alt Hacker News>> Witnessing such scorched-earth containment makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me.
It's called bad governing. To connect nuclear "not clean" with such bad governing is bit much.
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This argument that nuclear power generation is clean if you ignore the times when it isn't seems a bit no-true-Scotsman to me. It's a thing I've changed my mind about more than once in the past. What sways my thinking now is:
- most nuclear power does indeed seem to be well run with minimal pollution. - when it goes wrong, the consequences are awful and long-lived (I can, off the top of my head, name two sites that are dangerous decades after they were polluted. I suspect there are others that don't have the same cultural resonance for me. - the alternatives in terms of renewables and storage are improving seemingly from one day to the next.
The long term consequences, and human frailty in the face of a requirement for total and eternal vigilance convince me that the risk outweighs the reward. Where nuclear power once seemed [to me. I appreciated that some people have always been anti-nuke] like the least bad option compared with e.g. coal, now there are better ways to make our lives work.
If the endless 50-years-in-the-future ever actually expires and we get practical fusion power, it'll be interesting to see how this changes my thinking. Perhaps that will will have fewer toxic side effects when it goes wrong.
I don't know about "bad governing". It sounds more like a rigorous containment policy when nuclear technology was at its infancy in China. (Regulations are written in the blood of your predecessors - https://old.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/ud3lt4/lpt_osh... ). It is also about preventing accident leakage of information and preserving secrecy. For e.g. In the 1970s, India learnt that Pakistan was working to create a nuclear weapon when Indian agents in Pakistan collected hair samples of Pakistan's nuclear scientist, from a barber shop where they got their hair cut - traces of plutonium radiation were found in the hair samples, and Pakistan's nuclear weapons program got exposed.
Precisely.
Especially when comparing the number of deaths(1) from then-China's favourite energy source or simply Uranium's efficiency(2) and the fact we know now how to recycle most of the waste(3)
Sure, I prefer the solar too, but I agree the governance is the bigger problem in the example from the story.
(1) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/rates-for-each-energy-so... and https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/10/new-nuclear-power-is-p...
(3) https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...
You make a fair point, and from a purely technical or policy perspective, I agree that bad governance shouldn't be conflated with the potential of nuclear technology itself.
However, as a writer, I’m describing the subjective reality of growing up in that environment. When you see 'scorched-earth' measures taken to manage a city, it shapes your visceral perception of that power, regardless of the science behind it. My goal isn't to debate nuclear policy, but to capture how that specific 'bad governing' colored the way we, as residents, perceived the very energy that defined our lives.