Nuclear power has its own problems that we need to understand.

[NNadir]

3. The people who offer this line of bullshit are generally the least capable of understanding even...

...simple engineering or science.

These are the sort of people who can't add and subtract and who isolate nuclear energy from the vast destruction their appalling ignorance causes.

We spent over 3 trillion dollars on solar and wind junk, between 2004 and 2019, all of which will be toxic landfill in less than 20 years.

The children who are toddlers today will be stuck with this mess, vast stretches of destroyed wilderness laced with access roads and rotting electronic waste just as they leave college. They will do so in an atmosphere containing close to 500 ppm of carbon dioxide, vast stretches of wilderness rendered into rotting industrial parks by wind and solar fantasies, the residue of huge tracts of mine tailings and slag unnecessarily dug to service an unsustainable reactionary fantasy of returning to the dependence on the weather for energy abandoned in the 19th century for a reason, all because a set of antinukes - the intellectual and moral equivalents of antivaxxers, although antivaxxers are responsible for far fewer deaths - couldn't be bothered to have opened a science book or a scientific paper.

Here's the fucking result:

April 27: 424.60 ppm
April 26: 424.34 ppm
April 25: 424.78 ppm
April 24: 423.96 ppm
April 23: 423.64 ppm
Last Updated: April 28, 2023

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

I have never met or heard of a whiny bourgeois shit for brains antinuke who ever considers the cost of seven million deaths from air pollution each year, or the even larger cost of climate change. I have never met one who gave a fuck about future generations and what idiotic consumerism driven by bourgeois penny pinchers will cost them..

But build a nuclear plant, they all suddenly morph to Ayn Rand wannabe morons, who blithely accept the status quo because they're overly concerned about their pocket change.

They are not merely intellectually appalling; they are morally appalling. In general, they disgust me.

Now, anti-nukes have spent decades, whipping up fear and ignorance, to destroy nuclear manufacturing infrastructure. The Vogtle reactors are basically hand made, because they had to be because ignorance won the day.

My son is a nuclear engineering Ph.D. student, a member of a group of people who are mostly there for the subject about which anti-nukes couldn't give a rat's ass, climate change.

They are going to print nuclear reactors; they are going to rebuild the infrastructure - build back better - that was destroyed by penny pinching paranoids who just don't give a fuck.

Nuclear engineers, highly trained and highly educated people, don't give a fuck what antinukes, the tiresome ignoramuses who brought us here, at CO2 concentrations of over 424 ppm less than 10 years after we first saw readings of 400 ppm at Mauna Loa. They're way too smart to make the toxic and deadly suggestion that nuclear power is "too expensive" and climate change isn't "too expensive." They're way too smart to make the toxic and deadly suggestion that nuclear power is "too dangerous" and climate change isn't "too dangerous."

Being educated, they, I'm sure would find such anti-science, anti-engineering, anti-environmental solipsistic nonsense as appalling as I do. I'll run it by them this summer when I hang out with them.

They. Give. A. Shit.

They. Work.

They don't sit on their asses picking lint out of their navels criticizing stuff they are incompetent to understand.

So called "renewable energy" solar and wind junk is garbage, an unsustainable affectation that squandered three trillion dollars and still can't produce 13 Exajoules of the 634 humanity was consuming as of 2021 according to the WEO, a text that I'm quite sure zero anti-nukes ever bothered to peruse, mostly because they just don't give a shit.

The Vogtle plants will be operating at the dawn of the 22nd century, perhaps longer if refurbished, more than 60 years after every fucking fossil fuel dependent wind turbine on this planet will have spent six decades as landfill. Toddlers today will be twenty years into their retirement and will still be getting power from Vogtle.

The Vogtle are a gift from our generation - at least the less stupid and less self serving members of our generation - to the next several generations. They were built to prevent energy poverty, for generations to come.

This said, they are probably examples of a technology that will soon go away, this after having saved millions of lives, the large scale pressurized water reactor running on a Rankine cycle to produce electricity. The reactors we'll be building in about ten years will be small, flexible reactors designed to go way beyond merely producing electricity. Printed reactors will be a key tool in restoring the infrastructure destroyed by fear and ignorance.

The "victory" of antinukes - and let's be clear, they "won" the argument by appeals to public stupidity, nuclear infrastructure was willfully destroyed - is a loss to humanity.

Nuclear advocates, and nuclear engineers, and nuclear engineering students - I'm proud to have a son among them - are tired and disgusted by the sort of people, with the planet literally burning, who lack the decency if not to be supportive of their hard and challenging work, at least would have the decency to get the fuck out of the way.

However, having observed this sort, antinukes, for many years, I can assure you that decency is not among their notable attributes.

Antinukes won't get out of the fucking way. They'll just blather on with the same tiresome chants until they die, and it will fall to history to record their malign influence that did so much to work for the destruction of the planet, to prevent saving what might have been saved, to make it too late to restore what might have been restored. There is still something left to save, and still things that might be restored, but only if the solar/wind/gas/oil/coal codependents are swept aside by the "better angels of our nature."

Have a nice weekend.