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colinbtoday at 1:38 PM1 replyview on HN

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.


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sgjohnsontoday at 5:33 PM

> 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.

The same can be said about wind and solar. Nothing about producing the rare earths required is clean.

Even if we include Chernobyl, nuclear is still by far the safest source of energy when looking at deaths per TWh generated.

> I can, off the top of my head, name two sites that are dangerous decades after they were polluted

Two? I can only count one. Fukushima is almost perfectly safe today, although exclusion zones still exist.

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