Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throwaway894345 1730 days ago
> Nuclear is just proven to fail ... the way forward is wind and solar

Nuclear is the only proven clean technology for base load generation. The only hiccup is political (i.e., people decided they don't like nuclear), and while it's a big political problem, the whole climate crisis is an enormous political problem. Yes, there's the waste to be disposed of, but we already have to manage some waste and once you have to safely manage a little nuclear waste it's a marginal increase in cost to manage a whole lot of nuclear waste.

Further, innovations in nuclear are making it cheaper, safer, and faster to build. Moreover, as another commenter pointed out, if we were willing to ease some of our restrictions on nuclear such that our nuclear plants didn't need to be a thousand times safer than our coal plants (but merely, say, twice as safe), then nuclear could be even less expensive and facilities built more rapidly.

Yes, wind and solar will play a major role in the future, but we incur tremendous risk by ignoring nuclear.