Former Google VP Starts a Company Promising Clean and Safe Nuclear Energy
I get so frustrated reading anything in the popular press about nuclear power. Everyone commits the same fucking fallacy over and over again: measuring it against an absolute idea instead of anything in the real world.   Even here in the HN comments, I see &quot;if it can be made safe.&quot; In TFA, it&#x27;s the explanation that people are afraid of a three mile island or Chernobyl event, that his killer feature is the impossibility of meltdowns.<p>Here in the real world, you have to measure options against other real world options. The other real world options we have for baseload power on this scale are fossil fuels, primarily coal. Coal plants emit much more radiation than nuclear plants - even old ones. There&#x27;s lots of research about HOW MUCH more radioactive coal power is, but we&#x27;re talking about anywhere from 50-200% more. Coal power is responsible for 800,000 deaths per year, WHEN IT&#x27;S WORKING PROPERLY. That&#x27;s the bar nuclear, and any other alternative baseload power source, has to beat. It doesn&#x27;t have to failure proof, it doesn&#x27;t have to have zero deaths. It just has to be significantly better than the alternatives.<p>Refusing to consider a power source unless it has zero deaths, zero radiation, zero side effects for all time, is living in a fantasy world. It&#x27;s the paradigm promoted by the fossil fuel industry, and bought hook line and sinker by the dumber end of the environmentalist movement. And it keeps us from ever decreasing our power generation carbon footprint.