dangerous fossil fuel waste (sometimes called carbon dioxide) and the world's largest, by far, source of renewable energy, hydroelectricity.
As usual though, there are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of whiny yuppie brats sitting at the computer wondering about what
could happen involving radiation and not what
is happening on a tens of billion tons per year scale.
In fact, the anti-nuke religion never tires of making stuff up, usually scenarios that are not now, and never have remotely been connected with reality.
Of course, all fundementalist religions start with ridiculous scenarios. The fundementalist Christian religion starts, for instance, with the idea that
if you "believe" in evolution, Jesus will come back and fry your ass for eternity. Never mind that the probability of Jesus coming back and actually frying your ass for eternity is essentially zero, the religion depends on you
fearing the possibility.
All fundementalist religions begin with premises and then cherry picks fringe scientific opinion to justify patently absurd
immutable (or so the fundementalist claims) dogma.
Richard Dawkins - who is one of the most boring atheists on the planet by the way - takes to task the fundementalist geologist Kurt Wise who, despite a PhD from Harvard
in Geology, is trying to prove that the world is only a few thousand years old:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_21_4.htmlDawkins writes:
Kurt Wise doesn’t need the challenge; he volunteers that, even if all the evidence in the universe flatly contradicted Scripture, and even if he had reached the point of admitting this to himself, he would still take his stand on Scripture and deny the evidence. This leaves me, as a scientist, speechless. I cannot imagine what it must be like to have a mind capable of such doublethink. It reminds me of Winston Smith in 1984 struggling to believe that two plus two equals five if Big Brother said so. But that was fiction and, anyway, Winston was tortured into submission. Kurt Wise—and presumably others like him who are less candid—has suffered no such physical coercion.
So it is with the fundementalist anti-nuke religion. If you ask the fundementalist anti-nuke to produce a single incident of a person being injured by the storage of used nuclear fuel, they will not be able to do it. I've done this thousands of times and I have never actually gotten a straight answer because, in fact, the number of people injured by used nuclear fuel in this country is zero. Thus the response I usually get from these fundementalists consists entirely of the claim that I treat them with contempt, which as it happens, is exactly right.
If you ask an anti-nuke to read a scientific paper on say, the external cost of the (industrially nonexistent) wind powered compressed air energy storage system as compared to the external cost of nuclear energy - Denholm, Environ. Sci. Technol. 2005, 39, 1903-1911 for instance - they will simply
ignore what the article says, which is that the external cost of such wind energy is estimated to be 4 to 10 times greater than the cost of nuclear energy (as measured in the release of dangerous fossil fuel waste to the atmosphere.)
If I ask an anti-nuke to compare two real numbers, the amount of energy produced by nuclear energy and any other form of climate change gas free forms of energy, the fundementalist anti-nuke will do one or more of the following things: 1) Ignore the numbers. 2) Start talking illiterate "percent" talk. 3) Produce illiterate links to Greenpeace (and dumber) websites. 4) Talk about 2050, when most of us here will be dead. 5) Sulk about how mean I am.
But like all fundementalist religions, the anti-nuke religion depends wholly on obliviousness and indifference to data and experience and for that matter, ethics.
Nuclear power has saved millions of lives. The anti-nuke religion couldn't care less about those lives.
IGNORANCE KILLS. It always has; it does so now; it always will do so. Nuclear energy does not need to be perfect to be vastly superior to its
only exajoule scale alternative, coal and all other forms of energy as well. It only has to be vastly superior, which, in fact it is.
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