A Welcome Endorsement for Nuclear Power
A Welcome Endorsement for Nuclear Power
Written by John F. McManus*
Joshua S. Goldstein is emeritus professor of international relations at American University and a research scholar at the University of Massachusetts. Steven Pinker is professor of psychology at Harvard University. These two recently teamed up to pen a lengthy column in the Boston Globe entitled “Inconvenient Truths for the Environmental Movement.”
The two men do believe climate change is caused by human action. They contend that burning of fossil fuels to produce electricity by humans — resulting in carbon dioxide being sent into the atmosphere — causes a rise in the earth’s temperature. There are growing numbers of scientists who disagree. But, unlike most of the would-be banners of fossil fuel, Goldstein and Pinker’s solution doesn’t target its use in generating electricity. They thereby separate themselves from environmental extremists who insist that the carbon dioxide byproduct of burning coal and oil to produce electricity is a hazard serious enough to ban the practice. Then they present a strong case for nuclear power.
Here’s how these two educators addressed this topic: “Nuclear power is the world’s most abundant and scalable [reachable] carbon-free energy source. In today’s world, every nuclear power plant that is not built is a fossil-fuel plant that does get built…. Yet the use of nuclear power has been stagnant or even contracting.” Their point, of course, is that by not relying on nuclear power, the need for burning coal and oil cannot be avoided if electricity is needed — which it surely is. They then make the point that solar and wind power amounts to a mere one percent of the need and cannot be counted on to meet the needs for electric power.
Aware of the fears surrounding nuclear power, Goldstein and Pinker point out that the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan killed no one. But, they note in sadness, it unnecessarily led Germany to shut down some of its nuclear plants. In France where nuclear power produces three-quarters of the nation’s electricity, environmentalists are forcing a shutdown. And the anti-nukes in America also wrongly claim that Japan’s nuclear accident is reason to abandon nuclear power here....
*John F. McManusis president of The John Birch Society and publisher of The New American. This column appeared originally at the insideJBS blog and is reprinted here with permission.
SPLC on JBS https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2013/bringing-back-birch
= new reply since forum marked as read
Anti-nukes on this website, with nearly 100%, as may be expected, being very bad thinkers use one particular fallacy a lot:
It's called ad hominem and any fool could google his or her way to thousands of websites describing this.
Here's a graphic from one of the 660,000 hits one gets for "logical fallacies," since I have noticed that many stupid people can only respond to graphics:
The Eleven Most Irritating Logical Fallacies
If I say that Ted Kaczynski "believes" in global warming - as if the verifiable fact of global warming is a "belief" - I have not proved that global warming is not occurring.
Support for nuclear power is found throughout the primary scientific literature in many places in peer reviewed articles with high impact factors. The one I cite most often Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895).
Neither of the authors are well known as right wing nut cases.
The point of the paper, which I also make often, and which is in my view irrefutable, is that we now understand that the deaths from air pollution number in the millions per year, as recently reported in the highest impact scientific journal in the world, Nature in the following paper: The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale (Nature 525, 367–371 (17 September 2015)). Since nuclear energy reduces by huge orders of magnitude the onus of this deadly air pollution, which kills every decade more people than died in World War II from all war related causes, nuclear energy saves lives.
One does not have to show support for Donald Trump in order to enter the nuclear engineering program at MIT or at UC Berkeley or Georgia Tech. One does, however, need to be an excellent student in high school and score well on high stakes exams. One needs, in order to complete a degree, to pass a rigorous program involving high level mathematics, physics, materials science and engineering course. For example here is the undergraduate requirements for an undergraduate degree from MIT in any of a number of nuclear engineering program: MIT Nuclear Engineering Undergraduate Degree Options
Nowhere in the curriculum for these degress, available only to highest levels of successful students emerging from high schools around the world, is there listed any courses in "right wing politics."
In my opinion having seen the quality of anti-nukes on this website, I doubt that there is one person among them who could pass any of the courses in the Freshman year.
Now, if I assert that 100% of the anti-nukes I have had the misfortune of confronting on this web site are ignorant, scientifically illiterate, poor thinkers, one may argue that I am engaging in an ad hominem attack. However if I point to elements of their thinking (see the Ted Kaczynski billboard above) and refute their terrible, disastrous, and frankly (since nuclear energy saves lives) deadly thinking by appeals to supportable arguments, I claim that the argument is not, in fact, ad hominem. It is merely a reasoned assertion.
Enjoy the remainder of the long holiday weekend, should one have a good enough job to have such a weekend, and not be working at say, Walmart, where even your holiday pay - if there is holiday pay - will not allow you to dream of a stupid and toxic electric car for billionaires and millionaires powered by solar cells on obscene McMansions.
Last edited Fri Nov 27, 2015, 09:00 PM - Edit history (7)
...nor is of any real value. It certainly doesn't imply what you think it implies.
In my own case, point five that you quote is partially true: I am unashamed to be in favor of stability; I have no desire to live in Syria or Iraq, countries that were destabilized by dependence on oil, something that vast expenditure on so called "renewable energy" is a spectacular failure at addressing. If the author's point is that one needs to be in favor of instability to be ethical, they are, quite frankly, insane. But I doubt that this is in fact, their point, and a claim to the contrary is a function of low reading comprehension ability, something is certainly characteristic of the weak minds of anti-nukes. I also value my family, but I recognize nevertheless that decisions in my family have impact in other families, like say the families of those poor Chinese cadmium miners who dig cadmium to service the stupid fantasies of bourgeois American solar advocates.
Point six is simply out of a dictionary; most people would not need a dictionary to define it, so the point is superfluous. It has nothing to do with nuclear energy per se, but the evocation certainly points to an issue that I confront whenever I fact the inherent stupidity of anti-nukes. As pointed out in my previous post, millions of people die each year from air pollution. Many advocates of nuclear energy are in fact clearly and unambiguously concerned with human welfare and specifically about these millions of people. I know I am. By contrast, the anti-nukes I encounter here couldn't give a rat's ass about these people. I would argue that a shit for brains person writing endlessly about battery factories in China for stupid electric cars for rich people are either ethically challenged or badly informed. There is no excuse for the latter, since information is available detailing these risks to human beings.
Solving spent lithium-ion battery problems in China: Opportunities and challenges (Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews Volume 52, December 2015, Pages 1759–1767)
Point 7 is meaningless since it contains no data whatsover; but it is unsurprising to an anti-nuke highlighting it as a result of bad thinking and poor reading skills, if the point is to construe that all people who support nuclear power are evil, and all people who hate nuclear energy are noble and worthy. This is nonsense. The nuclear opponents here are all bourgeois consumer brats who can't be bothered to open an environmental paper in the primary scientific literature to find out about reality.
I could go on about the bad thinking connected with the current citation, but why bother?
The high impact journal, Science recently published a review on risk analysis, utilizing the example of nuclear power's role in development of the science of risk analysis by discussing the historical document WASH-1400, published in 1975.
The realities of risk-cost-benefit analysis ( Science 30 October 2015: Vol. 350 no. 6260 aaa6516-3)
It is regrettable that anti-nukes are incompetent to read this paper, just as they are incompetent to understand risk analysis, and thus understand, for example, that nuclear power need not be perfect to be vastly superior to everything else.
The Science makes nuanced, if hardly definitive, statements about ethical concepts, but does not attempt to make an insipid attachment of ethical worth to any particular held opinion.
Experimentally, after more than half a century of nuclear operations, the risk of nuclear energy is trivial compared to the risk of dangerous fossil fuels, including those burned to back up useless, expensive and toxic so called "renewable energy" facilities.
Now, the scientific literature - if one knows how to read it, and clearly anti-nukes are not competent to do so - contains many scientific and, arguably, ethical controversies in it. Most of these are resolved by consensus over a long period of time, although some are not. (There are also, regrettably, issues of fraud in the scientific literature.) It is a rare paper that asserts it represents an ethical certainty, at least in science (as opposed to so called "social science"
and undoubtedly such papers are generally garbage. In my opinion, anyone citing such a paper to prove a point of ethical certainty is probably not very bright nor very well educated.
My experience of anti-nukes here and elsewhere offers no impetus to regard anti-nukes as anything but a class of moral and intellectual simpletons; I particularly like, and often use, the word "Lilliputians" to describe the intellectual and moral standing of this class of pernicious human beings.
My main objection to anti-nukes is their general scientific ignorance, since I believe that ignorance kills people. This belief of mine is very much an ethical judgement and is entirely consistent with my entire world view. I am indifferent to having my ethics judged or addressed by anyone with whom I wouldn't be caught dead in association, particularly one who attempts to twist a junk paper by sociologists to support highly questionable ethics, the questionable nature residing in the irrefutable fact that nuclear energy saves lives that would otherwise be lost to the vast tragedy of air pollution, including, but not limited to climate change.
I refuse to apologize for my views to anyone clearly morally incompetent, or to buy into their garbage thinking about ethics.
Have a nice weekend.
...I think this exchange makes it pretty clear who is clueless and who is not, and rather than engage in further discourse on our very clear and unambiguous opinions of one another, I leave it the intelligent reader, if in fact many intelligent people show up to read this insipid foray into the logical fallacy, to adjudge the intellectual, moral merits of each of us.
Thanks though for leading me to the perfect graphic for the next regular stupid announcement that "nuclear scientists are evil" and "dumb guys who hate nuclear scientists are noble," post.
I love it!!!
