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by wrsh07 3723 days ago
Yeah, it'll make sense to do that when you start insuring other power plants for the environmental damage they cause.

We're not charging a carbon tax on coal plants. We're not charging drivers for the air pollution they cause in cities. If you believe the WHO when they say 7 million people die prematurely from air pollution, are you going to start making air-polluters pay for that? (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollut...) Are you insuring dams against the floods they would cause if they break?

It'd be great to do those things, but it's unreasonable to unfairly punish nuclear when you're not willing to charge other power plant technology for their expected negative externalities.

If you're going to start enacting "reasonable taxes" on negative externalities, start by getting us off of dirty energy, not by preventing us from using reusable energy.
1 comments
mohawk 3722 days ago
It would be great if externalities were insured by everybody, yes. But externalities are real, why would you ignore them "out of fairness"? The sane thing to do is to consider them for all kinds of power generation, and then make the best choice. Nuclear just has huge unconsidered negative externalities, we haven't even yet talked about cost of storing and guarding waste for centuries.

Thankfully there are only a few more years until wind & solar will have solved this once and for all by being cheaper, externalities considered or not.

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wrsh07 3717 days ago
You can't reject one form of power [as worse than existing power] because of externalities if you aren't considering the negative externalities of the existing power. It's not out of fairness, it's out of minimizing future damage.

If you aren't accurately considering the environmental damage of oil/coal/gas, then you can't say they're superior to nuclear just because you are considering its negatives.

I agree -- I look forward to a future of clean renewables, but even still wind and solar are inconsistent. Our storage systems aren't good enough to "just use batteries."[1]

We need a dependable, renewable form of energy that can bridge the gap for 80 years until our storage is good enough.

[1] http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving-storage

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