Vestas and Orsted warn of tough times for renewable energy; Sector hit by low wind speeds, supply...

[NNadir]

6. I'm pretty much done trying to reason with rote anti-nukes. The age of antivaxxers led me...

Last edited Thu Nov 11, 2021, 08:53 AM - Edit history (4)

...finally to understand the power, as well as the more obvious danger, of deliberate ignorance which no amount of information, no compilation of facts, can change.

To what end would one succeed at arguing with an anti-vax that Bill Gates is not really putting microchips in vaccines?

This report, Practical handling of allergic reactions to COVID-19 vaccines (Klimek, L., Bergmann, KC., Brehler, R. et al. Allergo J Int 30, 79–95 (2021)) published April just past, reports this:

From December 14 to December 23, 2020, a total of 4393 (0.2%) adverse events were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following administration of 1,893,360 initial doses of BNT162b2 vaccine. Among these, 175 case reports were identified for further review as possible cases of severe allergic reaction, including anaphylaxis, based on description of signs and symptoms. The report notes that 21 of these cases met the case definition criteria for anaphylaxis, representing an estimated rate of 11.1 cases per 1 million doses administered.

One can only imagine what an anti-vax Trumper could do with the use of the internet and the details of just one of the 21 cases described that met the criterion of anaphylaxis.

Nevertheless, vaccines save lives on a scale of tens of millions, ultimately hundreds of millions.

Because air pollution kills people - more people in fact than Covid has ever come close to killing - nuclear power saves lives.

But...but...but...FUKUSHIMA?

Really?

I will have been writing at DU 19 years as of this month. I know I have convinced a few people to change their minds about nuclear energy, but what's left is, to my mind, beyond hope.

I spent too much time writing here. The up side is that doing the background research for my posts was a mechanism for learning new things. For example, confronting a fool who carried on about a collapsed tunnel at Hanford led me to look into the geochemistry of plutonium and technetium. Of course, I already knew a lot about these subjects, but I learned more in the process of looking into this silly event, on which vast sums of money were spent to save zero lives. The money was spent to assuage ignorance, and nothing else.

One can always learn more about any subject, with the caveat that what one learns is often depressing.

I have a 22 year old son whose academic career in Materials Science Engineering has been close to spectacular thus far. He announced recently - I am deeply honored - his intention to pursue his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering. As I've spent more than 30 years deeply invested in the subject, even though I am not a nuclear professional, I am aware of many excellent ideas that were lost, and have had many ideas that I believe may have been missed.

If the world is to be saved, and it may not be, nuclear engineers will save it. Fathers are always proud of their sons, but my pride may be far deeper. How is my time better spent to fulfill my responsibility to the world, writing here or writing to my son?

I will probably write a valedictory post on DU in which I will discuss the disturbing data from California's very detailed CAISO website in which I will compare the output of Diablo Canyon with all the wind turbines in California, commenting perhaps on the very important issue in climate change of land and mass intensity. But it will go nowhere here.

Of course, anyone who actually gave a shit could look at the CAISO website themselves, and do as I did, download the data files over a period of time to understand the trends, and count the number of periods that Diablo Canyon was producing more electricity than all the wind turbines in California. These figures are readily available at high resolution, nearly continuous, the resolution being five minutes over a period of months.

But people don't give a shit. They just shout through their ignorance with the same tired rhetoric that was stupid when I was shouting it (before Chernobyl), was stupid in 2011 and is stupid now.

Mostly we are old people here, and what we have done with the world is obvious. While crowing about how solar and wind are great and - as bourgeois materialists have claimed in a fit of delusion that they are "cheap" - we have left a world where as of April 2021, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide, which is literally killing people and in fact killing the planet, broke 420 ppm.

When I started writing here, the week beginning Nov. 24, 2002, that concentration was 372.68 ppm. There is no value in any conversation I may hold here. I keep track of data.

The anti-nukes have won. Diablo Canyon will close, with California having written into to law that methane is carbon free.

420 ppm, and now the laws of chemistry are being changed by legislation. Galileo should roll in his grave.

Congrats to all the anti-nukes, they have triumphed...420 ppm.

Life is absurd, and then you die.

Have a nice day.