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Comment by cluckindan | Hacker News Reader

In the last 70 years, 600-700 nuclear reactors have been in operation worldwide, and three of them have had major accidents. You already mentioned two of them, the third is Three Mile Island.

That’s a catastrophic failure rate under 0.5 percent. Sure, the effects of a failure spread widely and can be a hazard for a long time, but personally I would want to see the same risk-averse sentiment applied to production and use of perfluorinated compounds and fossil fuels, since both of those can spread much farther and cause more of a hazard.

The cherry on top: coal power plants spread significant amounts of radionuclides into the environment.

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Around the turn of the century that was a stronger argument–it’s one of the reasons why I backed nuclear then–but now we have cheaper renewables which can be online decades sooner so the choice isn’t nuclear vs. coal but vs. solar & wind which have orders of magnitude less pollution. Even if we’re talking natural gas, which has killed coal economically, there’s still far more pollution and direct health risk avoided by picking renewables.

If we’re talking risk aversion, we can address both the major certain risk of climate change and the lesser but still valid risks of nuclear while saving a ton of money and probably getting results quickly. The reason so much fossil fuel money goes into pushing nuclear power is that it guarantees fossil fuel usage continues unchecked for decades before possibly going down, and we don’t have decades any more.

Solar and wind haven’t yet solved the two major issues: producing power 24/7/365 even when it isn’t sunny or windy (or when it’s too windy).

Batteries are one solution, but the power storage requirements far surpass the world’s capacity for battery production, and come with the same caveats: rare earth metals, which need mining. Mining is a huge source of air pollution, as mining equipment is usually diesel powered, and far worse for the environment due to pollution of natural surface and ground water reservoirs.

Uranium mines have the same issues for sure, the scale is just very different.

First, it’s rare to have protected periods where the entire grid has no wind, solar, hydro, etc. That can happen regionally, but it’s not a secret and grid operators prepare for it just as they do the impact of heatwaves shutting down nuclear or fossil plants getting iced up.

Second, power is so cheap with renewables that storage of over-production makes sense. Some of that can be things like pumped water systems but batteries are coming online by the hundreds of gigawatt-hour now and sodium isn’t exactly a rare earth mineral so that’s going to accelerate even more following market forces:

https://electrek.co/2025/09/25/us-first-grid-scale-sodium-io...

https://newmobility.news/en/2026/04/29/catl-turns-sodium-ion...

Again, this is so much cheaper that it makes nuclear even less competitive and it’s online so much faster that you’re basically weighing the gamble that storage which is already competitive won’t get substantially cheaper over multiple decades.

> power is so cheap with renewables

Heavily disagree. A ”green” power contract typically has at least double the price of a generic one.

Most batteries do not use rare earth metals. Even if they did and it was an issue, we would find alternatives if that was necessary, just like rare earth free motors were developed to avoid all the downsides of that come with those.

Have a look at CATL’s sodium-ion batteries, they do not use anything expensive, rare, or particularly damaging to extract from the environment.

Uranium mines will become a problem if every country tries to make 25% of electricity with nuclear. Electrification of primary energy might even need more nuclear according to some pro nuclear people.

Many forget that while there is plenty of uranium on Earth, most of it occurs in very low concentrations. The lower the concentration, the higher the CO₂ emissions for the entire uranium chain from the mine to the fuel rod.

Meanwhile, renewable energies receive free fuel from the sun. They are already recyclable today and, with intelligent local and intercontinental grids, will also require fewer batteries for storage.

One nuclear accident is already one too many.

As opposed to premature deaths from fossil fuel emissions, deaths of rooftop solar installers (surprisingly common), wars in the Middle East involving oil interests, drowning and environmental damage from dam failures, etc, etc.

One Parkersburg, WV is already one too many, yet next to nothing is done.

Chernobyl area is still no man's land, 40 years later.

That’s because nobody is allowed to settle there. Living in Parkersburg, WV is arguably more dangerous due to the water contamination, it just hasn’t been designated an exclusion zone.

Check out some videos by Chornobyl Family and you’ll see the state of the environment there.

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