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me_me_me 1y ago
[dead]
robotnikman 1y ago
>and the more strongly I suspect them to be fossil fuel industry plants. I feel the same way as well. It would make sense for an oil rich country that feels threatened by people not buying oil (or gas) to subvert a movement like greenpeace.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
pydry 1y ago
Poland is the dirtiest coal producer in Europe but a point in its favor (for some) was that it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power. So, it didnt attract any hate or shaming from the nuclear industry's faux - environmentalist public relations arm. Unlike Germany, whom they really hate and for whom the FUD and lies was nearly constant. (E.g. https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/german-nuclear-exit-may-lead-to-winter-blackouts-idUSLDE74L0CB/ https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/german-nucle... remember when the nuclear industry-promised blackouts finally materialized? I dont).
- opo 1y ago
  Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid? Germany has a long term goal of decarbonizing the grid, but it isn’t there yet. They made the decision to keep coal plants burning and shut down their nuclear power plants. And even years later in 2025 they continue to burn coal - the most dangerous and dirty source of power ever invented. >…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office >… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-production-germany-increased-10-first-half-2025 https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-prod... The direct deaths caused by burning coal are significant. I didn’t see any current estimates for those being killed downwind from Germany's reckless burning of coal, but overall the EU has a high death rate: >…Europe, coal kills around 23,300 people per year and the estimated economic costs of the health consequences from coal burning is about US $70 billion per year, with 250,600 life years lost. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479725027914 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972... Never mind that all those coal plants are also contributing to climate change and are poisoning the oceans enough that many species of fish are not safe to eat. The waste problem from coal will also be a problem for future generations to deal with - not all the ash from burning coal is being deposited in people's lungs. In 2023, I saw a stat that in 2023 about 17.0% of Germany electrical production was from burning coal. As a comparison, I believe that before the phase out of nuclear power, it generated about 25% of the electricity. If Germany wanted to shut down nuclear power plants after they had decarbonized their grid, that would be their choice - shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable. I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.
  - pydry 1y ago
    >Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid? I neither said nor implied that the green transition is complete. Green transitions take decades. Germany is merely transitioning the fastest and doing it without the overpriced and risky albatross that is nuclear power. >shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable It's unbelievable that the country some people are most furious at is the one that has decarbonized at the fastest rate. Not the country next door to it that didnt even try. They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important. It's bizarre.
    - opo 1y ago
      >I neither said nor implied that the green transition is complete. Green transitions take decades. Maybe you didn't intend too, but your words certainly implied it: >>...it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power. Since you reference Germany later, the implication above was that Germany did prove you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power. Which might be true someday in the future, but Germany certainly hasn't decarbonized their grid yet. The one thing that Germany did "prove conclusively" is that thousands of lives were needlessly lost over the last 15 years because of bad policy. >Germany is merely transitioning the fastest Germany will certainly not be carbon neutral the fastest. I guess it will beat Poland though. >Not the country next door to it that didnt even try. You have a point - it is the responsibility of every country to decarbonize. I guess a big issue here is simply money - Poland GDP is much smaller than Germany and they have less available options. Though besides your claim, I've never heard anyone actually lauding Poland's efforts or thinking it was a good thing they are using coal. >...They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important. I have no idea what you are trying to say here. Like I said, I find that those who actually want to decarbonize the grid, don't particularly care what clean technology is used and different countries will have a different mix of technologies they use. Unfortunately, there certainly do seem to be some advocates of solar/wind who would prefer to go decades (or maybe much longer) burning coal and killing people and destroying the environment when their country had the option to use a clean energy source.
ben_w 1y ago
Greenpeace is both halves of the name. While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons. This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants. Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.
- SequoiaHope 1y ago
  Also nuclear requires a powerful state to manage it safely, which has peace-related side effects.
  - beeflet 1y ago
    Are you considering a world in which nuclear weapons do not exist at all? I don't know how you are going to disarm the current stable-state of mutually assured destruction.
    - SequoiaHope 1y ago
      No but every nuclear power plant requires local military defenses, and every country that expands nuclear power requires this state power even if they don’t have nuclear weapons.
      - beeflet 1y ago
        This is true. I have no counterpoint.
- exabrial 1y ago
  > the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons I'm unaware of this to be true. Civilian reactors are hardly-at-all-enirched uranium reactors. Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes.
  - 1y ago
awalsh128 1y ago
Whatever people think about Greenpeace I think it's a stretch to say they are a plant. They just lost a lawsuit recently and have to pay $660 mil for defamation against an oil company. It was a pretty ugly case.
- Eji1700 1y ago
  There's this weird dissonance where people don't seem to want to admit that someone championing the same cause as them can be really really dumb about it. Must be a plant, couldn't possibly be that a lot of people take stances on positions due to their emotional reaction and don't always look at the evidence first. That's just them, not *US*.
  - yellowapple 1y ago
    I'd agree with that in the context of an individual or a small local group or something. For a well-established organization like Greenpeace, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe it's a matter of them collectively having an emotional reaction. They have the resources to look at the evidence, and have indeed almost surely done so; when it comes to explaining their refusal to accept that evidence, ”their jobs depend on rejecting it” is a much simpler explanation IMO than “they are experiencing a collectively-identical ideological quirk that their organizational bureaucracy somehow has yet to iron out”.
  - throwbigdata 1y ago
    e.g. PETA
V__ 1y ago
I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away. The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future.
- oceanplexian 1y ago
  How is the hype for a limitless clean energy source, something that could benefit every aspect of humanity more than any other invention in human history considered “weird”?
  - V__ 1y ago
    Because this limitless clean energy source is too expensive, even though it had 60+ years time. I hope the day fusion energy finally has its big breakthrough isn't too far away, but conventional nuclear won't solve our problems.
    - mulmen 1y ago
      Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps. Running our own fusion reactors would be great but waste is not limited to fission designs. All nuclear generation has radioactive waste, it’s unavoidable. Grid scale storage with renewables can absolutely meet our needs.
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        > Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps. This observation seems entirely useless and pointless. What implication are you saying we should draw from this?
      - mpweiher 1y ago
        > extra steps. Those extra steps are crucial, as they massively dilute the output and make it weather/daylight and seasonally dependent. Intermittent renewables produce at least an order of magnitude more waste than nuclear reactors, be they fusion or fission.
varispeed 1y ago
These are orchestrated by Russia. They want to destabilise European energy sector and economies and they are sponsoring various organisations to spread such misinformation.
- varispeed 1y ago
  The West is losing information war with Russia - see the downvotes. Sites are infested with Russian bots and useful idiots helping the genocidal regime.
jltsiren 1y ago
I believe Greenpeace leaders and activists genuinely consider themselves environmentalists. As an organization, Greenpeace is also pretty strict on declining funding that could compromise its independence. However, it's likely that Greenpeace benefits from indirect support from the fossil fuel industry and petrostates. If you get too deep into Realpolitik, you start believing that ideologies and convictions only hinder and weaken you. Then it becomes acceptable to support groups that are ideologically opposed to you, as long as it advances your strategic interests. There have always been ways of manipulating the public sentiment, and social media has made it easier to do that without linking the manipulation back to you.
quotemstr 1y ago
It's not greed. They're not plants. They're just trapped in a self-reinforcing social structure that, as is common, adopt group ideological beliefs inconsistent with the real world. People are pretty good at finding ways to rationalize and internalize beliefs enforced by groups that form their social superstructure. It's the same dynamic that gets people to earnestly and fervently believe in, say, they're infested with Body Thetans or that the local cult leader is Jesus or (as Pythagoras believed) eating beans (yes, the food) is sinful. The belief becomes a tenet of the group, a reason for its existence and a prerequisite for membership. Evaporative cooling fixes the belief by ejecting anyone who rejects it. Greenpeace will never accept nuclear power. Opposing it is part of their core identity and anyone who disagrees leaves. Greenpeace the organization can be defeated, but it cannot be reformed.
xrisk 1y ago
[flagged]
- quickthrowman 1y ago
  The (authoritarian?) nation of Finland has already solved the problem of what to do with nuclear waste: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re... I watched a very interesting documentary about Onkalo, which happens to be on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4
  - bobmcnamara 1y ago
    Last I read Onkalo was testing empty casks and had stored zero waste for zero years. Bit of a rush to close the GitHub ticket eh?
    - quickthrowman 1y ago
      True, they haven’t stored any waste yet but the facility is completed. And depending on how you look at it, it could be 100,000 years before you know for sure if it works, so my claim that it’s a ‘solved problem’ is a bit strong. I’ll retract that and say that it’s the most promising idea for nuclear waste disposal, one that that is close to beginning operations.
      - bobmcnamara 1y ago
        It does seem like one the best designs we've had. I hope it works well.
throwawayffffas 1y ago
The more I observe a lot of activists the more I suspect, a lot of organizations and movements are cold war era Soviet psyOps that outlived their handlers.
tomhow 1y ago
You can't comment like this on HN, no matter how right you are or think you are. This comment breaks several guidelines, most notably these ones: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- yellowapple 1y ago
  Sorry. I'll tone it down going forward.

[flagged]

[dead]

>and the more strongly I suspect them to be fossil fuel industry plants. I feel the same way as well. It would make sense for an oil rich country that feels threatened by people not buying oil (or gas) to subvert a movement like greenpeace.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

pydry 1y ago

Poland is the dirtiest coal producer in Europe but a point in its favor (for some) was that it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power. So, it didnt attract any hate or shaming from the nuclear industry's faux - environmentalist public relations arm. Unlike Germany, whom they really hate and for whom the FUD and lies was nearly constant. (E.g. https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/german-nuclear-exit-may-lead-to-winter-blackouts-idUSLDE74L0CB/ https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/german-nucle... remember when the nuclear industry-promised blackouts finally materialized? I dont).

opo 1y ago
Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid? Germany has a long term goal of decarbonizing the grid, but it isn’t there yet. They made the decision to keep coal plants burning and shut down their nuclear power plants. And even years later in 2025 they continue to burn coal - the most dangerous and dirty source of power ever invented. >…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office >… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-production-germany-increased-10-first-half-2025 https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-prod... The direct deaths caused by burning coal are significant. I didn’t see any current estimates for those being killed downwind from Germany's reckless burning of coal, but overall the EU has a high death rate: >…Europe, coal kills around 23,300 people per year and the estimated economic costs of the health consequences from coal burning is about US $70 billion per year, with 250,600 life years lost. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479725027914 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972... Never mind that all those coal plants are also contributing to climate change and are poisoning the oceans enough that many species of fish are not safe to eat. The waste problem from coal will also be a problem for future generations to deal with - not all the ash from burning coal is being deposited in people's lungs. In 2023, I saw a stat that in 2023 about 17.0% of Germany electrical production was from burning coal. As a comparison, I believe that before the phase out of nuclear power, it generated about 25% of the electricity. If Germany wanted to shut down nuclear power plants after they had decarbonized their grid, that would be their choice - shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable. I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.
- pydry 1y ago
  >Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid? I neither said nor implied that the green transition is complete. Green transitions take decades. Germany is merely transitioning the fastest and doing it without the overpriced and risky albatross that is nuclear power. >shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable It's unbelievable that the country some people are most furious at is the one that has decarbonized at the fastest rate. Not the country next door to it that didnt even try. They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important. It's bizarre.
  - opo 1y ago
    >I neither said nor implied that the green transition is complete. Green transitions take decades. Maybe you didn't intend too, but your words certainly implied it: >>...it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power. Since you reference Germany later, the implication above was that Germany did prove you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power. Which might be true someday in the future, but Germany certainly hasn't decarbonized their grid yet. The one thing that Germany did "prove conclusively" is that thousands of lives were needlessly lost over the last 15 years because of bad policy. >Germany is merely transitioning the fastest Germany will certainly not be carbon neutral the fastest. I guess it will beat Poland though. >Not the country next door to it that didnt even try. You have a point - it is the responsibility of every country to decarbonize. I guess a big issue here is simply money - Poland GDP is much smaller than Germany and they have less available options. Though besides your claim, I've never heard anyone actually lauding Poland's efforts or thinking it was a good thing they are using coal. >...They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important. I have no idea what you are trying to say here. Like I said, I find that those who actually want to decarbonize the grid, don't particularly care what clean technology is used and different countries will have a different mix of technologies they use. Unfortunately, there certainly do seem to be some advocates of solar/wind who would prefer to go decades (or maybe much longer) burning coal and killing people and destroying the environment when their country had the option to use a clean energy source.

ben_w 1y ago

Greenpeace is both halves of the name. While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons. This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants. Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.

SequoiaHope 1y ago
Also nuclear requires a powerful state to manage it safely, which has peace-related side effects.
- beeflet 1y ago
  Are you considering a world in which nuclear weapons do not exist at all? I don't know how you are going to disarm the current stable-state of mutually assured destruction.
  - SequoiaHope 1y ago
    No but every nuclear power plant requires local military defenses, and every country that expands nuclear power requires this state power even if they don’t have nuclear weapons.
    - beeflet 1y ago
      This is true. I have no counterpoint.
exabrial 1y ago
> the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons I'm unaware of this to be true. Civilian reactors are hardly-at-all-enirched uranium reactors. Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes.
- 1y ago

awalsh128 1y ago

Whatever people think about Greenpeace I think it's a stretch to say they are a plant. They just lost a lawsuit recently and have to pay $660 mil for defamation against an oil company. It was a pretty ugly case.

Eji1700 1y ago
There's this weird dissonance where people don't seem to want to admit that someone championing the same cause as them can be really really dumb about it. Must be a plant, couldn't possibly be that a lot of people take stances on positions due to their emotional reaction and don't always look at the evidence first. That's just them, not *US*.
- yellowapple 1y ago
  I'd agree with that in the context of an individual or a small local group or something. For a well-established organization like Greenpeace, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe it's a matter of them collectively having an emotional reaction. They have the resources to look at the evidence, and have indeed almost surely done so; when it comes to explaining their refusal to accept that evidence, ”their jobs depend on rejecting it” is a much simpler explanation IMO than “they are experiencing a collectively-identical ideological quirk that their organizational bureaucracy somehow has yet to iron out”.
- throwbigdata 1y ago
  e.g. PETA

V__ 1y ago

I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away. The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future.

oceanplexian 1y ago
How is the hype for a limitless clean energy source, something that could benefit every aspect of humanity more than any other invention in human history considered “weird”?
- V__ 1y ago
  Because this limitless clean energy source is too expensive, even though it had 60+ years time. I hope the day fusion energy finally has its big breakthrough isn't too far away, but conventional nuclear won't solve our problems.
  - mulmen 1y ago
    Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps. Running our own fusion reactors would be great but waste is not limited to fission designs. All nuclear generation has radioactive waste, it’s unavoidable. Grid scale storage with renewables can absolutely meet our needs.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      > Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps. This observation seems entirely useless and pointless. What implication are you saying we should draw from this?
    - mpweiher 1y ago
      > extra steps. Those extra steps are crucial, as they massively dilute the output and make it weather/daylight and seasonally dependent. Intermittent renewables produce at least an order of magnitude more waste than nuclear reactors, be they fusion or fission.

varispeed 1y ago

These are orchestrated by Russia. They want to destabilise European energy sector and economies and they are sponsoring various organisations to spread such misinformation.

varispeed 1y ago
The West is losing information war with Russia - see the downvotes. Sites are infested with Russian bots and useful idiots helping the genocidal regime.

jltsiren 1y ago

I believe Greenpeace leaders and activists genuinely consider themselves environmentalists. As an organization, Greenpeace is also pretty strict on declining funding that could compromise its independence. However, it's likely that Greenpeace benefits from indirect support from the fossil fuel industry and petrostates. If you get too deep into Realpolitik, you start believing that ideologies and convictions only hinder and weaken you. Then it becomes acceptable to support groups that are ideologically opposed to you, as long as it advances your strategic interests. There have always been ways of manipulating the public sentiment, and social media has made it easier to do that without linking the manipulation back to you.

quotemstr 1y ago

It's not greed. They're not plants. They're just trapped in a self-reinforcing social structure that, as is common, adopt group ideological beliefs inconsistent with the real world. People are pretty good at finding ways to rationalize and internalize beliefs enforced by groups that form their social superstructure. It's the same dynamic that gets people to earnestly and fervently believe in, say, they're infested with Body Thetans or that the local cult leader is Jesus or (as Pythagoras believed) eating beans (yes, the food) is sinful. The belief becomes a tenet of the group, a reason for its existence and a prerequisite for membership. Evaporative cooling fixes the belief by ejecting anyone who rejects it. Greenpeace will never accept nuclear power. Opposing it is part of their core identity and anyone who disagrees leaves. Greenpeace the organization can be defeated, but it cannot be reformed.

xrisk 1y ago

[flagged]

quickthrowman 1y ago
The (authoritarian?) nation of Finland has already solved the problem of what to do with nuclear waste: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re... I watched a very interesting documentary about Onkalo, which happens to be on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4
- bobmcnamara 1y ago
  Last I read Onkalo was testing empty casks and had stored zero waste for zero years. Bit of a rush to close the GitHub ticket eh?
  - quickthrowman 1y ago
    True, they haven’t stored any waste yet but the facility is completed. And depending on how you look at it, it could be 100,000 years before you know for sure if it works, so my claim that it’s a ‘solved problem’ is a bit strong. I’ll retract that and say that it’s the most promising idea for nuclear waste disposal, one that that is close to beginning operations.
    - bobmcnamara 1y ago
      It does seem like one the best designs we've had. I hope it works well.

throwawayffffas 1y ago

The more I observe a lot of activists the more I suspect, a lot of organizations and movements are cold war era Soviet psyOps that outlived their handlers.

tomhow 1y ago

You can't comment like this on HN, no matter how right you are or think you are. This comment breaks several guidelines, most notably these ones: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

yellowapple 1y ago
Sorry. I'll tone it down going forward.