about all of the environmental issues whether they are nuclear, fossil fuels, over-population, resource extraction pollution, consumer and industrial waste disposal, leaking landfills etc. and the various negative effects on the biology of the living things on the planet.

But I am curious about your figure of 80 million deaths in the last 14 years from "uncontrolled release of fossil fuel waste" which I take it you mean air pollution. I would be interested to see how many of the 80 million deaths had doctors specifically attribute their deaths to solely "air pollution". We know we have increased cases of respiratory disease due to air pollution but some sourcing for your number would be helpful for inspection in order to gauge the voracity of that number.

At the same time that you push for nuclear power plants, which has the only real application being the production of electricity, you also have railed against electric vehicles operating on battery technology and so I'm curious what your transportation solutions are for the planet that can be scaled quickly.

Automotive emissions have come down dramatically on a per vehicle basis from where we were 30 years ago. Our overpopulation and unchecked consumerism has greatly increased the number of vehicles however per capita on the planet and so we still have a major problem in trying to get people to drive more efficiently, maintain their vehicles, reduce idling etc.

When it is all said and done we have as much a "people" problem as we do a "source" problem. Getting people to use mass transit and forgo their car, carpooling, combining shopping trips etc. are all things that a certain percentage of the population does but obviously nowhere near a majority.

Early on I took environmental courses way back in the '70's and the fundamental and inescapable conclusions by people looking at the issue of the environment were that the "problems" are not just matters of technology or regulation. All of it is linked with people, behavior and population growth. So when we speak of "pollution" and cutting it back it is not just an application of technology. Our automotive emissions technology shows us that we can reduce that on a per car basis by leaps and bounds but if we vastly increase the number of vehicles and largely fail to maintain them and operate them in a more efficient manner we aren't getting anywhere near the result we could.

Many people keep demanding higher and higher speed limits which means worse fuel mileage and increased emissions for example. Many people complain about plastics yet they largely keep right on buying the containers, bags and products that contain them. Many people complain about pesticides and other chemicals in agriculture but they won't garden, window garden, pay a higher price for naturally grown crops or naturally raised animals. I'm not talking about people who can't afford to purchase higher priced naturally raised/grown food.

Suffice it to say that yes some of the people who complain about this aspect or that of environmental issues are being more of a contributor to problems than they might realize or care to admit or educate themselves about. The long and the short of it is that any approach that is going to sustain us on this planet has to be comprehensive and address many difficult areas. Two of the most difficult are the effects of overpopulation along with the huge gap between developed and underdeveloped nations. It feeds increasing consumerism and we end up shooting ourselves in the foot. But how do we tell people who are doing less well than some that they should not aspire to some of the things those in developed nations have?

Doing better and "having" is what drives a capitalist system. Increased spending, increased consumption, increased profits. But what do we replace that with if we even can do it in time? How do we get that to be accepted? All the answers in the world are for naught if society and cultures won't accept them and instead resort to wars of "survival of their way of life" scenarios.

So in conclusion I can say I am more pessimistic than optimistic about the long term survival of humans on the planet. Mainly because of the "people problem" aspect to things. A small example in closing is that I religiously pour out any and all liquid contents from bottles, cans, packages down my drain. I do not carelessly let anything with a water component end up trapped in a landfill rather than returning it to the water processing cycle. It may not seem like much to some but taking personal action is the point. Like turning off lights when leaving a room of the house or apartment. Do what you can in your own life to be better about our environment. Even if it's not everything it can be something. Do what you can for those you encounter every day. Small is beautiful as they say.

...in the world, Lancet.

I reference often in this space, including many times, text with an excerpt, as I will now.

It is here: Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

I added the bold so that everyone, including the antinukes I hold responsible for this state of affairs can find easily, irrespective of their educational and reading level.

For convenience, I often round the number for the sum of women killed by antinukism and men killed by antinukism (6.67 million) up to 7 million per year, remaining well within the error bars. Even at 6.67 million, in the 14 years during which we've had people here whining and pissing in hopes of demonstrating someone will be shown to have died from radiation at Fukushima, while not giving a shit about the roughly 20,000 people who died from seawater in the same event, this works out to 93.₄ million deaths from air pollution.

The problem is a lot more serious than what "feel good" bourgeois conceits and practices like car pooling and riding mass transit. Right now there are about than 1.5 billion people on this planet who lack access to any form of improved sanitation. The issue with them is not about taking a train vs driving.

As for driving I would suspect, but cannot prove, that this number of people who lack basic sanitation includes the cobalt slaves in the "Democratic Republic" of Congo, who dig cobalt for bourgeois batteries so Westerners can declare themselves "green."

I find no benefit whatsoever to attaching riders to the problem on socioeconomic fantasies to cover for the consumerism in which we all participate.

Irrespective of socioeconomics it is clear from an engineering standpoint that nuclear energy is the only sustainable low carbon form of energy there is. All one needs to do is to compare the carbon intensity of France with that of Germany to see this.

Have a nice weekend.

Last edited Sat Sep 13, 2025, 03:14 PM - Edit history (1)

the study you reference and so I encourage you to perhaps ask someone in the medical field to explain what is meant by "risk factors in attributable deaths". A factor showing up in x number of deaths as a high risk factor from an estimation calculation does not mean that x number of people are known to have died from that risk factor. In fact you might want to read up on the problems of using such estimation calculations etc. cited here for example in Lancet, unless you now consider them unreliable, as published in Volume 20 Issue 12 December 2020.

Your purpose in pointing out the problems of sanitation for some people doesn't let you escape from your apparent inability to provide your transportation proposals since even if you could snap your fingers and we would instantly have all generation of electricity be from nuclear power you are still left with the transportation question. Tunnel vision on one aspect of source pollution doesn't cut it as I explained previously. So what is your remedy for transportation as a source of pollution? Unless you have one then your cries about fossil fuel pollution are poorly thought out, not comprehensive and in the end merely complaint with only a fraction of a solution.

Years ago when engineers would come to me with myopic proposals some would find it instructive to be told to broaden their consideration to include other aspects of a system or problem and engage other engineers etc. with specialty in those aspects. Others would take it as some kind of attack that they must defend. The better course is the first since the engineer will become more educated in the application of engineering. Some engineers are destined, when they can't grasp broader implications of a problem, to be someone who can design but have given no thought, or think there is no need, to the consequences to the system of the application of their design. Other engineers learn to look at problems comprehensively and usually enjoy better success in applying themselves to questions with broad implications.

If you had your wish instantly granted and all power generation were nuclear we are still left with massive source pollution from transportation. Your option as I said is myopic. I think you can do better since I do believe you have the skills if you broaden rather than fixate. You can do better. Railing against air pollution from fossil fuels is correct but having a proposal to eliminate only one source, keeping in mind the fossil fuel pollution the solution would generate from construction/operation/maintenance, while being adamantly against additional source pollution reduction by using the product of your solution in a mixed use transportation strategy to reduce overall fossil fuel pollution is a justification at odds with itself.

Massive reduction in fossil fuel use in transportation is not an overnight thing and it requires an approach that takes many parts to the mix. While we transition and develop technologies we certainly may be using some technologies that also have some negative environmental impacts. But this is the case for many things we engineer and apply as our solutions develop for many different things in our world. Battery technology for example is moving along and we certainly are mindful of environmental problems associated with current technology and indeed it provides some of the push to develop battery technology that moves away from those problems. Other generation technologies as well develop and change over time.

Your solution is incomplete, has unaddressed problems of it's own, has a quite long time frame for implementation and while it may be a long term answer in a mix of technologies it is not a comprehensive answer that can be relied upon yet for many years to come due to these cited factors.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30485-0/abstract

I have been a working scientist engaged in the health industry (pharmaceutical) for more than 40 years, and I spend at least 20 hours a week reading on a wide range of scientific subjects. I have full access to most of the world's scientific literature beyond the abstracts.

I also think about what I read.

The Lancet article sited specifically uses the words "deaths," which are attributable to air pollution. If, for some reason, there are bloggers who can't comprehend the statements "air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019)" and "followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths." I guess I can only be appalled or bemused at the low level of reading comprehension.

There are some pretty typical and frankly nonsensical features of people who object to my position on nuclear power.

One is that nuclear power has "problems." This of course, is a very weak bit of nonsensical thinking, as if nothing else has "problems." My point, which seldom gets through the head of sloganeering antinukes repeating the same tripe over and over and over and over is as follows:

"Nuclear power does not need to be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is."

As for the nonsense about "taking a long time," I note that the United States, with engineers who worked with slide rules or computers less powerful than a modern Apple watch, built more than 100 nuclear reactors in this country while providing the lowest cost electricity in the industrial world.

Then, uneducated kibitzers, who made the absurd calculation at a moral level than can only be described as detestable, ran around saying that if they could, even with their poor educations possibly resulting for limited reading comprehension skills, imagine anyone anywhere at any time dying from exposure to radiation, it was therefore acceptable for millions of people to die from fossil fuel waste each year, at a rate, according to the Lancet publication, at a rate of around 19,000 people per day.

Most of those 100 reactors still operate, albeit in a climate of continuous attack by people who don't understand a single thing about nuclear technology.

The sloganeering nonsense that nuclear power "takes too long" to build is an outgrowth of the deliberate destruction - let's call it "vandalism in service of ignorance" - of nuclear manufacturing in this country. Again, the United States once built its reactors in a period of 25 years. The metaphor I most often use to describe the antinukes responsible for vandalizing and destroying this infrastructure is to describe these awful people as "Arsonists complaining about forest fires."

This year, China will surpass France as the world's largest producer of nuclear energy. They have built 58 nuclear reactors, all but two in this century, and have 33 under construction

The big lie that solar and wind junk, the latter spewing plastics - the point of the OP is about plastics - off their turbine blades while they spend less than 25 years of unreliable operation degrading before becoming landfill, is that they are easily and quickly built. The unit of energy is the "Joule," and not the "Watt," the latter used by barely transparent liars to represent that so called "renewable energy" matters.

A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.

I get taken to task by whiny antinukes around here for reproducing this table, which uses the unit of energy, repeatedly, as if repeating data somehow made it invalid:




IEA World Energy Outlook 2024
Table A.1a: World energy supply Page 296.

The table consists of two parts: Soothsaying and data. I refer only to the data, since as someone who has followed and downloaded these WEO reports for decades, I find the soothsaying in them rather dubious.

In an atmosphere of wild cheering and at a cost of trillions of dollars, combined the solar and wind crap strewn all over the planet on ruined landscapes, produced just 16 exajoules of energy combined. Nuclear power, attacked continuously by a bunch of fossil fuel coddling poorly educated sloganeering malcontents, in an atmosphere of mindless vituperation, produced roughly 30 Exajoules in the same period.

Clearly building solar and wind crap, tearing the fuck out of pristine wilderness, and mining materials like maniacs, isn't "fast," mindless bullshit sloganeering to the contrary.

As for the carrying on about "transportation," I have yet to meet a single antinuke who cares more about the health of the planetary atmosphere than they do about their fucking cars.

I'm not sorry to report that in my view, the car CULTure is not sustainable in any form. It is possible to fuel transport vehicles in a closed carbon cycle using the wonder fuel DME, which is accessible by process intensification using high temperatures. I've written about this as a source of exergy recovery from fission heat many times in this space and elsewhere.

To the extent we want independent powered vehicles for various purposes, some better than others - to the extend we can afford them, which is questionable - the key is wise utilization of primary energy, with exergy recovery, primary energy of which there is only one environmentally, materially, and economically available form, nuclear energy.

I trust you're having a pleasant weekend.

ignorant of wind power in Iowa, for example, would make such a false claim of "only a useful life of 25 years". I have been involved in these facilities throughout the Plains and Midwest for longer than your claim and I can tell you that other than routine maintenance on gearboxes or upgrades they go along quite well. Your vaunted nuclear plants are not maintenance free so just stop with the nonsense.

Nobody cares how long you've been in the health industry. You can still be short-sighted in your proposals and as I have noted you have no solutions put forth for transportation. Your writings always attack and belittle those who express concerns and from an engineering standpoint that approach holds little of value.

I've worked with such people in the past and they were always a net negative to any working group because of their inability to conduct themselves in a collegial manner rather than picking fights, ridiculing other team members and never missing an opportunity to express to all of the group that only they are right about anything and everything. These kinds of people take any critique of their views or cautions about additional considerations to be a personal attack and they respond with more of their useless and counterproductive putdowns etc.

Some very intelligent people in science and engineering are also some of the least productive because of these problems in their approach and manner. The more extreme examples are the ones I knew who were brilliant but despite that you could not let them into a meeting with colleagues or people from outside because they would invariably start yelling, belittling and swearing at people. So they were useful for limited purposes because they never understood that an engineering meeting and review is not there for the purpose of bowing to them but rather for the purpose of professional assessment across disciplines so that projects and proposals are vetted across those disciplines with input given and considered about all manner of items and aspects of the project/proposal.

Working with and managing people who behave in their profession in the ways I've described is misery for colleagues and managers and ends up being counter-productive and bad for morale, collegiality and cohesiveness of working groups. Eventually it can get so bad that the person has to be let go because they are an overall net negative and refuse to improve their approach. Sadly I've seen this before and I recognize it when I see it. You couldn't get me to want to work with such people again for all the money in the world. In technical fields the approach of "I'm always right and the rest of you aren't" is always a negative. It can often be the result of an education that focused on "numbers and science" without giving an education about the process and how to work with people.

A nationally highly regarded Engineering school in my area produced several engineers who came my way who were great on "the numbers, materials knowledge etc." and had high grades but their ability to write a memo or report was atrocious with grammar, spelling and construction that would have failed 8th grade. In other words they may have been very good about something but they couldn't communicate it effectively because their "higher education" didn't consider training their students to communicate effectively to be important. It is not dissimilar to schools not understanding the need to educate about the professional process and things like the engineering review process, it's purpose and how to effectively and constructively take part. Been there done that.

On the subject of "attributable" or "attributable risk factors" it is faulty to imply to people that this is the same thing as "verified cause of death". Estimations of effects or potential effects based on risk factors are precisely and only estimations based on formulas. As the Lancet article I linked points out there are issues with all of it that need to be recognized rather than flailed at and denied. Recognizing them and working on them is the proper process.

But this dialogue has gone as far as is useful and anything further would just be circular etc. Have a nice Sunday and keep trying to always work better.

...wind turbine, operating and decommissioned in their offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole of a country?

They stopped updating it when it became clear that their systems were unreliable and didn't last. The average lifetime before decommissioning for those decommissioned was a little over 17 years.

Again, in case any so called "renewable energy" apologist missed it, I analyzed this data sometime back in this space.

A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.

I'm perfectly happy with the level of detail I provided in that post, and a the risk of being called rude by stating something called "truth," I provide a few excerpts of that post, of which I am proud:

It is unsurprising to me to see for me to see someone working in the fossil fuel dependent wind industry - one showing distain for engineers with a passion for calling bullshit, um, bullshit - in denial about the death toll associated with fossil fuels.

This, in my view, is the result of the fact that the wind industry requires fossil fuels to operate.

Expressing contempt for engineers as being, um, "too rude" strikes me as the inability to understand the frustration of engineers when confronted with denial, whether that denial is in the form of denying the vast death toll produced by the combustion of fossil fuels - on which the useless wind industry depends - or denying the reality of engineering realities to the engineer reporting them.

You know, in my lifetime, I may have poured through thousands of graduate theses at both the Ph.D. level and Master's level. These theses are definitely an underutilized resource. Most of them are highly literate, and certainly more literate than much of what I see here, including from those defending the indefensible, a cranky bunch, who make specious generalized attacks without bothering to offer any reference for their claims.

Many of my engineering and science posts on this website, by contrast, are based on references to the primary scientific literature, as is the OP in this thread.

Hatred for scientists and engineers is becoming increasingly prevalent in this country; a scientific superpower is being decimated. As for individuals here at DU participating, it is happily not all that prevalent, but we can see that examples here are not completely absent.

If any apologists for the so called "renewable energy" scam are here to claim that the trillions of dollars spent to trash wilderness by industrializing it for wind farms has had any effect on the use of fossil fuels or the rate of accumulation of dangerous fossil fuel waste, they can easily be dismissed by pointing to something called "numbers."

Here for instance, not that the apologists for the fossil fuel dependent wind industry give a rat's ass, is my recent analysis of the situation with respect to the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide, about which, I know, the wind industry couldn't care less, except for trying to pawn off their wilderness destroying junk:

New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 430.86 ppm



It's depressing to note that months later that data point for the 52 week running average for 10 year increases reported in week 18 was 26.12 has reached, as of the week beginning September 7, 2025, week 36, 26.40 ppm/10 years.

As for the question as to whether nuclear plants require maintenance, of course they do. This is certainly not unique to any energy industry, dirty plants in industries like the dangerous natural gas that backs up wind turbines, coal plants, oil refineries, cars, trucks, and trains. Is this surprising somehow? Occasionally nuclear reactors need complete refurbishing, as is the case with the beautiful Bruce and Darlington CANDU reactors in Canada that have been saving lives since the 20th century.

To wit:




...and so on...

Bruce 2, first connected to the grid in 1976, operated in 2024 at 100% capacity utilization, producing 7186 GWh (25.87 Petajoules) of electricity in a single building. There isn't a wind turbine on this planet that operated for a year at 100% capacity utilization for a year, which doesn't stop the wind industry from reporting their crappy stuff in units of peak power, power levels they almost never obtain, and if they do, for periods of minutes, not years.

The refurbishment program of CANDU reactors - in my view some of the most important reactors in the world owing to their potential for thermal breeding - means that reactors that connected to the grid in the 1970's and 1980's will be saving lives well into the 21st century. This will be true irrespective of whether representatives of the useless fossil fuel coddling and dependent wind industry question the scientific fact that air pollution kills people.

The noted climate scientist Jim Hansen made a nice calculation in 2013 about how many lives were saved from air pollution by nuclear energy by the way.

It's here:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

The above note is called a "reference," as distinct from handwaving and blank assertions about, let's say wonderful wind turbines in Iowa that last forever. I do hope that providing references to facts, as Dr. Hansen clearly does in his paper in my view, isn't considered "rude," but if it is, well, I can't help it.

As for the claim that "nobody cares about," I would call into question whether the many nice notes I've received in my 22 years at DU advocating for nuclear energy and, occasionally commenting on other scientific issues connected with my career, and, after a time, my practice of denigrating the expensive fossil fuel dependent and useless so called "renewable energy" industry, many people have written me very nice notes about my work here. I certainly didn't ask anyone to do so, and I'm not here seeking either praise or condemnation. I am merely commenting on my views on the important issue of extreme global heating. I have people who appreciate my efforts, and I am assured, in spite of anyone asserting otherwise, that they are not "nobodies."

I'm fully aware that there are airheads all over the world who claim to speak for "everyone." Usually they're uninteresting people with weak minds and in some cases, for example, the orange pedophile in the White House, dangerous people. I would characterize anyone coddling fossil fuels dangerous, but that's just my opinion.

If someone finds stating one's opinions, supported by references and the evocation of facts "rude" that's not my problem. In my view, it's their problem.

In this vein, let me offer another analogy that I often use when I am confronted with complaints about the statement of facts being done in a "rude" way.

A guy is walking down the street near a railroad track, and he sees someone walking on the tracks and a train approaching. He yells out "Hey asshole! Get off the track! A fucking train is coming!!!"

The person walking on the tracks calls back, "Ask me nicely and I'll consider it."

One can only shake one's head in disbelief.

The planet is burning. The trillions of dollars squandered on wind energy in the last 10 years has done nothing, zero, zip, to address this outcome. In fact, the wind industry can't even keep up with the increases in fossil fuel use if one uses units of energy in lieu of effectively lying by pointing to peak power. I certainly feel no compunction to be nice about it, especially to people defending the indefensible fossil fuel dependent wind industry.

My son and his serious girlfriend are both rising nuclear engineers nearing the completion of their Ph.Ds. They are doing what they are doing in hopes of saving what is left to be saved, which is less and less by the hour. They are spectacularly disinterested in malcontents confusing themselves with grammarians, but I'm sure my son and his girlfriend both know that they will encounter in their careers, people who get angry with them, disparage them, and demean them for stating the truth.

It goes with the territory. It's entirely unsurprising to me and it won't be to them.

I trust you're having a swell day out there in those wind industrial parks. Try not to breath in any aerosol plastics spallated from those magical wind turbine blades when the wind is blowing.

Have a wonderful evening as well.

I was sampling to see if the hexavalent chromium component of the reactor coolant in the groundwater plumes had reached the nests of incubating king salmon eggs. At 10 μg/L, hex chrome is lethal to fish, and we got a hit of 845 μg/L seeping into the river within these chinook salmon redd gravels,

The DOE Chief science advisor firm, (I cannot ID here) stated no reactor site contaminated groundwater has discharged to the Reach, since they have been monitoring over the past half century or so with groundwater monitoring wells. I found some, which attracted a lot of attention from the Yakima, Nez Perce and Umatilla tribes.when the tribes found out, oh boy, that's another story for another day.

Anyway, the point of this post inspired by your discussion of highly radioactive discharges to a fishery is, even though I know water is a barrier to RADS, I couldn't help but wonder what the levels of strontium 90 and tritium exposures I was swimming in might have been. Those dives were in '95-'96, and I'm still here with no Hanford ill effects, which some poor chaps working landslide can't say to this day.

I'm big into keeping abreast of the sad world of collapsing worldwide fisheries, and those Fukushima impacts to the critters, so thanks for the read.

...plants as it is about Hanford.

I sometimes attribute the rise of insanity across the world - expressed as a rise in fascism among other things - is actually an outgrowth of heavy metal poisoning, Minamata disease on a global scale.

As for effects, if one looks, one can find that some of the highest life expectancy figures in the entire United States, are found in the Portland, Oregon region, at the mouth of the Columbia River. This may be in spite of Hanford rather than because of it, but is an indication that Hanford, which gets tons of commentary from antinukes, is not a disaster on the scale of extreme global heating.

As I often state, nuclear energy does not need to be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.