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It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil

by rayiner 4mo ago

It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies. If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our discussions about climate change would be entirely different. We would have decades more runway to avoid 2C+ scenarios. We would have already electrified vast swaths of the economy, like home heating. We’d have extremely mature technology to give to developing countries that need massive baseload for industrial production. Today, we’d be discussing how many older nukes we could retire and replace with wind and solar plants.

pydry 4mo ago
>environmentalists have choked it to death. Those regulations you despise were written in blood. Moreover, Nuclear power enjoys free catastrophe insurance. If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs. So yeah, all you have to do is let them keep their freebie insurance, lavish them with subsidies and water down the regulations which make it vastly more likely that they'll need to use it. Or just build some solar, some wind and some storage, save a mountain of cash and have new generation projects take under five years to finish instead of more than 20.
- TimorousBestie 4mo ago
  > If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs. An apt reference. In both India and China it was the Fukushima disaster that spurred protests and stalled nuclear power growth. Organized environmental activism in both countries is basically nonexistent. I would rank US-led nonproliferation policies above environmental activism as a cause for slow nuclear adoption as well. (Nonproliferation was primarily a military objective, by the way, not an environmentalist one.) Many countries only have nuclear power programs because France decided to occasionally proliferate them, many times over US objections.
  - pydry 4mo ago
    The effect environmentalists have on adoption is a rounding error compared to the humongous cost of nuclear power. Most non nuclear powers have a few for the same reason Iran does: having some nuclear scientists and a developed nuclear industry around is handy in case of a, uh, geopolitical "emergency". This is why Poland suddenly became interested in 2023 specifically. Most countries do not want a lot though - it's too expensive.
    - TimorousBestie 4mo ago
      I agree, I also believe the overall startup cost and low ROI is more relevant than the occasional tree-hugger’s limited political influence.
adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago
Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades. Nuclear has never been financially viable and to the degree there has been “environmental” opposition it’s been NIMBY opposition to either the siting of the reactors or the siting of the disposal. But again, the primary reason no one is building nuclear is because it’s incredibly expensive.
- rayiner 4mo ago
  > Nuclear has never been financially viable We literally have a whole-ass G7 country that went 75% nuclear back in the 80s.
  - BadBadJellyBean 4mo ago
    A country can do things that are not financially viable.
  - onraglanroad 4mo ago
    Because it was paid for by the taxpayer. Why are you suddenly in favour of socialist projects? Shouldn't you be saying they should be privately funded and lets see if they can make a profit selling their electricity?
    - TimorousBestie 4mo ago
      Winning arguments on the internet is more important than ideological consistency.
      - fc417fc802 4mo ago
        Or alternatively a reasonable person will accept the observation that sufficiently large problems with sufficiently bad consequences need to be socialized. However even then there is still going to be disagreement about where exactly to draw the line. That nuclear and climate change falls far to one side of it should not be a surprise.
esarbe 4mo ago
Ah, yes - "the evil environmentalists." Congratulations, you really torched that straw man. We stopped building nuclear reactors in the early 1970ies[0], long before there was any large organized civil movement organizing against it - because with the required additional complexity to make them safe, the technology was just too expensive. (As always - it's the capitalists that messed things up, not civil society.) Despite having 70 years of progress, nuclear today is more expensive than ever. It just doesn't scale. France's nuclear operator EDF is €50 billion in debt. They make about €3 billion per year - and have between €150 - €200 billion investments on the table for the next 10 years. Go figure. [0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construction-Starts-Drop-Again-in-the-World.html https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...
- TimorousBestie 4mo ago
  > Congratulations, you really torched that straw man. Who are we to begrudge a man his decade-long windmills-tilting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=rayiner%20environmentalists&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- uxp100 4mo ago
  I mostly agree with your larger point, but the anti-nuclear movement predates the 70s by quite a bit.
- fc417fc802 4mo ago
  I'm not sure I agree but lets set that aside for now. Are you seriously suggesting that $50 billion per France equivalent over half a century would have been an unreasonable price to pay to avert climate change? It's just not a logically consistent or even remotely sensible position. The environmentalist movement undeniably got this one wrong and I say that as someone with views that would generally be categorized as such.
  - esarbe 4mo ago
    These €50 billion is just what EDF is in debt, not what building and operating these reactors actually cost. Just in the next 10 years EDF will have in invest about €150-200 billion to replace and refurbish their reactors. That's just to keep the current capacity, not to expand it. Unfortunately "the environmentalist movement" didn't have the information regarding the dangers of climate change and the information about the near-zero threat from low level nuclear radiation in 1970ies. Hindsight is 20/20. That said; planning and construction of new nuclear reactors peaked in the early 1970ies, before large scale accidents (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) really mobilized civil society against nuclear power. The reason the West stopped building is because even with state support, it's not such a financially attractive investment. That's why "the East" continued building more and more reactors until the big incident. (Arguably their reactors were also much less safe and thus probably cheaper by quite a bit.)
LinXitoW 4mo ago
So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive. I'm certain there's ZERO correlation between regulations that make it expensive and regulations making it safe.................... So, where is the free market shitting out nuclear power? Anywhere?
- jrflowers 4mo ago
  > The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has over 7,500 reactor years of cumulative reactor operation, and nuclear powered ships have steamed over 175 million miles. Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity to the environment which has adversely affected public health or safety. https://www.nr-ha.org/history https://www.nr-ha.org/history
  - lolc 4mo ago
    > ... which has adversely affected public health or safety. Why would they tack that on at the end of a very long sentence? Because they don't want to talk about the loss of USS Scorpion. They mention the sub once on the whole page and even misspell it as "Scorpian". Would not trust them as a source.
    - gmanley 4mo ago
      >Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity None of the theories put forward about the loss of the USS Scorpion have involved the reactor. Maybe they didn't discuss it because it wasn't relevant?
    - jrflowers 4mo ago
      > Would not trust them as a source. Ok https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/Gray%20Book_2025.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/Gray%20Bo...
  - crote 4mo ago
    The program led to the Three Mile Island accident, which is one of the largest releases of radioactivity in US history. Naval reactors are inherently safer due to their small size and unlimited supply of cooling water. A meltdown is virtually impossible, worst-case scenario you could always use a firehose and a diesel pump to inject sea water into the reactor. On the other hand: you really don't want to overfill the reactor: a naval reactor "going solid" rips itself apart, killing the ship. Commercial reactors are the exact opposite. Overfilling them is not a huge deal as there are plenty of ways to relieve pressure, but underfilling them can easily lead to a meltdown. Even after shutdown it needs active cooling for a decent while to prevent residual decay from overheating it. The TMI reactor operators were trained on naval reactors, but they were operating a commercial reactor. During the incident they were too busy trying to prevent it from overfilling to notice that it was actually cooking itself dry - so they intentionally shut down the emergency cooling system! So no, saying that the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program has led to zero accidents is both wrong, and completely irrelevant to the subject here.
triceratops 4mo ago
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death How did they succeed with nuclear energy but fail so miserably with everything else - fossil fuels, meat, even whaling?
- coryrc 4mo ago
  Because they were useful idiots funded by fossil fuel companies. (also US whaling is nearly banned by the US and most countries, and we're not going to go to war with Japan over it)
  - triceratops 4mo ago
    I'm not asking where they got funding. I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone. You don't find that strange at all? The elites, powers that be, whatever you want to call them, had their own reasons for killing nuclear power. And nuclear's economics, compared to fossil fuels, didn't make it a slam dunk to adopt despite powerful opposition. So it had no one to defend it. Environmentalists weren't just useful idiots then (and I hesitate to call people acting in good faith, without any self-interest, "idiots"). They're convenient fall guys today. The fossil fuel industry killed nuclear power and pinned it on the environmental movement. That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
    - coryrc 4mo ago
      > I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone First, it wasn't this topic alone; whaling too. You also don't need 100% of people to listen. You just need to shift from 45% to 55%. If people were already skeptical about nuclear because they conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power, then they only need to shift ~10% on the issue. And money gets their message out much stronger. > That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists. Washington State had I-732, which would make taxes less regressive and efficiently tax carbon. Both issues liberals pretend to care about. Most state environmentalist groups fought against this! It got defeated because of that opposition, then those groups put up a different carbon tax initiative which would funnel the money to them to spend as they want. Also shot down with a shift of who voted for and against. Environmentalists are sometimes the villains.
Perseids 4mo ago
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies. Do note, though, that it was the unbelievable irresponsibility of past operators that has spurred the anti-nuclear movement in the first place. See e.g. https://youtu.be/929B8sgOOTM?si=FttZr_MsbQ1hB4Nj&t=1664 https://youtu.be/929B8sgOOTM?si=FttZr_MsbQ1hB4Nj&t=1664 from 27:44 to 31:35.
tfourb 4mo ago
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. The only reason why "environmentalists" were able to influence the debate around nuclear is because nuclear is uneconomical and studded with actual, real problems. Look at fossil fuels. Environmentally and in terms of public health it is way worse than nuclear (at least a current respective buildout levels). And environmentalists have campaigned against it for decades. Still, it is not only used, its use has expanded until very recently. That is because fossil fuels were incredibly cheap (as its environmental costs have been externalized), while nuclear has been incredibly expensive, even with massive government subsidies. Fossil fuels are also very practical, while nuclear is cumbersome and comes with real security issues (terrorists and planes and such) that have nothing to do with some hippies blockading nuclear fuel transports. "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
- rayiner 4mo ago
  > "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar. France went 75% nuclear in the 1980s. If we had built all those nuclear plants back in the 1980s when France did, they would be fully depreciated by now. And we'd be having this conversation about "cheap solar" in a far more favorable position where we had avoided huge amounts of CO2 emissions for 40+ years while we waited for solar technology to improve.
  - frm88 4mo ago
    This is so shortsighted. We'd still have the nuclear waste problem and - more importantly - the cost. Germany alone is facing a bill of €26B to €45B for nuclear waste management, decomissioning and cleanup. All of that goes into your electricity bill, because the government pays only 25% of it: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/nuclear-clean-costs https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/nuclear-clean-cos...
    - Moldoteck 4mo ago

by rayiner 4mo ago

pydry 4mo ago

>environmentalists have choked it to death. Those regulations you despise were written in blood. Moreover, Nuclear power enjoys free catastrophe insurance. If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs. So yeah, all you have to do is let them keep their freebie insurance, lavish them with subsidies and water down the regulations which make it vastly more likely that they'll need to use it. Or just build some solar, some wind and some storage, save a mountain of cash and have new generation projects take under five years to finish instead of more than 20.

TimorousBestie 4mo ago
> If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs. An apt reference. In both India and China it was the Fukushima disaster that spurred protests and stalled nuclear power growth. Organized environmental activism in both countries is basically nonexistent. I would rank US-led nonproliferation policies above environmental activism as a cause for slow nuclear adoption as well. (Nonproliferation was primarily a military objective, by the way, not an environmentalist one.) Many countries only have nuclear power programs because France decided to occasionally proliferate them, many times over US objections.
- pydry 4mo ago
  The effect environmentalists have on adoption is a rounding error compared to the humongous cost of nuclear power. Most non nuclear powers have a few for the same reason Iran does: having some nuclear scientists and a developed nuclear industry around is handy in case of a, uh, geopolitical "emergency". This is why Poland suddenly became interested in 2023 specifically. Most countries do not want a lot though - it's too expensive.
  - TimorousBestie 4mo ago
    I agree, I also believe the overall startup cost and low ROI is more relevant than the occasional tree-hugger’s limited political influence.

adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago

Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades. Nuclear has never been financially viable and to the degree there has been “environmental” opposition it’s been NIMBY opposition to either the siting of the reactors or the siting of the disposal. But again, the primary reason no one is building nuclear is because it’s incredibly expensive.

rayiner 4mo ago
> Nuclear has never been financially viable We literally have a whole-ass G7 country that went 75% nuclear back in the 80s.
- BadBadJellyBean 4mo ago
  A country can do things that are not financially viable.
- onraglanroad 4mo ago
  Because it was paid for by the taxpayer. Why are you suddenly in favour of socialist projects? Shouldn't you be saying they should be privately funded and lets see if they can make a profit selling their electricity?
  - TimorousBestie 4mo ago
    Winning arguments on the internet is more important than ideological consistency.
    - fc417fc802 4mo ago
      Or alternatively a reasonable person will accept the observation that sufficiently large problems with sufficiently bad consequences need to be socialized. However even then there is still going to be disagreement about where exactly to draw the line. That nuclear and climate change falls far to one side of it should not be a surprise.

esarbe 4mo ago

Ah, yes - "the evil environmentalists." Congratulations, you really torched that straw man. We stopped building nuclear reactors in the early 1970ies[0], long before there was any large organized civil movement organizing against it - because with the required additional complexity to make them safe, the technology was just too expensive. (As always - it's the capitalists that messed things up, not civil society.) Despite having 70 years of progress, nuclear today is more expensive than ever. It just doesn't scale. France's nuclear operator EDF is €50 billion in debt. They make about €3 billion per year - and have between €150 - €200 billion investments on the table for the next 10 years. Go figure. [0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construction-Starts-Drop-Again-in-the-World.html https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...

TimorousBestie 4mo ago
> Congratulations, you really torched that straw man. Who are we to begrudge a man his decade-long windmills-tilting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=rayiner%20environmentalists&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
uxp100 4mo ago
I mostly agree with your larger point, but the anti-nuclear movement predates the 70s by quite a bit.
fc417fc802 4mo ago
I'm not sure I agree but lets set that aside for now. Are you seriously suggesting that $50 billion per France equivalent over half a century would have been an unreasonable price to pay to avert climate change? It's just not a logically consistent or even remotely sensible position. The environmentalist movement undeniably got this one wrong and I say that as someone with views that would generally be categorized as such.
- esarbe 4mo ago
  These €50 billion is just what EDF is in debt, not what building and operating these reactors actually cost. Just in the next 10 years EDF will have in invest about €150-200 billion to replace and refurbish their reactors. That's just to keep the current capacity, not to expand it. Unfortunately "the environmentalist movement" didn't have the information regarding the dangers of climate change and the information about the near-zero threat from low level nuclear radiation in 1970ies. Hindsight is 20/20. That said; planning and construction of new nuclear reactors peaked in the early 1970ies, before large scale accidents (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) really mobilized civil society against nuclear power. The reason the West stopped building is because even with state support, it's not such a financially attractive investment. That's why "the East" continued building more and more reactors until the big incident. (Arguably their reactors were also much less safe and thus probably cheaper by quite a bit.)

LinXitoW 4mo ago

So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive. I'm certain there's ZERO correlation between regulations that make it expensive and regulations making it safe.................... So, where is the free market shitting out nuclear power? Anywhere?

jrflowers 4mo ago
> The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has over 7,500 reactor years of cumulative reactor operation, and nuclear powered ships have steamed over 175 million miles. Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity to the environment which has adversely affected public health or safety. https://www.nr-ha.org/history https://www.nr-ha.org/history
- lolc 4mo ago
  > ... which has adversely affected public health or safety. Why would they tack that on at the end of a very long sentence? Because they don't want to talk about the loss of USS Scorpion. They mention the sub once on the whole page and even misspell it as "Scorpian". Would not trust them as a source.
  - gmanley 4mo ago
    >Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity None of the theories put forward about the loss of the USS Scorpion have involved the reactor. Maybe they didn't discuss it because it wasn't relevant?
  - jrflowers 4mo ago
    > Would not trust them as a source. Ok https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/Gray%20Book_2025.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/Gray%20Bo...
- crote 4mo ago
  The program led to the Three Mile Island accident, which is one of the largest releases of radioactivity in US history. Naval reactors are inherently safer due to their small size and unlimited supply of cooling water. A meltdown is virtually impossible, worst-case scenario you could always use a firehose and a diesel pump to inject sea water into the reactor. On the other hand: you really don't want to overfill the reactor: a naval reactor "going solid" rips itself apart, killing the ship. Commercial reactors are the exact opposite. Overfilling them is not a huge deal as there are plenty of ways to relieve pressure, but underfilling them can easily lead to a meltdown. Even after shutdown it needs active cooling for a decent while to prevent residual decay from overheating it. The TMI reactor operators were trained on naval reactors, but they were operating a commercial reactor. During the incident they were too busy trying to prevent it from overfilling to notice that it was actually cooking itself dry - so they intentionally shut down the emergency cooling system! So no, saying that the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program has led to zero accidents is both wrong, and completely irrelevant to the subject here.

triceratops 4mo ago

> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death How did they succeed with nuclear energy but fail so miserably with everything else - fossil fuels, meat, even whaling?

coryrc 4mo ago
Because they were useful idiots funded by fossil fuel companies. (also US whaling is nearly banned by the US and most countries, and we're not going to go to war with Japan over it)
- triceratops 4mo ago
  I'm not asking where they got funding. I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone. You don't find that strange at all? The elites, powers that be, whatever you want to call them, had their own reasons for killing nuclear power. And nuclear's economics, compared to fossil fuels, didn't make it a slam dunk to adopt despite powerful opposition. So it had no one to defend it. Environmentalists weren't just useful idiots then (and I hesitate to call people acting in good faith, without any self-interest, "idiots"). They're convenient fall guys today. The fossil fuel industry killed nuclear power and pinned it on the environmental movement. That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
  - coryrc 4mo ago
    > I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone First, it wasn't this topic alone; whaling too. You also don't need 100% of people to listen. You just need to shift from 45% to 55%. If people were already skeptical about nuclear because they conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power, then they only need to shift ~10% on the issue. And money gets their message out much stronger. > That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists. Washington State had I-732, which would make taxes less regressive and efficiently tax carbon. Both issues liberals pretend to care about. Most state environmentalist groups fought against this! It got defeated because of that opposition, then those groups put up a different carbon tax initiative which would funnel the money to them to spend as they want. Also shot down with a shift of who voted for and against. Environmentalists are sometimes the villains.

Perseids 4mo ago

> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies. Do note, though, that it was the unbelievable irresponsibility of past operators that has spurred the anti-nuclear movement in the first place. See e.g. https://youtu.be/929B8sgOOTM?si=FttZr_MsbQ1hB4Nj&t=1664 https://youtu.be/929B8sgOOTM?si=FttZr_MsbQ1hB4Nj&t=1664 from 27:44 to 31:35.

tfourb 4mo ago

> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. The only reason why "environmentalists" were able to influence the debate around nuclear is because nuclear is uneconomical and studded with actual, real problems. Look at fossil fuels. Environmentally and in terms of public health it is way worse than nuclear (at least a current respective buildout levels). And environmentalists have campaigned against it for decades. Still, it is not only used, its use has expanded until very recently. That is because fossil fuels were incredibly cheap (as its environmental costs have been externalized), while nuclear has been incredibly expensive, even with massive government subsidies. Fossil fuels are also very practical, while nuclear is cumbersome and comes with real security issues (terrorists and planes and such) that have nothing to do with some hippies blockading nuclear fuel transports. "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.

rayiner 4mo ago
> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar. France went 75% nuclear in the 1980s. If we had built all those nuclear plants back in the 1980s when France did, they would be fully depreciated by now. And we'd be having this conversation about "cheap solar" in a far more favorable position where we had avoided huge amounts of CO2 emissions for 40+ years while we waited for solar technology to improve.
- frm88 4mo ago
  This is so shortsighted. We'd still have the nuclear waste problem and - more importantly - the cost. Germany alone is facing a bill of €26B to €45B for nuclear waste management, decomissioning and cleanup. All of that goes into your electricity bill, because the government pays only 25% of it: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/nuclear-clean-costs https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/nuclear-clean-cos...
  - Moldoteck 4mo ago