UNEP/Frankfurt School Investment figures in so called "renewable energy" 2006-2016.

[NNadir]

9. Nuclear energy has been consistently under attack by stupid people for half a century.

Last edited Sat May 13, 2017, 07:16 AM - Edit history (4)

It doesn't matter that all of the rhetoric they use involves the application of criteria they apply to nothing else - which is amazing because in comparison to everything else, notably the issue of "waste," nuclear energy is actually vastly superior to everything else in any compartive analysis - the selective attention has a political effect.

It also has a hype effect. If a seal at a nuclear power plant fails it's national news, even if it injures no one at all. If a major blowout of an oil platform instantly kills workers on the platform and then destroys vast areas of marine ecosystems people forget about it; it goes down the media and cultural Orwellian "memory hole."

Nuclear energy saves lives in spite of the stupidity of popular anti-nuke rhetoric.

The anti-nuke mentality, which kills people continuously by appeals to fear and ignorance, is rather like arsonists containing about fires, an analogy I use repeatedly because it's especially apt. Anti-nuke people do everything in the immoral and ignorant power to oppose nuclear energy, do everything they can to raise its cost by attaching requirements for "safety" they attach to nothing else, everything they can to resist infrastructure building, and then announce that it's "slow and expensive."

If one reads and understands the scientific and engineering primary literature referring to nuclear energy one will often find that the major resistance to the expansion of nuclear energy mentioned are based on the "problem" of "public perception." It has nothing to do with engineering or science. The public perception is in turn, based on appeals to ignorance, hype, wishful thinking, and frankly contempt for science and engineering which is clearly on the rise in the world culture as evidenced by the inhabitant of the White House. And let's be clear, the lies, distortions and selective attention to nuclear issues is Trumpian in scale, and has been Trumpian in scale for more than a generation.

The United States built more than 100 nuclear reactors in roughly 20 - 30 years while providing some of the lowest cost electricity in the world. I have no use for crap statements that "it isn't doing that now," especially when people doing so are clearly in the camp of the anti-nuke "renewables will save us" camp.

So called "renewables" didn't save us. In fact they were abandoned at the beginning of the 19th century because a the vast majority of people comprising a much smaller world population than we have now generally lived short, miserable lives of dire poverty. The reactionary sun worship crap cannot change that fact. They aren't saving us. The degradation of the planetary atmosphere is now taking place at the fastest rate every observed despite the squandering of trillions of dollars on this temporary and toxic junk. They won't save us, because their material demands and their ecological impact resulting from their extremely low energy to mass ratio are not sustainable.

Sometime this weekend I'm going to compare the reliability, the cost, and most importantly the active lifetime of the US's oldest nuclear reactor, the Oyster Creek nuclear reactor, which is partially powering the computer on which I write, with the cost, performance and lifetime of all the so called "renewable" crap on which morons and fools are betting the future of this planet. I'm going to use 1965 criteria - the year the reactor's construction began - with the historical results.

Probably almost all of the people who designed the reactor, and who built it, are dead or at least long retired. Since the reactor is powering my computer, the money and time and effort they spent is a gift from their generation to mine, and in fact, my children's, since my sons were born and raised in New Jersey, and nearly every time a computer or light switch came on in their schools, Oyster Creek was powering it. The generation that built the Oyster Creek nuclear reactor was a generation that cared about the future and about future generations. This generation, by contrast, can only be regarded by contempt for its regard for future generations. We think only of ourselves and don't give a shit about the future, which is why we are reluctant to spend our money on nuclear reactors that will be operating near the dawn of the 22nd century. By contrast, every goddamned useless wind turbine on this planet right now will be a pile of useless junk before my sons, and everyone else now entering college, reach midlife.

This is why this Trumpian bull about so called "renewable" energy is allowed to prevail, even as it has, is, and always will give clear and irrefutable evidence of its failure: We couldn't care less about the future.

Have a nice weekend.