Activists who embrace nuclear power

Its facile to dismiss the negative of creating waste that has to be managed for thousands of years based on a sense of urgency for solving immediate problems. Thats payday loan mentality, not statecraft.

> Scenario 1: a hypothetical societal collapse happens and scientific knowledge and written language are somehow lost. A handful of people explore a dangerous area and are swiftly killed by radiation from tampering with a storage facility.

Society collapses and the remaining primitive population is decimated or eradicated because of unmanaged waste entering the ecosystem.

> Scenario 2: millions die from climate-related catastrophes and ecological collapse leads to famines that kill millions more.

You think society collapses to the extent that we can no longer manage the nuclear waste, and millions of people don’t die? Millions of people die in both scenarios, but in one they are greater risk of nuclear waste exposure.

> We know we're facing scenario two as a distinct possibility, or we'd be happily burning coal until we can't find any more.

What is your plan to get China et al to stop burning coal, by the way?

> Fuel reprocessing is a thing, modern reactors deplete the fuel much more thoroughly, and there isn't even that much of it. All of the spent fuel France has used since the 1970s fits in a small fraction of their basketball-court sized storage facility.

I can roll over my payday loan on a miminum wage paycheck, what could go wrong?

> There is no such thing as 'empty land'.

Can't help but be reminded of this classic skit.

"The ship was towed outside the environment."

"...Into another environment."

"No no, it's been towed beyond the environment."

https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM

The major problem with these comparisons is that people are treating sources as if they are equal and placed on an arbitrary piece of land. As you kinda elude to in your comment with the batteries, that has to be taken into account with wind and solar, but just making it through the duck curve isn't enough since storms exist and everywhere isn't as sunny as southern california. Land mass also matters. Materials for the batteries, etc. This is an extremely complex issue that everyone is overly simplifying and are pulling articles that they don't realize are making simplifications that the authors and experts understand but the linkers don't.

The reason I hate these conversations on HN (and Reddit) is because people are comparing things as if they are equal (I'd expect HN to know that this is the first rule of analysis: compare apples to apples) and then getting really aggressive about a singular metric (anti-nuclear: costs, anti-renewables: batteries, etc. Please don't let these become dog whistles). Being pro nuclear isn't "nuclear vs renewables" it is "nuclear + renewables vs fossil fuels". It is simply not taking it off the table. It is "if the experts think that would be best for the situation then I, as a member of the public and not an expert, am okay with trusting the experts and letting them do what they need to do." If there is an area where nuclear fits best, use it. If it doesn't, don't. One power source for everything is just an idiotic idea. It literally comes down to trusting the experts or not.

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2014/05/20/why-t...

It is not just a misconception. It is a Big Lie, endlessly repeated, endlessly debunked. Continuing to repeat it makes one a Big Liar.

When you need to lie to make your case, you don't have one.

People started lying about nuclear power before it even existed: "Too cheap to meter", they said. Now with FOIA we have documentary evidence that they knew at the time it would always be a high-cost choice. But on the back of Red Scares and nuclear weapons tie-ins, they got and still get monstrous public subsidies, so we all pay, wherever we get our power.

In recent years, the agency that had once collected payments from nuke operators for waste placement has instead been paying out huge amounts to remaining operators, who pocket it.

The only bigger liar is fusion research. There, the only tech the feds will fund is hot-neutron fusion; that's the giveaway that it is really just a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work.

There will never be one lonely erg of commercially-viable Tokamak fusion. It can never even begin to approach competitiveness with solar + wind + storage, even without counting the enormous sunk cost of decades of $billions/year with nothing meaningful to show for it.

The continued hemmorhage of money for Tokamaks starves actually potentially-viable fusion programs.

The reason administrators like huge centralized projects like nuke plants always are is that they provide almost unlimited scope for corruption: steady, year-over-year corruption. Cost overruns are not accidental; they are the whole point of the operation.

Small modular nuke plants don't offer scope for as much corruption, so they would face an uphill battle even if they could be made compretitive. But even with huge subsidies and high pricing, they weren't competitive, nothing new has made them cheaper, and prices are still plummeting.

After that you can move on to reducing the amount of space we have devoted to suburbs; the amount of water, sand, and metal we use; the amount of plastic we dump into the ocean; the infrastructure and energy required for our transportation networks; etc.

Cutting down on space for solar panels is way way way down the list.