Science

...business of saving human lives overall.

During the early days of the AIDS crisis, if someone screwed up, even with the best intentions, people died. If someone screwed up because they were out all night partying to celebrate making a lot of money, people died. Overall, though we, our industry, saved human lives.

Ordinary people, and famous people - Magic Johnson comes to mind - are alive today because of our work.

If one is old - and I am - in my opinion, one is naive if one believes that all processes are infused with an overwhelming sense of decency and the will to do the right thing.

It should be obvious that the disaster of extreme global heating we are now observing was not disconnected with greed in the energy industry in connection with fossil fuels. I would also note that there were and are hard working and generally decent people who work or worked in coal plants who do not want their plants to shut because their livelihood depends on the plant staying open. These are hard choices to make; do good for humanity as a whole, or keep food on one's own table, a roof over one's own children's head.

I worked on AIDS drugs; I worked on cancer drugs; I worked on drugs to make old men get an erection; I worked on drugs to make bald men grow hair. I objected ethically to the use of resources in the latter two cases, but I was keeping a roof over my family's head, food on the table.

I repeat and add: Nuclear energy need not be without risk, neither does it need to be practiced only by people of high ethical standards, to be better than everything else. It only needs to be better than everything else, this, on a vast scale, being the case.

Any high technology will involve injury to some individuals; the question is whether on balance it makes, on the grand scale, life more livable, and gives us the opportunity to do the great and wonderful humans can and sometimes do accomplish.

Nuclear reactors have failed, and may fail again. We have observed the consequences of these failures. To my mind these consequences are trivial in comparison to a planet on fire because of extreme weather driven by extreme global heating, although, as a nuclear advocate, I have been engaged in the tiresome exercise of listening to badly educated people, people incapable of making simple comparisons, whine and chant insipidly about Fukushima and Chernobyl.

On a scale that matters, they are both relatively unimportant events; their repeat being subject to address by improved engineering.

But let's cut to the chase:

Which killed more people in Ukraine, Chernobyl, or the Russian weaponry funded by German antinukes buying coal, oil and gas from Vladimir Putin? A former German Chancellor has been paid over a million dollars a year, for well over a decade, to work for Putin's Gazprom.

Nuclear energy saves lives, and to the extent it has been permitted to do so against the elevation of fear and ignorance, it has slowed, but not been permitted, to repeat, by appeals to fear and ignorance, to stop, the destruction of the planetary atmosphere.

Pushker Kharecha and his colleague, the famous climate scientist Jim Hansen have done the numbers:

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).

As of 2013, nuclear power had prevented about a year's worth of the dumping of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide directly into the planetary atmosphere. We'd be well beyond 430 ppm concentrations of CO₂ if it hadn't done so. As it is, during my roughly 20 year tenure at DU, listening all the time to the whining of antinukes, the concentration has risen by about 50 ppm.

Week beginning on September 22, 2024: 421.71 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 418.28 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 395.47 ppm
Last updated: September 28, 2024

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa (It was 427.98 ppm in April; the annual concentrations are sinusoidal imposed on a quadratic axis.)

The Disastrous 2024 CO2 Data Recorded at Mauna Loa: Yet Another Update.

People lie, to themselves and each other, but numbers don't lie.

Human beings have many flaws. Greed is one, I suppose, but to my mind not nearly as egregious as fear and ignorance.

Thanks for your comment.