Environment & Energy

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.