Item — HN Reader

If SpaceX cuts corners, some rockets fall over a field in Texas/the ocean somewhere. Not a great thing to have happen, but the damage is pretty minimal all things considered.

If a nuclear power plant-owning VC-backed startup cuts corners because their shareholders expect 3 cents more of profit YoY on their earnings report, we get a nuclear meltdown that shuts off an area the size of a small city for a century.

These startups can barely keep passwords secure, I don't trust them and their VC psycho buddies for a second with something as potentially powerful as nuclear energy.

2 comments

> ... we get a nuclear meltdown that shuts off an area the size of a small city for a century.

Not necessarily. Instead we could just have disposal containers that leak sooner rather than expected.

The storage and disposal side of the nuclear waste is still an unsolved problem, other than "just bury it and hope there's no contamination problems later on".

It depends what your definition of 'unsolved' is.

Sticking it at the bottom of a 5000ft mine shaft in a geologically stable region, with pictograms, is a solution.

If we lose the ability to decipher pictograms on the containers, we're probably back to being apes and have also lost the ability to mechanically dig 5000ft straight down, or 1000ft straight forward through rock, so we'd never encounter it ever again.

> Sticking it at the bottom of a 5000ft mine shaft in a geologically stable region, with pictograms, is a solution.

That's probably where our definition of "unsolved" differs.

To me, the concept of leaving something super toxic hanging around for the next several thousand years - more than double the entire existence of recorded western civilization so far - is "unsolved".

It's handing the (huge) problem to future generations to deal with. And doing so when there are alternatives already in existence that don't have the problem? That's (to me) not a rational approach.

This kind of proposal is not the direction to take for making the world better for our descendants, which should always be the goal of big decisions (and the goal of our descendants too). :)

There are meltdown-free designs as engineers have learnt from previous problems.

That's exactly the point of government regulation, want to build a privately developed and operated commercial nuclear reactor? Requirement #1: it cannot be physically possible to have a meltdown.

Pretty much the same way jet liners have black boxes, round windows, no smoking, seat belts, etc. The FAA regulates and legislates that.

The irrational fear of nuclear power is just that.

You misunderstand my fears. I'm not fearful of Nuclear power, I'm fearful of VCs and by extension the kind of behavior they encourage.

Aviation is, as you pointed out, heavily regulated, yet that didn't stop the profit-seeking vultures from causing the Boeing-MAX fiasco. There are countless instances of private equity ruining everything they touch while covering things up to avoid repercussions for getting caught (if they ever even come), what makes you so sure this time it's going to be different?

Nuclear is held to an entirely different and higher standard, even to aviation. There isn't any other field that is so critically examined under a microscope by governments.

VC companies have to meet the regulatory criteria. There aren't any safety corners that they can realistically cut without falling foul of regulation and inspection.