Combining evidence from various sources, it’s obvious that fossil fuels kill directly more than ten million people, a year. So why the negative obsession with nuclear energy? We are in a fossil fuel dominated world, and the fossil fuel industry hates nuclear, so finances its hatred. OK, old style nuclear plants are unacceptable… But that was 60 years ago, and those plants were built in such a way that they made nuclear explosives. Tech has changed, and we don’t need Plutonium anymore. Have We The Sheeple been programmed to love the tar, breathe it all day long? (I long advocated Hydrogen for storage, by the way.)
Enough with the hypocrisy of Communal Wisdom! Today we celebrate! The New York Times just aligned itself on one of my most ancient positions, so I shall reiterate, and celebrate this sudden Enlightenment of the old gray lady (nickname of the NYT).This is not an original essay: most of what’s below, I have said again and again, even 10 years ago. However here is the refrain again:
90% of humanity’s worldwide energy comes from burning fossils (even more than 90% of energy comes from burning, once one integrates the burning of forests).
We burn, therefore we are. Only one emergency solution to decrease dependency on burning fuels: nuclear energy.
Yet, all too many of the haggard populations, soon to be devoured by the climate catastrophe, hate nuclear energy, that is, they hate the Sun, our nuclear Sun, and they hate the Earth, our nuclear Earth, and don’t even know it.
The world International Energy Agency just revealed that CO2 emissions from burning fossils augmented nearly 2% in 2018, up to 33 gigatons of CO2. (Total emissions of CO2 are much higher from other human activities, like pouring concrete, deforestation, etc.)
Says IEA: “Coal-fired power plants were the single largest contributor to the growth in emissions observed in 2018, with an increase of 2.9%, or 280 Mt, compared with 2017 levels, exceeding 10 Gt for the first time.” I guess pseudo-ecologists like Angela Merkel loves that. Merkel closes nuclear, because she is an ecologist, she says, while opening full up on the world’s dirtiest coal, lignite… First used by Neanderthals 80,000 years.
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Germany Climate Mass Murder, and Its Wind Illusion:
Wind illusion? In case of massive greenhouse, winds will go down. Renewables provide 40% of German power, and government propaganda emphasizes this with relish, reminding me of “Arbeit Macht Frei” at the entrance of Auschwitz (namely a misleading slogan covering up mass murder). Although Germany has one of the most advanced renewable energy systems in the world thanks to its Energiewende (energy transition) policy, it has not reduced its emissions since Angela Merkel’s decision to phase out nuclear power following an enormously murderous tsunami in Japan from a 9 Richter quake (that’s what is called logic; at least Angela didn’t accuse the Versailles treaty: progress!)
Coal, the most CO2 emissions productive fossil fuel, now provides more than 42% of Germany’s power according to the International Energy Agency – a proportion that has been growing since the nuclear decision. The result is that Germany’s carbon emissions have been growing, since Germany’s horrendously selfish decision… while the neighbors’ CO2 emissions have been declining. France, in particular CO2 pollutes less than half of Germany per capita… due to nuclear.
Not happy with digging grand canyon sized craters in Germany, to extract “brown coal”, Germany is importanting gigantic amounts of gas from the Russian dictatorship next door…. While complaining about Trump’s strong man rule, to cover its own Putin puppet status…
Notice France is just at world average… The less polluting wealthy country in the world. Clearly, except for massive nuclear right away, the world’s total CO2 emissions will climb spectacularly as two-thirds of humanity catch up in energy utilization.
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I denuclearize, therefore I mass murder:
Renewable energy won’t change make enough energy to do without getting 90% of our energy without burning fossil fuels. Massive nuclear and hydrogen are needed, right away. Who disagrees with this is morally indifferent, ignorant, misinformed, cruel, & will help kill 6 billions.
I could go on like that: fossil fuel burning kills at least ten million a year, probably more than a million a year in Europe (looking at the latest numbers).
How many did nuclear energy kill?
In Fukushima, the unimaginable happened: four nuclear reactors, terribly located, without back-ups, or sea wall, crushed by giant waves. And, yes, there was no back up for the cooling systems. Back-ups were in Florida. Three reactors blew up and melted down. Result? Nobody died, and the beach is reopened for babies, 15 years later.
In other words, those who oppose nuclear energy are the lowest of the low, the sleepiest of the sheep. Let me buttress these cogent observations, in full metal jacket complement to:
“Nuclear Power Can Save the World
Expanding the technology is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonize the economy.”
[By Joshua S. Goldstein, Staffan A. Qvist and Steven Pinker
Drs. Goldstein and Qvist are the authors of “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow.” Dr. Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard. Yes, usually I criticize Pinker for finding everything pink… But here he focuses on the biggest, blackest problem…]
Young people rightly bleat in unison to mitigate the man-made climate catastrophe. However the young sheep should be advised that the question is not what to do — eliminate fossil fuels ASAP, and by 2050 at the latest— but how. It’s impossible to achieve this by ill-informed, however well-meaning, bleating.
Right now 90% of the world primary energy production is by burning fossil fuels. Repeat slowly, and try to understand what it means: we need a humongous source of energy, right away, to replace that.
Renewable energy will not change the 90% of fossil fuel burning except in a few special places such as California (a rare place with water, mountains, wind and sun). Norway and New Zealand, full of water and mountain, get their electricity for dams. Yemen is also full of mountains, and had the first dam. However Yemen’s electricity will not come from dams. Yemen’s electricity will not come from Solar Photovoltaic, either, except for a few hours a day, because batteries hold at most 4 hours and are immensely expensive.
Ethiopia, on the other side of the Red Sea, is building a giant dam on the Nile. That enraged Egypt so much, at some point, it made military threats (those stopped, simply perhaps war with Ethiopia promises to be counterproductive). The fact is, the planet is dammed out. (One could build artificial lagoons and mountains to store energy as elevated water, but that would be expensive, and best done in places full of water…)
Humanity must provide for the fast-growing energy needs of poorer countries. It also needs to extend the grid to a billion people who now lack electricity. And our energy needs will only grow. One will need to more electricity to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by mid-century, and stabilize the climate (the present CO2 density has launched natural self-feeding warming mechanisms with a life of their own…)
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Pinker and company now proclaiming the truth about nuclear power, of all places, in the New York Times (those knowing the NYT will appreciate the U-turn!):
“Where will this gargantuan amount of carbon-free energy come from? The popular answer is renewables alone, but this is a fantasy. Wind and solar power are becoming cheaper, but they are not available around the clock, rain or shine, and batteries that could power entire cities for days or weeks show no sign of materializing any time soon. Today, renewables work only with fossil-fuel backup.
Germany, which went all-in for renewables, has seen little reduction in carbon emissions, and, according to our calculations, at Germany’s rate of adding clean energy relative to gross domestic product, it would take the world more than a century to decarbonize, even if the country wasn’t also retiring nuclear plants early.”
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One must with renewables is storage. But this massive storage we do not have yet in the present state of technology (but for a few dams where water can be lifted and turbined back down). Batteries are extremely far from being able to provide that mass storage, for months at a time (there are possible possibilities, for the future, but we aren’t there yet)…
There is only one way to store renewable energy which is affordable, and expendable on a huge scale : the hydrogen economy. That hydrogen economy has not been developed massively, yet. Although it’s feasible. It could be used in planes… This is the only way, in the foreseeable future, to get 100% CLEAN planes.
The hydrogen economy is so feasible, that the first thing Obama did, on the first day, arriving in the White House, was to destroy it, so that his friends in the fossil industry could prosper. And prosper they did… And reward him and his family, thereafter. Hey, Obama is a family man. So fracking and bituminous sands prospered , and the ill-informed populace bleated its approval, as Obama made plenty of seductive ecological noises, while hyenas laughed in the night.
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So what energy source are we left with, if we want to decarbonize? Nuclear energy.
Fission now, which could be rendered rather innocuous, if Thorium reactors were developed. Fusion soon, which could bring reactors connected to the grid in ten years, if massive spending was engaged. Fusion brings neglectable pollution, and not at all if using Helium 3.
The pseudo ecologists who refuse nuclear energy refuse the earth and the sky. In the core of the planet, a fission reactor generate plate tectonic and the magnetic shield which made life possible (by controlling CO2 and radiation). In the sky, that thermonuclear reactor known as the sun.
A further complicating factor is that massive ecological disruption always bring war.
Pseudo ecologists refusing nuclear energy condemn the biosphere to the Sixth Mass Extinction. They are the objective accomplices of fossil fuel fanatics. Just their propaganda angle is different. Instead of just being greedy to no end like the fossil fuel fanatics, anti-nuclear “ecologists” are, on top of that, completely irrational.
Anti-nuclear pseudo-ecologists do to reason what Jihadists do to faith in God.
Patrice Ayme
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Let me quote Pinker and Al in the Times again: such sweet revenge, I have been saying these things forever, and been called devil incarnated for them… By repeating them, I repeat myself…
Pinker and Al: Nuclear made France and Sweden clean:
…”we actually have proven models for rapid decarbonization with economic and energy growth: France and Sweden. They decarbonized their grids decades ago and now emit less than a tenth of the world average of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour. They remain among the world’s most pleasant places to live and enjoy much cheaper electricity than Germany to boot.
They did this with nuclear power. And they did it fast, taking advantage of nuclear power’s intense concentration of energy per pound of fuel. France replaced almost all of its fossil-fueled electricity with nuclear power nationwide in just 15 years; Sweden, in about 20 years. In fact, most of the fastest additions of clean electricity historically are countries rolling out nuclear power.
This is a realistic solution to humanity’s greatest problem. Plants built 30 years ago in America, as in France, produce cheap, clean electricity, and nuclear power is the cheapest source in South Korea. The 98 U.S. reactors today provide nearly 20 percent of the nation’s electricity generation. So why don’t the United States and other countries expand their nuclear capacity? The reasons are economics and fear.
New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition…”
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Worldwide CO2 emissions went down as China opened several new giant nuclear reactors(one French designed, but made so much faster than the French in Finland and France, that it is the only such EPR in use!). Pinker and Al.:
“France has two types of reactors and hundreds of types of cheese, in the United States it’s the other way around. In recent decades, the United States and some European countries have created ever more complicated reactors, with ever more safety features in response to public fears. New, one-of-a-kind designs, shifting regulations, supply-chain and construction snafus and a lost generation of experts (during the decades when new construction stopped) have driven costs to absurd heights.
These economic problems are solvable. China and South Korea can build reactors at one-sixth the current cost in the United States. With the political will, China could replace coal without sacrificing economic growth, reducing world carbon emissions by more than 10 percent.”
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Nuclear Power is safer, and less polluting, even when one is talking about second generation nuclear fission plants (now fourth generations plants are developed… Thorium would still be something else, much less polluting…). Pinker and Al.:
“All this, however, depends on overcoming an irrational dread among the public and many activists. The reality is that nuclear power is the safest form of energy humanity has ever used. Mining accidents, hydroelectric dam failures, natural gas explosions and oil train crashes all kill people, sometimes in large numbers, and smoke from coal-burning kills them in enormous numbers, more than half a million per year.
By contrast, in 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed no one (many deaths resulted from the tsunami and some from a panicked evacuation near the plant); and Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day. (Even if we accepted recent claims that Soviet and international authorities covered up tens of thousands of Chernobyl deaths, the death toll from 60 years of nuclear power would still equal about one month of coal-related deaths.)
Nuclear power plants cannot explode like nuclear bombs, and they have not contributed to weapons proliferation, thanks to robust international controls: 24 countries have nuclear power but not weapons, while Israel and North Korea have nuclear weapons but not power.
Nuclear waste is compact — America’s total from 60 years would fit in a Walmart — and is safely stored in concrete casks and pools, becoming less radioactive over time. After we have solved the more pressing challenge of climate change, we can either burn the waste as fuel in new types of reactors or bury it deep underground. It’s a far easier environmental challenge than the world’s enormous coal waste, routinely dumped near poor communities and often laden with toxic arsenic, mercury and lead that can last forever.”
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Misinformation, intellectual laziness, and Pluto engineered tribal hatred explain the distaste for nuclear energy. People love to hate. When one is not officially a racist and hater of low lives, one has to invent new hatreds, and hatred for nuclear energy ecology comes, ready to wear. Pinker and Al:
“Despite its demonstrable safety, nuclear power presses several psychological buttons. First, people estimate risk according to how readily anecdotes like well-publicized nuclear accidents pop into mind. Second, the thought of radiation activates the mind-set of disgust, in which any trace of contaminant fouls whatever it contacts, despite the reality that we all live in a soup of natural radiation. Third, people feel better about eliminating a single tiny risk entirely than minimizing risk from all hazards combined. For all these reasons, nuclear power is dreaded while fossil fuels are tolerated, just as flying is scary even though driving is more dangerous.
Opinions are also driven by our cultural and political tribes. Since the late 1970s, when No Nukes became a signature cause of the Green movement, sympathy to nuclear power became, among many environmentalists, a sign of disloyalty if not treason.”
The hilarious, and very telling, part, personally, is that I was an early anti-nuclear activist… on some specific type of reactors (Plutonium surgenerators… I am FOR Thorium surgenerators, though…)
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And Pinker and Al. to conclude:
“Protecting the environment and lifting the developing world out of poverty are progressive causes. And the millennials and Gen Z’s might rethink the sacred values their boomer parents have left unexamined since the Doobie Brothers sang at the 1979 No Nukes concert.
If the American public and politicians can face real threats and overcome unfounded fears, we can solve humanity’s most pressing challenge and leave our grandchildren a bright future of climate stability and abundant energy. We can dispatch, once and for all, the self-fulfilling prophesy that we’re cooked.”
There are lots of things which could have been done, since Sparta, financed by Persia attacked Athens in the Peloponnesian war, nearly 25 centuries ago. Hence many catastrophes, the worst of them all the collapse of Greco-Roman civilization which started with the condemnable Aristotle, and ended with a flood of barbarian tribes going through the Frankish military curtain at the Winter Solstice of 406 CE (nearly three-quarters of a millennium later). Yes, bad philosophy was in the driver’s seat:
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/aristotle-destroyed-democracy/
This time, though, collapse will be faster, fiercer… and nuclear bombs will be used. Thus it would be wiser to use nuclear energy in a civil manner….
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