Should the Phoenix Arise; the Bateman Equation and Wind Energy.

[NNadir]

10. It's amusing to hear that there are people...

Last edited Fri Nov 8, 2024, 11:05 AM - Edit history (1)

...who claim they can tell another person how their mind works, what they believe, who they are, etc. One of course can claim that one is a clairvoyant, or a God perhaps.

I'm personally not prone to credit mysticism however; I'm a scientist.

I find claims of clairvoyance simply to be evidence that the claimant feels justified in pontificating on subjects about which they know nothing at all.

Clearly it carries well beyond discussions of personality into technical realms, say about energy. I almost never encounter an antinuke who knows a damn thing about the subject.

Much of my journal on the website is my commentary on papers in the primary scientific literature; I may have referenced, excerpted, and linked thousands of such papers here. One does not read extensively if one has a closed mind. However if one works very, very hard, is highly trained and equipped to think critically, one can and should draw conclusions from scientific consensus, until there is good reason to withdraw it or modify it. Pretty much every damn day I am reading journals published in the same week I'm reading it.

On the other hand if one wishes to lazily assert using silly graphics about the cost of energy without factoring in the normal parameters defining it's external costs as delineated in things related to reliability, the health and damage costs, material intensity, land area intensity, one is not working with any depth; one is merely regurgitating nonsense consistent with what one wants to hear. I define such an approach as dogmatic.

My interest is not about nuclear energy per se; the goal of my detailed hard work is actually about bringing an end to fossil fuels, which, by the numbers, it has failed to do. The question as to why nuclear energy has failed to prevent the extreme global heating with which we now live may not be technical, it may be social.

It's pretty clear that it is the latter that has prevailed, a social constraint driven by fear and ignorance, ignorance being driven by people pontificating on subjects on which they know nothing at all.

We hear endless soothsaying about so called "renewable energy" decade after decade, but none of it addressed extreme global heating since extreme global heating is observed and is in fact accelerating. It's not like vast resources have been not extended to the effort. Vast stretches of wilderness have been industrialized for it, vast materials consumed and trillions of dollars expended.

A classic loud mouthed know nothing is the President elect, but the existence of this type is hardly unknown among people who purport to comment on energy matters here.

For the record until around 1989 or so I was as dumb and poorly informed as any antinuke who writes here. Then Chernobyl blew up in 1986 and I began looking into the actual consequences as opposed to my expectations derived from being just another credulous intellectually fossilized antinuke. I was stimulated to do this when in 1986 I opened one of the reference books we used in those days before the internet, The Handbook of Chemistry to find the half lives of the released radionuclides, and came across a parameter of which I'd never heard, the neutron capture cross section. It stimulated some curiosity that led me on a path of deep investigation. That little column in that long table changed my life, causing me to look into the fascinating chemistry of nuclear fuels, and ultimately nuclear reactor engineering and design.

I wasn't hostile to so called "renewable energy" until well into my tenure at Kos and DU when I began to receive exposure to some of the clearly absurd representations about, then and now, so called "renewable energy" heavily loaded with soothsaying not supported by observed results. I'd date that change of heart on this score to somewhere in the period between 2005 and 2010. Eventually I recognized that trillions of dollars were being squandered for meager or no results, so I changed my mind and concluded that solar and wind were not merely useless but are instead pernicious, inasmuch as they generate far more complacency than energy, destroy precious wilderness rely on unacceptable large material requirements.

I am accused of being intellectually ossified, which I find amusing, especially given the source. To me the "renewables will save us" types are a set of people for whom no amount of data can change their minds: no amont of data can result in them rethinking their beliefs. In short, they demonstrate the features of a cult.

Nevertheless the data is in, if one looks.
So called "renewable energy" has failed, is failing, and will continue to fail at the only thing that matters to me, ameliorating if not reversing the extreme global heating we now are experiencing.

Thank you for your comments and giving me the opportunity to express my distain for cult thinking.

Have a nice weekend.