.

Coal plants emit more radionuclides into atmosphere, but nuclear plants produce more radionuclides overall (burnt fuel). This coal nuclear pollution is however still very small to the point of irrelevance, the real pollution problem is with CO2, dust and mining coal.

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