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Comment by daedrdev | Hacker News Reader

Unironically the anti nuclear luddites killed the main chance to be divert climate change that we had over unfounded fearmongering

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Antinuclear have and always had zero power to stop nuclear plants. Except for Germany, if nuclear stopped growing was because of its economics. The same economics that stopped solar photovoltaics until it made sense.

Even France, that is heavily pro-nuclear, can't find the economics to build new nuclear energy at decent pace.

Also, nuclear was not replaced by more carbon, except again a for a couple of years in a small country (by global standards) called Germany. Everyone else is planting more clean energy.

What we did: growing China and all Asia at high rates based on coal, for decades. Offsetting by a lot internal combustion engine efficiency by buying bigger and more cars. Buying stupid and useless stuff on the other side of the planet. Everyone first hobby today is "travelling the world", preferably by plane. Being 10 billion people, and richer (more capita and more consumption per capita). None of those thing would be solvable with more nuclear plants.

You're acting as if politics AKA overregulation (first person to say "You think nuclear should be unregulated???" gets a medal) has had no effect on the price of nuclear energy.

Dude, Germany sets the tone for whole EU and then some more (aka Switzerland, they are extremely pushy also in matters which should be completely upon given country, like citizen gun laws).

They are the biggest economic force bar none (at least for now, lets see in few years when their car industry will be mostly a thing of the past). They steer 500+ million continent like a fiddle.

I have to crap on Merkel here yet again - she was horrible, utterly despicable leader. Much of the backlash in popularity of extreme right across Europe is her doing. She killed nuclear which wasn't in greatest shape, but it was well before we had actual replacements. She studied as nuclear physicist. Europe as a continent would be in much better shape politically, economically, militarily and socially if she didn't get so much power for so long. German ADF is completely her doing.

Of course when she met real power dealers like putin she caved immediately so he played her like those proverbial fiddles.

Many of the "luddite" groups were funded, and in some cases entirely formed, by fossil fuel interests.

That's pure fiction. Cite your sources.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...

https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/

https://truthout.org/articles/top-oil-and-gas-lobby-spent-mo...

http://climatecoalition.org/how-american-petroleum-institute... (sorry, no https)

Russia has huge influence in German politics. I believe there is connection there as well, but I cannot find any public information to cite regarding funding of anti-nuclear power movements.

Successful massive nuclear and renewable deployment at world scale, would it have happened, would have only solved one third of the problem. Agriculture, construction and all carbon-emitting industry processses (steel production) require their own solution too.

One third of global emissions is a staggering quantity we presently can't even dream of, and it would buy us a lot of time.

I'd take it.

Sure, my point is that it would not have been enough to divert climate change, though it would have probably bought a few years/decade and allowed public discourse to move above "nuclear vs wind power" while burning more and more coal, and start discussing other problems. (on another hand, everything that public discourse touches gets politicized to stupidity so I'm not sure if I'd rather have the public choose how to decarbonize concrete production or some magical alternative that does not involve the general public talking about it).

Since uranium at 3x the current price could supply the current world primary energy demand with burner reactors for only about 5 years, diverting climate change with nuclear would have required mass rollout of breeder reactors. These were stopped by their own inherent cost and technical problems, not by greens.

And now, not even the French are pursuing them, sending the strong signal that nuclear is off the table as anything but a minor contributor to stopping CO2 build up.

If environmentalists are so powerful how are fossil fuels, automobiles, and meat still around?

I think it is extremely simplistic to blame the nuclear transition's failed potential solely on them.

1. The fact that nuclear power has been quite safe so far does not mean that it would have been just as safe if its deployment would have rapidly spread.

2. Nuclear energy is unfortunately tightly coupled with nuclear weapons, as well as the treaties and geopolitics that were designed to keep them only in the hands of the few. Quite many late 1900s crises in Europe could have looked different if nuclear material was even more widespread than it was. I don't even wanna think about nations outside Europe that have been extremely unstable in the past and in recent history.

3. Seeing how intensely fossil fuel companies spread misinformation and disinformation about green technology and climate science, it's hardly a far-fetched idea that that same industry had a hand in helping policymakers steer away from an energy source that would unseat it from the throne.

Too much about nuclear safety was based on trust and if that fails the consequences are huge. In Europe we learned the hard way what it means if a plant is not safely build and how bad the communication is when there is an accident.

And then you are also going to trust the same people when they are saying the waste issue is solved.

If your arguments are luddites and fearmongering you have not improved trust in any way.

Nuclear, even with Chernobyl which infamously cheaped out to use an explosive roof, is safer than almost every energy source, only solar is safer per kWh

No nuclear accident has involved a reactor built after the 1960s. Yet we regulate as if a dozen more Chernobyls have happened

No. You can shit all you want over the antinuclear boys but:

* Building nuclear plants is a 5-10 year plan. More if you haven't built them in a while.

* The first economy in the world has quite literally started wars over oil because it wants to keep using it.

* The countries that would be the biggest emitters right now are also the ones doing the most in electrification.

Building more nuclear wouldn't have changed shit: there is an ongoing work to maintain the world dependent on fossil fuels. We can't even get electric cars to properly pick up.

EV only this year became comparable in prices to gasoline cars thanks to massive efforts by Chinese companies to reduce battery prices and improve drivetrain.

With that further changes can be very quick as forcing EV no longer requires reallocating money from other things.

You're overestimating the amount of people that can afford a brand new car. The transition will take 15 years at least.

If 100% of new cars were EVs then there might be feedback loops that accelerate the long tail. Like gas stations becoming leas profitable, less prolific, and more expensive.

You might also see battery prices push the price of new cars well below that of second hand ICE vehicles.

Even if the replacement window for existing vehicles doesn’t change, the environmental impact would run ahead of the adoption curve. High volume use cases like delivery and Ubers would be the first to switch to EVs.

I don't buy it.

Climate change is related to our consumptions, period, focusing only on energy or transport doesn't tackle the whole problem: we consume too much, eat too much (cattle and fish in particular) and destroy too much in our quest for more and more.

Inefficient transport or energy is just one aspect of the whole problem.

But I'm tired of hearing how it is just a matter of energy or transport, it's literally missing the forest for a tree, even if it might be a particularly big one.

"A third of the problem" is fucking huge

Sure, which is why I used the image of "missing the forest for the tree, even if the tree is huge".

But it's our consumption and expectations that feed into it.

And that image is wrong. If the tree is that big then it's okay to focus on it.

Even a huge tree, is still a tree in the forest. You need to look at consumption patterns, not just energy, which derive from the first anyway.

Your chosen forest exists within the even bigger forests of human action and ecology. That doesn't mean we have to focus that wide. When one part of the picture is both specialized and huge, it makes sense to focus on it.

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