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Comment by tvon | Hacker News Reader

> Anti-nuclear activists want nuclear power to be dangerous (...)

That really doesn't make any sense. They are opposed to nuclear power because they don't perceive it to be safe (which they learned from disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island), if it was perceived to be safe then they wouldn't be opposed to it. It's not like they hate the power it would give or the jobs i wold create, there is no other agenda for them to oppose it on (unless you're talking about astroturfing campaigns by alternatives, in which case I misunderstood you).

Extreme religious conservatives are another story (and I add 'extreme' because someone can be religious, conservative, and perfectly sane).

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> It's not like they hate the power it would give

Please read the writings of the prominent environmentalists. Many of them want humans to hurry up and go extinct. Not necessarily in so many words, but anyone who advocates a return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is in fact calling for the murder of the billions of people who are alive only due to agriculture, of a kind which depends on modern energy sources.

You are applying extreme positions held by a minority to broad groups of people who don't hold those positions. To imply that being an environmentalist means advocating a return to hunter-gatherer lifestyle is absurd.

Honestly it's starting to sound a bit hypocritical given your original statement.

I'm not simply talking about openly declared human-extinction advocates. The death by starvation of billions is a logical consequence of perfectly mainstream environmentalist platforms - pushing for the elimination of nuclear power, factory farming, pesticides, genetically-engineered crops, and other technologies which make our historically-unprecedented abundance of food and other necessities possible.

I simply don't care about anyone's stated goals. What I care about is the logically inevitable results of the changes they are pursuing.

Chernobyl was a criminally unsafe design coupled with a criminally unprepared crew in charge of the reactor. TMI was only an obsolete design (in use because it's hideously expensive to certify a new one) with a sadistic user interface for the operators that prevented them from finding out what was happening.

Many anti-nuclear activists perceive nuclear as unsafe, but a lot of others want it to be unsafe because it makes them important. If nuclear was perceived as safe, they would have less money and volunteers to play with.

From what I understand, Three Mile Island wasn't a disaster, but a huge success. The safety systems worked as they should and prevented an actual disaster.

According to Bob Cringely (http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/three-mile-island-memories/), who was part of the presidential commission that studied the situation, TMI was actually a disaster for the failure systems, but was saved by a super-high-quality containment system.

There were plenty of people opposed to nuclear power before TMI and Chernobyl happened.

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