Live data from Hacker News

Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

allianceforscience.cornell.edu

11–20 of 306 posts

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#11

The Greens' idiotic anti-nuclear stance has empowered and embolden decades of coal and oil exploration and proliferation. As a Green voter I desperately hope this pattern gets adopted and replicated here in Australia the sooner the better.

Incorrect, that would be Rupert Murdoch.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#12
post #3

I have heard a lot of chatter recently about how nuclear has fallen out of favor among certain circles on the left. Can someone explain what the reasons for that are?

I'm not aware of a change, politically, except perhaps in the opposite direction (more people on the left supporting nuclear power - but that seems to have been slowly going on for many years at this point). Those who oppose nuclear don't trust the long term effects of how nuclear waste is stored, and they don't think the tradeoff between how horrible it is when something goes wrong and how rarely it happens is at an acceptable balance. Of course, these are the main two obvious points of examination from anybody arguing the cons of nuclear power - not just people on the political left.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#13
post #6

The big problem for nuclear in Sweden at least is that no new staff has been trained for a long time. We couldn’t really run our shutdown reactors if we tried.

Last time I visited Sweden, the mentality there seemed a bit like changing the mind on something like approach to energy is unthinkable. "We said in the 70s that nuclear is bad, so we can't just revisit this mindset now, just like that, 50 years later".

It may be hard for them to get off nuclear though, as most Swedes (that I met) seem not to care about costs of electricity at all. Lightbulbs on, when leaving a house. Not ever getting into an elevator with a stranger - better for it to ride twice. Petroleum cars are expensive and EVs free to use...

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#15
post #4

Wait… someone in the realm of politics changed their mind in a… sane… rational direction? I feel like I could count instances of that in my lifetime on one hand. Everywhere on the political spectrum everyone seems to have been utterly losing their minds for a long time.

Running nuclear power plants isn't a sane thing to do, but let's pretend Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island never happend.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#16
This is great, and hopefully it will stop the premature shutdown of existing nuclear reactors.

But it's pretty tiny climate news overall. Nuclear reactors are aging out and nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore.

Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor, which won't come on line for a bare minimum of 10 years, best case. We don't have that long to wait to start replacing nearly all of our fossil fuel infrastructure, and replace the nuclear reactors that are reaching end of life.

If nuclear was going to be a climate solution, then all the nuclear reactors started in the 2000s needed to complete on time and on schedule to encourage the building of more. Instead it's 2022 and we are still waiting to see how bad the financial disaster will be for them. That's not the route towards building more nuclear.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#17

The Greens' idiotic anti-nuclear stance has empowered and embolden decades of coal and oil exploration and proliferation. As a Green voter I desperately hope this pattern gets adopted and replicated here in Australia the sooner the better.

Green parties never endorsed nuclear energy. Maybe you're voting for the wrong party?

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#19
the fossil industry loooooved the green hair folks fighting nuclear.

now slowly everyone finds out that with "only renewables", thus without nuclear in the mix, we simply cannot guarantee interrupt free electrical power at scale in most places.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#20

The Greens' idiotic anti-nuclear stance has empowered and embolden decades of coal and oil exploration and proliferation. As a Green voter I desperately hope this pattern gets adopted and replicated here in Australia the sooner the better.

Green parties never endorsed nuclear energy. Maybe you're voting for the wrong party?

Perhaps adopting nuclear energy is not the only thing I care about ?
Post reply on HN