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The reason that we see this much articles being posted on hacker news is that we are still using fossil fuels and there is no active plans to stop it. Everyone*

• pydry 6y ago
  >Can we all agree that we should stop subsidize existing fossil fuel infrastructure? Yes, but that's not what this article is about. >Can we also all agree to stop expanding capacity for more fossil fuels? Yes, but that's not what this article is about. >Can we then also agree to stop repairing and extending the lifetime of existing power plants that uses fossil fuels? Yes, but that's not what this article is about. This article is a fluff human interest story about an "environmental activist" who suddenly "saw the light" and realized that nuclear power can generate "energy at all hours unlike solar" (their words). I'm sure the New Yorker journalist is not unaware that solar and wind are a lot cheaper than nuclear power even accounting for variability but it's barely hinted at in the article. It doesn't serve their agenda. One thing that is mentioned is the "onerousness" of safety regulations piled on after Fukushima. If you think this article wasn't explicitly written on behalf of the nuclear industry trying to garner some green points I've got a coal fired plant scheduled to break ground in 2024 to sell you. If you're wondering why they'd spend money campaigning for this, well, it's because they desperately need taxpayer money to stay viable.
  • belorn 6y ago
    This conversation match pretty well the phrase "Talking past each other". Environmental activists that are also in favor of nuclear power are not interested in nuclear power for nuclear power itself. The goal is to get rid of fossil fuels, with the strategy to do so simply left open for both storage and nuclear. Since we are in an agreement on the questions about fossil fuels then everything else are unimportant. Lets implement those things we agree on! Where I live, the government and the green party which decides on the current energy strategy has the opposite strategy. Their strategy for handing grid stability is to subsidize oil power plants and to expand the capacity to buy coal energy from nearby countries. No intention at all to allow existing power plants that uses fossil fuels to shut down. The stated goal of emission free energy grid is reached the moment where the total export of renewables over a year is higher than the import of coal. I don't need to wonder who is desperately campaigning to get tax money. The government budget for energy subsidizing is public information. It is listed under the term of "reserve energy".
    • runarberg 6y ago
      > Environmental activists that are also in favor of nuclear power are not interested in nuclear power for nuclear power itself. The goal is to get rid of fossil fuels And the is the point with the anti-nuclear campaign. It is to argue that nuclear is not a solution to the climate crisis (or at least a very bad option next to renewables). I would argue that environmental activists that argue for nuclear are doing the cause a disfavor. We might be in an agreement that fossil fuel is bad, and we might agree that renewables are good. But we are in disagreement about whether nuclear is good (hence we argue). > Since we are in an agreement on the questions about fossil fuels then everything else are unimportant Quite the contrary. Where we go from here is very important. Firstly because there is world after the climate crisis (hopefully!), and we should be careful how we build that world. Secondly it might turn out (and evidence suggest) that nuclear is not a solution the climate crisis. This is important—as GP suggests—because renewables and nuclear are competing for attention of public policy makers. My government representatives might tomorrow start making the case that we should focus more on nuclear and allocate money and time that would otherwise have been spent on renewables to the nuclear pipe dream. Worst case scenario. New nuclear power plants are build over the next decade instead of renewable infrastructure, and a decade from now we are still emitting more carbon into the atmosphere. This the nightmare we in the anti-nuclear campaign are trying to avoid.
• EricE 6y ago
  >We are done when the answer is yes on all of those, and then the market will find out what technology works and what doesn't. The market can only really work when it's allowed to. Between the subsidies, perverse incentives and outright FUD being spread around I doubt there is a market that will solve this automatically. It's going to have to be fought for. Perfect example - I was in San Diego in the mid 90's. There was a project to recycle wastewater to use for irrigation and eventually work back into the water supply. Some news organization sensationalized it - dubbed it "Toilet to tap", got everyone riled up and the community voted it down. All my co-workers were congratulating themselves on not drinking toilet water until I pointed out the majority of water they were using to make the coffee they were drinking came out of the Colorado River. Towards the end of the Colorado River. They were already drinking "toilet water". Bah. I also predicted since we were in a desert, the project would happen anyway within 20 years. I was wrong, it ended up being within 7 and about four times the cost to boot. So yeah, I see much of the consternation around nuclear in the same light. It's going to happen sooner or later, and later always costs more. Speaking of higher costs - in the meantime we continue to burn fossil fuels which means we are still emitting significant amounts of CO2. If you are really concerned about CO2 being existence threatening, we should be doing nuclear, solar, wind and whatever else we can throw at the problem - not sitting around arguing what the "best" is while the house is still on fire.