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Comment by wolvoleo | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear has a lot of environmental impact too. You need to mine a lot of earth to get a little uranium, and a lot of that activity is very polluting and a lot of that activity is not climate neutral. Then you have the waste problem that's not figured out, proliferation etc.

We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems. That way we roll from one crisis into the next. There's so many issues we're causing, like entire ecosystems going extinct. Sooner or later that will lead to crises too. We have to stop externalising.

And yes the electorate wants to be safe and for good reason. Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.

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Modern lithium batteries or solar panels for that matter don’t get magiced out of nothing.

Those materials are mined also. At least forethought is given to handling/disposal for nuclear since it’s a known issue.

Well yes but lithium is easily recycled and solar panels are made from sand and nowhere near rare earth.

See how the soviets destroyed half the Czech countryside looking for Uranium for their bombs and power plants: https://www.rferl.org/a/soviet-uranium-mines-explored-abando...

Uranium mining is a dirty business and if we're going to be needing a lot more of it due to expansion of nuclear and leaving the mining to the lowest bidder it will be very polluting.

I think it’s pretty questionable to suggest it’s easy to recycle, hence the mining of the material isn’t of consequence.

And if we’re just being offhanded then apparently thorium is a replacement for uranium, or there’s the ability to reprocess used fuel again for nuclear power.

I think you missed the point of the nuclear tangent. The point was that people might be reluctant to build out energy storage capacity before demand appears because of what happened last time. The difference is that climate change is more predictable than the economy.

Well demand is pretty much a given now with AI, so I think either way this is not an issue. We will want all the power we can generate.

If you're just gonna be replacing entire orders of magnitudes of difference with the word "too", then everything "has a lot of environmental impact too".

> We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems.

Huh? Local pollution with solid waste vs dispersing that waste into the global atmosphere is the same to you?

> Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.

Right, 20_000 deaths from the tsunami is no big deal, the pollution is!

Since you're ignoring any and all statistics wholesale, I hope you never fly — 9/11 was terrible after all, so aviation is clearly unsafe.

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