I thought that the Hacker News community was a lot more alert to avoiding upvoting linkbait articles like this.
First of all, the entire main story point of the article is based on PRESS RELEASES, not on peer-reviewed articles published in good-quality scientific journals.
Second, even if a statement like the premise of the article were published in a peer-reviewed article in a good-quality scientific journal, you would still want to check the methodology of the study described in the article for the "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" that Google's director of research, LISP hacker Peter Norvig, is always warning us about.
Third, the article is about a public policy proposal, so it's not just about physics, it's about economics and the psychology of the general public as well. As Thomas Sowell has written, "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." What the public wants is as much energy as can be humanly desired, with total safety, and at nil cost. The efforts of politicians to reconcile these contradictory desires may very well result in a regulatory pattern that doesn't let this new technology thrive. As a matter of economics, this technology should only thrive if it genuinely provides a better cost-benefit trade-off than other proposed energy technologies, which the article hand-waves away as an issue.
Discussions on Hacker News are better if they are launched by submission of better sources. This source, on this subject, is below general community standards. We can learn more about new possibilities in energy technology from (for example) Technology Review (several HN participants regularly submit articles from that source) or The Economist (I am one of several HN participants who submit articles from that source) or the better professionally edited mainstream newspapers or general news weeklies. We don't need to rush ahead to speculate about every new press release here.
The register can be good on tech issues, however it just goes completely mental if anyone mentions the words climate, nuclear, green or wikipedia anywhere within the editors earshot. Or if anyone shows Lewis a picture of some guns.
After a while I have decided that the most likely explanation for their behaviour is that they are mostly just trying to troll hippies and don't necessarily actually believe a lot of what they print. Trolling the readership is fairly common in the UK press anyway, the Mail having turned it into something of an art.
First of all, the entire main story point of the article is based on PRESS RELEASES, not on peer-reviewed articles published in good-quality scientific journals.
Second, even if a statement like the premise of the article were published in a peer-reviewed article in a good-quality scientific journal, you would still want to check the methodology of the study described in the article for the "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" that Google's director of research, LISP hacker Peter Norvig, is always warning us about.
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
Third, the article is about a public policy proposal, so it's not just about physics, it's about economics and the psychology of the general public as well. As Thomas Sowell has written, "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." What the public wants is as much energy as can be humanly desired, with total safety, and at nil cost. The efforts of politicians to reconcile these contradictory desires may very well result in a regulatory pattern that doesn't let this new technology thrive. As a matter of economics, this technology should only thrive if it genuinely provides a better cost-benefit trade-off than other proposed energy technologies, which the article hand-waves away as an issue.
Discussions on Hacker News are better if they are launched by submission of better sources. This source, on this subject, is below general community standards. We can learn more about new possibilities in energy technology from (for example) Technology Review (several HN participants regularly submit articles from that source) or The Economist (I am one of several HN participants who submit articles from that source) or the better professionally edited mainstream newspapers or general news weeklies. We don't need to rush ahead to speculate about every new press release here.