You still have not addressed the problem of nuclear waste. And there is not death until there is. Nevertheless, there are strong arguments for nuclear, but you have not made them.
Speaking both as a lefty and somebody who's done hands-on work involving both radioactive and other hazardous waste streams, I can speak from a 'been there, done that, worn the plastics and masks on a tanker gantry in July' perspective.
Human activity generates waste. A lot of this waste will go on to be hazardous for generations, if not properly disposed of. And for various forms of this waste, 'disposal' entails long-term storage. I've been on work processes that dealt with some decently smoky rad material (not 'kill you if you look at it' material, but 'give you the lethal dose if you spend an hour or so next to it' variety.)
I've also dealt with materials like mercury, for which we... just stick it in cans and let it sit, because mercury is mercury and it's not going to become less dangerous any time soon.
There are hazards for any sort of material generation and chemical processes. There are hazards for every form of power generation, and problematic waste streams associated with those products.
Nuke right now offers the best bang for the buck in terms of energy density and reliability vs. social/ecological cost. And, to be quite honest, there were things I preferred about working with nuke over other chemical hazards. "Lethal dose you in a couple of minutes" level of rad hazards are loud things for the proper equipment. But arsenic just looks like powder, and the way you find out that it's the bad stuff is to gather a sample, send it to a lab, and wait two months for them to get back and say "Oh hey guys don't snort that stuff."
Also, my full, contextual statement was "Nuke right now offers the best bang for the buck in terms of energy density and reliability vs. social/ecological cost."
This isn't about profitability, this is about providing grid power for a planet with over seven billion people on it.
What I believe to be the actual intractable problem concerning energy supply is the underlying premise of capitalism that a business isnтАЩt successful unless it is getting bigger. To encourage that, we have constructed a consumer society which encourages us to buy more and more consumables whether we need them or not. There are billion-dollar industries dedicated to encouraging us to spend money we donтАЩt even have to buy stuff we donтАЩt even want. We have to change our consumer behaviour and buy less, spend less, consume and travel less so we use less energy.
But buying less is incompatible with capitalism. The multiple alternate energy sources combined with a decreasing demand for energy could result in humans having a planet we are not destroying but it will take all of us understanding what we must do - consume less of everything. Those of us in developed countries could still live a happy existance if we decided to live within our environmental means while simultaneously helping less-developed countries raise their standard of living to be more equitable. Every parent in any country just wants to raise their child to have a happy, healthy, meaningful life. A parent in the Democratic Republic of Congo loves their child as much as any parent in the United States or Germany and every child should have an equal opportunity to live, learn and grow.
We have to decrease our consumer behaviour to bring about a world with greater equality and a livable future for us all. The single greatest threat to that future is consumer capitalism. The big money interests are not going to give their billions up willingly. How do we change things so they realize we all must change our behaviour - even you, Elon Musk.
Capitalism has been a cancer on our society, and one of the biggest problems we've had is that as tumors erupted everywhere, a segment of society was dedicated to convincing us that having cancer was the greatest thing ever.
But.
We aren't going to end capitalism in ten years.
Do we need to revamp our social model to center around something besides 'make more'? Hell yes we do.
But right now, we need to take the key steps for there to be a tenable future in which we can get about convincing people that there are better, healthier ways to go about coexisting.
We can talk about these things while we're doing the needful, but what we can't afford is to avoid doing the needful in favor of talking about the wishful.
And the alternative path, with the population density and demand we have (which will continue to increase as global warming ramps up the needs for climate control) is to continue to pump more CO2 into the atmosphere with other methods because solar and wind aren't anywhere near ready to supply the need.
That's the decision point we're at: continue to increase power supply one way or the other (coal, LNG, or nuclear being the only viable alternatives for demand right now) or accept mass death. Mass, mass, massive death.
We can continue to pursue solar and wind, but right now it's not there. It may never be there.
Doubling down on your conspiracy theory doesn't give you more credibility. There has been a huge amount of research on Three Mile Island and the best estimate for number of deaths is zero. I do cancer epidemiology research for a living. There is junk science from the Right and there is junk science from the Left. You are promoting it from the Left.
Jacobs Journal of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine published an article documenting
тАЬa remarkable and statistically-significant 28% overall increase in infant mortality rates in the coastal strip group relative to the inland control groupтАЭ since Diablo Canyon opened.
A lousy paper in a predatory for profit journal. The paper has a non-comparable comparison group and the author no attempt to control for that -- because he couldn't. The author's data source were publications downloaded from web sites! It would be possible to do this kind of study correctly but it would take far more work, getting individual level data and using much smaller geographic units in the analyses. We have seen a lot of this kind of junk science during the COVID pandemic and the nutty far right promoted every lousy paper to promote things like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and to trash the vaccines.
A review of the literature is also a valid method. Of course it is not an experimental method because it would be unethical to set up control groups and experimental groups of infants and deliberately expose the experimental group to dangerous radiation. Observations of longitudinal changes is also valid. The paper says that infant mortality has increased 28% in the vicinity of Diablo Canyon since the plant opened in the 1980s . There is correlation. The question is whether it is a causal correlation. Sounds more like you don't like the conclusion, not that it is junk science.
The problem is that there are fortunes available for researchers that support industries that harm - tobacco, fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers as well as the nuclear industry. Money to research issues like public health and climate change and the harmful effects of big, money-making industries are much more difficult to fund. As a researcher, I would think that this would be well known to you. Cancer research can be different if the research will benefit lucrative industries like big pharma.
But sometimes some of those big industries are incorrectly attacked when their products are NOT dangerous. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide RoundUp, is a great example. But there is an entire industry of ambulance-chasing attorneys and activists who have a vested interest in the junk science and they have convinced scientifically-illiterate judges. :( You don't assume something or some industry is harmful without evidence.
And we have a LOT of evidence that some industries are harmful and don't do anything about them -- coal is probably example #1 today. (Germany closing nuclear plants and increasing use of coal was one of the worst environmental decisions in many years!) I have just started a study of individual exposure to air pollution and I am focusing on particulate matter from diesel exhaust, which I fear may show similar bad effects. I am hoping that the Ford F-150 Lightning truck will be followed by much larger and more powerful trucks that will be able to totally replace even the most powerful current diesel trucks. The same could happen eventually with the current diesel-electric locomotives. It probably isn't realistic to electrify every railroad line in the US but hopefully battery powered electric locomotives will be reality soon. It should be possible to switch locomotives every few hundred miles.
It took generations to do anything about tobacco and lead, both of which had strong evidence of harm. Lead is particularly tragic because it was NEVER necessary to put tetraethyl lead into gasoline -- refiners already knew how to make anti-knock gasoline, by adding aromatics. One oil company, Amoco, famously did this for part of its marketing area, the eastern and southerin US. The problem was that the cost was one cent per gallon higher than the leaded versions other oil companies sold. For one cent per gallon, two generations were poisoned. And lead could have been completely removed from paints in the 1930s, as consumer tastes had changed to prefer the brighter zinc and titanium based whites, but it did not happen until four decades later.
Population research in cancer epidemiology really doesn't impact Big Pharma. But the attacks on Big Pharma have absolutely killed people during the COVID pandemic because they cause people to question whether the vaccines are safe and/or effective. (I am only up to speed on the mRNA vaccines from Biontech/Pfizer and from Moderna, and they are incredibly safe and incredibly effective!) During the pandemic I have publically complained about the difficulty of getting descriptive epidemiology research funded. The problem with it isn't Big Pharma, is that stakeholder groups, including the US Congress, that only want to fund research that is likely to bring immediate or at least short term changes in treatments or preventions. One example of how this has caused harm is that there are very few studies on the incidence of myocarditis in young people. We actually do not know whether the mRNA vaccines' apparent increase in rates of (generally mild) myocarditis is real or not. Because (sometimes severe) myocarditis is a side effect of actually getting COVID, it is entirely possible that the vaccines reduce rates of myocarditis, but because we haven't done the studies, we don't know one way or another.
(Oh FTR I haven't done any industry sponsored research in years.)
From what I know, Charlie is right about coal and lead. And Invermectin. I disagree on the safety of RoundUp but I have only a general understanding of the science - although there is credible research on both sides of the argument. It is not coincidence that generally industry research supports the argument that it is safe and agricultural research shows it is harmful. I know it is getting more and more difficult to get food that hasnтАЩt been grown without RoundUp because industry money has made sure that products grown using RoundUp can not be labeled as such because people wouldnтАЩt buy them. And thatтАЩs suspicious in my way of thinking.
No, I not a lab tech and you can easily figure out who I am if you really wanted to, just as you could find the definitive study on mortality after the Three Mile Island incident if you wanted to. To save you the trouble, here it is:
Talbott EO, Youk AO, McHugh-Pemu KP, Zborowski JV. Long-term follow-up of the residents of the Three Mile Island accident area: 1979-1998. Environ Health Perspect. 2003 Mar;111(3):341-8. doi: 10.1289/ehp.5662. Erratum in: Environ Health Perspect. 2003 Jul;111(9):A453. PMID: 12611664; PMCID: PMC1241392.
You suggested that there might have been some kind of cover-up. The nutty far right has been saying the same thing the entire COVID pandemic. That is the very definition of conspiracy theory.
And the nutty far right has also been denigrating the expertise of those who have been working in the field for years, as you just did to me.
"as far as we have been told"
Yes, the nutty far left is also into conspiracy theories.
You still have not addressed the problem of nuclear waste. And there is not death until there is. Nevertheless, there are strong arguments for nuclear, but you have not made them.
You are the one who posted a conspiracy theory in a comment, not me.
Speaking both as a lefty and somebody who's done hands-on work involving both radioactive and other hazardous waste streams, I can speak from a 'been there, done that, worn the plastics and masks on a tanker gantry in July' perspective.
Human activity generates waste. A lot of this waste will go on to be hazardous for generations, if not properly disposed of. And for various forms of this waste, 'disposal' entails long-term storage. I've been on work processes that dealt with some decently smoky rad material (not 'kill you if you look at it' material, but 'give you the lethal dose if you spend an hour or so next to it' variety.)
I've also dealt with materials like mercury, for which we... just stick it in cans and let it sit, because mercury is mercury and it's not going to become less dangerous any time soon.
There are hazards for any sort of material generation and chemical processes. There are hazards for every form of power generation, and problematic waste streams associated with those products.
Nuke right now offers the best bang for the buck in terms of energy density and reliability vs. social/ecological cost. And, to be quite honest, there were things I preferred about working with nuke over other chemical hazards. "Lethal dose you in a couple of minutes" level of rad hazards are loud things for the proper equipment. But arsenic just looks like powder, and the way you find out that it's the bad stuff is to gather a sample, send it to a lab, and wait two months for them to get back and say "Oh hey guys don't snort that stuff."
Also, my full, contextual statement was "Nuke right now offers the best bang for the buck in terms of energy density and reliability vs. social/ecological cost."
This isn't about profitability, this is about providing grid power for a planet with over seven billion people on it.
What I believe to be the actual intractable problem concerning energy supply is the underlying premise of capitalism that a business isnтАЩt successful unless it is getting bigger. To encourage that, we have constructed a consumer society which encourages us to buy more and more consumables whether we need them or not. There are billion-dollar industries dedicated to encouraging us to spend money we donтАЩt even have to buy stuff we donтАЩt even want. We have to change our consumer behaviour and buy less, spend less, consume and travel less so we use less energy.
But buying less is incompatible with capitalism. The multiple alternate energy sources combined with a decreasing demand for energy could result in humans having a planet we are not destroying but it will take all of us understanding what we must do - consume less of everything. Those of us in developed countries could still live a happy existance if we decided to live within our environmental means while simultaneously helping less-developed countries raise their standard of living to be more equitable. Every parent in any country just wants to raise their child to have a happy, healthy, meaningful life. A parent in the Democratic Republic of Congo loves their child as much as any parent in the United States or Germany and every child should have an equal opportunity to live, learn and grow.
We have to decrease our consumer behaviour to bring about a world with greater equality and a livable future for us all. The single greatest threat to that future is consumer capitalism. The big money interests are not going to give their billions up willingly. How do we change things so they realize we all must change our behaviour - even you, Elon Musk.
Capitalism has been a cancer on our society, and one of the biggest problems we've had is that as tumors erupted everywhere, a segment of society was dedicated to convincing us that having cancer was the greatest thing ever.
But.
We aren't going to end capitalism in ten years.
Do we need to revamp our social model to center around something besides 'make more'? Hell yes we do.
But right now, we need to take the key steps for there to be a tenable future in which we can get about convincing people that there are better, healthier ways to go about coexisting.
We can talk about these things while we're doing the needful, but what we can't afford is to avoid doing the needful in favor of talking about the wishful.
And the alternative path, with the population density and demand we have (which will continue to increase as global warming ramps up the needs for climate control) is to continue to pump more CO2 into the atmosphere with other methods because solar and wind aren't anywhere near ready to supply the need.
That's the decision point we're at: continue to increase power supply one way or the other (coal, LNG, or nuclear being the only viable alternatives for demand right now) or accept mass death. Mass, mass, massive death.
We can continue to pursue solar and wind, but right now it's not there. It may never be there.
Doubling down on your conspiracy theory doesn't give you more credibility. There has been a huge amount of research on Three Mile Island and the best estimate for number of deaths is zero. I do cancer epidemiology research for a living. There is junk science from the Right and there is junk science from the Left. You are promoting it from the Left.
Jacobs Journal of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine published an article documenting
тАЬa remarkable and statistically-significant 28% overall increase in infant mortality rates in the coastal strip group relative to the inland control groupтАЭ since Diablo Canyon opened.
A lousy paper in a predatory for profit journal. The paper has a non-comparable comparison group and the author no attempt to control for that -- because he couldn't. The author's data source were publications downloaded from web sites! It would be possible to do this kind of study correctly but it would take far more work, getting individual level data and using much smaller geographic units in the analyses. We have seen a lot of this kind of junk science during the COVID pandemic and the nutty far right promoted every lousy paper to promote things like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and to trash the vaccines.
Here is the actual paper. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/coseteng1/docs/busby.pdf
A review of the literature is also a valid method. Of course it is not an experimental method because it would be unethical to set up control groups and experimental groups of infants and deliberately expose the experimental group to dangerous radiation. Observations of longitudinal changes is also valid. The paper says that infant mortality has increased 28% in the vicinity of Diablo Canyon since the plant opened in the 1980s . There is correlation. The question is whether it is a causal correlation. Sounds more like you don't like the conclusion, not that it is junk science.
The problem is that there are fortunes available for researchers that support industries that harm - tobacco, fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers as well as the nuclear industry. Money to research issues like public health and climate change and the harmful effects of big, money-making industries are much more difficult to fund. As a researcher, I would think that this would be well known to you. Cancer research can be different if the research will benefit lucrative industries like big pharma.
But sometimes some of those big industries are incorrectly attacked when their products are NOT dangerous. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide RoundUp, is a great example. But there is an entire industry of ambulance-chasing attorneys and activists who have a vested interest in the junk science and they have convinced scientifically-illiterate judges. :( You don't assume something or some industry is harmful without evidence.
And we have a LOT of evidence that some industries are harmful and don't do anything about them -- coal is probably example #1 today. (Germany closing nuclear plants and increasing use of coal was one of the worst environmental decisions in many years!) I have just started a study of individual exposure to air pollution and I am focusing on particulate matter from diesel exhaust, which I fear may show similar bad effects. I am hoping that the Ford F-150 Lightning truck will be followed by much larger and more powerful trucks that will be able to totally replace even the most powerful current diesel trucks. The same could happen eventually with the current diesel-electric locomotives. It probably isn't realistic to electrify every railroad line in the US but hopefully battery powered electric locomotives will be reality soon. It should be possible to switch locomotives every few hundred miles.
It took generations to do anything about tobacco and lead, both of which had strong evidence of harm. Lead is particularly tragic because it was NEVER necessary to put tetraethyl lead into gasoline -- refiners already knew how to make anti-knock gasoline, by adding aromatics. One oil company, Amoco, famously did this for part of its marketing area, the eastern and southerin US. The problem was that the cost was one cent per gallon higher than the leaded versions other oil companies sold. For one cent per gallon, two generations were poisoned. And lead could have been completely removed from paints in the 1930s, as consumer tastes had changed to prefer the brighter zinc and titanium based whites, but it did not happen until four decades later.
Population research in cancer epidemiology really doesn't impact Big Pharma. But the attacks on Big Pharma have absolutely killed people during the COVID pandemic because they cause people to question whether the vaccines are safe and/or effective. (I am only up to speed on the mRNA vaccines from Biontech/Pfizer and from Moderna, and they are incredibly safe and incredibly effective!) During the pandemic I have publically complained about the difficulty of getting descriptive epidemiology research funded. The problem with it isn't Big Pharma, is that stakeholder groups, including the US Congress, that only want to fund research that is likely to bring immediate or at least short term changes in treatments or preventions. One example of how this has caused harm is that there are very few studies on the incidence of myocarditis in young people. We actually do not know whether the mRNA vaccines' apparent increase in rates of (generally mild) myocarditis is real or not. Because (sometimes severe) myocarditis is a side effect of actually getting COVID, it is entirely possible that the vaccines reduce rates of myocarditis, but because we haven't done the studies, we don't know one way or another.
(Oh FTR I haven't done any industry sponsored research in years.)
From what I know, Charlie is right about coal and lead. And Invermectin. I disagree on the safety of RoundUp but I have only a general understanding of the science - although there is credible research on both sides of the argument. It is not coincidence that generally industry research supports the argument that it is safe and agricultural research shows it is harmful. I know it is getting more and more difficult to get food that hasnтАЩt been grown without RoundUp because industry money has made sure that products grown using RoundUp can not be labeled as such because people wouldnтАЩt buy them. And thatтАЩs suspicious in my way of thinking.
As the other, much more articulate, Charlie opened with, "In a court of law, Truth is actually a thing".
It is also a thing in science, too.
No, I not a lab tech and you can easily figure out who I am if you really wanted to, just as you could find the definitive study on mortality after the Three Mile Island incident if you wanted to. To save you the trouble, here it is:
Talbott EO, Youk AO, McHugh-Pemu KP, Zborowski JV. Long-term follow-up of the residents of the Three Mile Island accident area: 1979-1998. Environ Health Perspect. 2003 Mar;111(3):341-8. doi: 10.1289/ehp.5662. Erratum in: Environ Health Perspect. 2003 Jul;111(9):A453. PMID: 12611664; PMCID: PMC1241392.
You suggested that there might have been some kind of cover-up. The nutty far right has been saying the same thing the entire COVID pandemic. That is the very definition of conspiracy theory.
And the nutty far right has also been denigrating the expertise of those who have been working in the field for years, as you just did to me.