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.
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