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Comment by throwaway4aday | Hacker News Reader

Why fight an uphill battle for reduction in manufacturing when you can get rich by being the first to offer cost competitive on-site carbon free power production? Forget marketing rooftop solar to households, you should be selling micro-nuclear to steel and cement plants.

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A lot of American steel mills have houses literally right next door to them, in part because many of them were built before the widespread availability of cars.

There's no way in the world you're putting a nuclear plant on site.

Why not? Nuclear is far safer than a coal or gas plant and that's using the older model reactors as a stats source. Newer small reactor designs are even safer. Anxiety and fear of nuclear power is a purely media and activist driven phenomenon not supported by any evidence. The chances of you dying as a result of radiation released from a nuclear power plant are incredibly small even if you were to live right next door to one your entire life. You're much more likely to die in a car accident and yet you'll use those every day without a second thought.

As a society, it makes more sense to figure out how to generate more clean energy (rather than to try to reduce our energy usage).

But as an individual who wants to do something, and in principle has an incentive to reduce their energy bill, reducing consumption is the main thing under their control.

Perhaps it feels that turning down the thermostat or skipping the dryer helps, but the vast majority of your energy use is baked in by the manufacturing and transport of everything you use and eat.

If you live far from the temperate zones, just keeping yourself alive costs a ton of energy.

The best thing you can do is making nuclear and solar an issue with your local politics and then voting for it.

I would say the best thing you can do is "making nuclear and solar an issue with your local politics and then voting for it" and then also trying to reduce your energy consumption

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