Hacker News Reader

Comment by po | Hacker News Reader

I totally understand the fears behind fracking as well as nuclear power (I'm living in Japan and my family lives in upstate NY) but often the progressive approach to energy policy has been to jump from the pan into the fire. Absolutely the worst offender is the coal industry (and the so-called 'clean coal' movement is just not feasible) and it has to go to zero. If gas and nuclear have to grow to fill the vacuum, then so be it.

The anti-nuclear movement here in Japan is flawed in a similar way. It certainly would be nice not to have nuclear plants but they're replacing them with coal imports. They should be talking about regulating and replacing the nuclear operators, and put replacing the nuclear power itself on the long-term track.

View on HN

It's sad that the trade off is between dirty coal and natural gas. Energy policy (and the corrupt subsidies) are so short-sighted. In 5-10 years, Europe will have moved a small but significant chunk of their powergrids to renewable energy sources. The best the US can hope for is a decrease in coal power as it is replaced by fracked natural gas. Hardly any forecasts expect an increase in the adoption rates for renewables.

However, Europe and whomever invests in renewable technologies will likely benefit most in the long term.

The US is a large place. Having just driven cross-country, I can say that there are a lot of wind farms along the I-84 + I-80 route. The issue though is that those wind farms probably still only represent a small portion of the total power usage of the country.

Well, in the linked article you can see a graph showing the contribution from renewables. You can see it's even growing a bit. It's just nowhere near ready to replace coal just yet.

We absolutely should be pushing them and they represent our long-term solution but the 5-10 year plan should be shutting down coal. That means you need an alternative ready to go now.

The real question (which I haven't researched) is if (specifically) wind power is sustainable without government 'alternative energy' subsidies.

In the long term, they may try to harness wind power. Japanese article about floating windmills on the ocean near Fukushima: http://www.nikkei.com/news/article/g=96958A9C93819499E3E2E2E...

I live in Japan too and the whole thing is frustrating as hell. What happened here last year ought to be an example of how safe nuclear power is, but instead it's nothing but ATOMS fear-mongering and total willful ignorance of the dangers of coal power.

What's weird to me is how long it took for public opinion to turn as it has. For the first few months it dropped of course but there wasn't any overreaction even as people were checking Geiger counters online every day. But as things got under control public opinion continued to slide. I blame the institutional fuck-ups, and can sympathize with that.

But Tokyo air quality is going to go to shit again, which is something this city has historically had problems with. And electricity prices continue to rise.

Japan has to own a lot of that failure though - nuclear power is something you can only get behind if you have a tremendous amount of trust in the people running it. The potential catastrophic failure modes are, well, sobering.

With the Fukushima disaster, we've seen an awful lot of finger-pointing, buck-passing, carpet-brushing-under-ing, and an utter lack of transparency (some of it IMO bordering on criminal). If you cannot trust your government and/or power utility to be transparent about their handling of nuclear power, both in a day-to-day and disaster context, of course you can't sell it to the public.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com