6 ms·
It does surprise me -- HN is a really skeptical audience, or at least has a highly skeptical subset. Think about how bearish HN is on autonomous vehicles: sure,
by dont__panic 5y ago
It does surprise me -- HN is a really skeptical audience, or at least has a highly skeptical subset. Think about how bearish HN is on autonomous vehicles: sure, there's a group who worship Elon, and believe that autonomous vehicles are perpetually on the brink of mass adoption. But most autonomous vehicle discussions come with a HUGE grain of salt, with a lot of folks pointing out edge cases that will prevent mass adoption for the forseeable future.
I think nuclear is just so complex it's too hard/easy to make viable arguments in either direction, and things just boil down to "danger" and "cost". My skeptical bone points out that implementation is always messy compared to theory, so we should expect building flaws/design compromises/flawed processes to result in failures at some small percent of nuclear facilities. And given how catastrophic those failures can be, it's hard to justify it. But the climate side of the argument is equally scary: if we don't switch away from carbon-based power sources, massive areas of our world are going to become uninhabitable, underwater, or dramatically change in ways that destroy life as we know it. So maybe that small fraction of failures is acceptable? And in all fairness, the major nuclear failures I can think of -- Fukushima, Chernobyl -- came with comparatively few deaths, and a moderate cost of now-uninhabitable land. Perhaps less than climate change will come with over the coming decades.
- eldaisfish 5y agowe should take comfort in the fact that nuclear power is one of the few industries that designs for the worst case scenario and that is actively regulated in most western countries. The quality of that regulation can be improved but it is far better than the other use case of nuclear technology - weapons. We have no idea how effective or functional the safety systems in place for the world's nuclear arsenal are or how antiquated they are.
- dv_dt 5y agoIn my lifetime, I have seen the quality of western regulation and institutions consistently decline. Particularly the more money enters into a given industry. It's one of the reasons I'm skeptical of nuclear power.
- eldaisfish 5y agothen you should be equally sceptical of the claim that wind and solar are the future. There is no scalable solution to their volatility and magical battery tech is always just around the corner.
- dv_dt 5y agoWind and solar do not require the same quality of regulation as nuclear. Nor do they have the same long term security and stability commitments - e.g. see nuclear reactor sites in the Ukraine conflict.
- hardolaf 5y ago> and a moderate cost of now-uninhabitable land Most of the land is actually inhabitable but they just keep people away because it's safer to err on the side of caution. When it comes to Fukushima Daichii, more people died in the evacuation than will ever die or have ever died from the radiation exposure that occurred.
- redwall_hp 5y agoAnd over twenty thousand people died from the earthquake/tsunami. That's one of my pet peeves: the 2011 Touhoku earthquake was one of the first major natural disasters that was all over social media, and people in the west quickly swept it under the rug in their haste to focus on fearmongering about Fukushima Daichii and how it might somehow impact California. A massive tragedy had just happened, and people basically ignored that and focused on the cable news hype about a total non-issue.
- fomine3 5y agoThe tsunami was really horrible. I recommend to check videos if you aware.
- namdnay 5y agoIt’s not perhaps less, it’s definitely yes. Burning fossil fuels kills more people in a year than the entire history of nuclear power