Jim Hansen compares anti-nukes to climate denialists and anti-evolutionists.

[NNadir]

Long considered one of the world's most important climate scientists, Jim Hansen is well on a path to becoming one of the World's loudest supporter of the world's largest, and most successful forms of climate chantge gas free energy.

Addressing an anti-nuke in the ASAP section of the scientific journal Environmental Science and Technology he writes:

The critique by Rabilloud1whose only listed professional affiliation is an antinuclear activist group is grossly biased and contains numerous misleading, hyperbolic, and erroneous claims about our paper2 and about nuclear energy in general. The nature of his comments bears a striking resemblance to the fallacious reasoning commonly employed by climate change deniers to try to undermine public concern about the climate crisis. Specifically, he resorts to cherry-picking of information and diversionary (red herring) arguments,
demands unrealistic exactness, and cites untrustworthy sources. None of his claims undermine any of the key results of our paper, most notably our conclusion that nuclear energy has
prevented, and can continue to prevent, a very high number of fatalities and very large greenhouse gas emissions due to fossil fuel burning. It follows that, as uncomfortable as it is for many well-intentioned environmentalists to admit, efforts to undermine nuclear energy also undermine mitigation of climate change and air pollution, with a heavy cost in human lives and
potentially disastrous future climate change.

Rabilloud’s first section relates mainly to the mortality factor we used to convert historical and projected nuclear energy to number of fatalities. Here he demands exactness/perfection in an inherently approximate set of computationsmuch as climate deniers do with, for example, climate model computations (and much as deniers of biological evolution demand a perfect fossil record).

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es404806w

I couldn't have said it better myself.

However, I have news for Jim Hansen. At this point the hope that the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy, nuclear energy, can save very much is essentially lost.

Unfortunately fear and ignorance have won the day. 2013 is coming in as the second worst year for increases in climate change gases ever observed, losing out only to 1998, when the huge Indonesian fires injected billion ton quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

[GliderGuider]

1. Hansens's view is a bit narrow, I think.

If all we had to worry about was climate change, he might have a case. However, what we face isn't a single-factor problem but a multifactorial predicament. The ongoing collapse of the planetary biosphere renders his whole line of argument moot. We've been in desperate trouble for at least the last 50 years, and possibly for the last 200 years. A bit more nuclear power wouldn't help at this point, even if it could gain public acceptance. We'd barely got enough time left to finish a single round of planning and building before the whole human enterprise begins its final slide into the shitter.

[NNadir]

2. I think something meaningful might have been done much earlier...

...than 200 years ago, but understand that my post does not fall into the category of a claim that nuclear energy can do anything at this point.

I appreciate Hansen's activism certainly, but my post in the admittedly bitter category of "I told you so."

If he's a day late and a dollar short, he's hardly alone.

[GliderGuider]

3. The reason I don't feel bitter

The reason I don't feel bitter is that I don't think anything could have been done, no matter when we started. Once we had opened the Pandora's box and let out the fossil fuels, we were done. All we have left now is the hopium.

The reason I think nothing could have been done comes from my reading about non-equilibrium thermodynamics, its role in the creation of life, the probable encoding of gradient-dissipation imperatives in all living DNA, the influence of our resulting genetic coding on our behavior via adapted neurological mechanisms (from evolutionary psychology) and the influence of this genetically-shaped behavior on all aspects of human culture.

Basically all of human culture has been created on the foundation of one core imperative - to acquire as much free energy as possible to ensure the survival of the species. All else is elaboration, embroidery or misdirection.

The problem is that we are not genetically adapted to care about waste products. When our behavioral circuitry was being shaped half a million years ago, waste products from energy production were a non-issue, so we never developed adaptive responses for them.

Nor are we genetically predisposed to base our decisions on neocortical reasoning. Most human decisions are driven by emotion, and the acquisition of energy for survival has a very high emotional weighting. Waste production - especially invisible waste production like CO2 - doesn't. So we ignore it. And we largely ignored a host of issues around nuclear waste - until it became an obvious, immediate threat as it did at Fukushima.

You and I can recognize the problems associated with CO2 or nuclear waste disposal, but the ancient hominid brain where our collective behavior originates does not. So when Fukushima happens people get alarmed, and rather than reduce their energy consumption and risk the future of their societies they turn to fossil fuels - because CO2 is invisible and there's all this doubt about the veracity of global warming, you see.

This hypothesis explains a lot: our addiction-like growth mania and the constant drive to use more energy; the constantly increasing complexity of civilization; our ability to ignore realistic existential threats; our antipathy towards de-growth; our willingness to believe the deniers and hopium merchants of renewable power; our willingness to disbelieve the doomers/realists/Cassandras. It also explains our willingness to accept any and all sources of energy no matter what their potential consequences, and our inability to get worried about those consequences until after the shit has already hit the fan.

So, I'm not bitter. Rather than being stupid, venal or broken, human beings are quite simply operating according to spec. It's just that because we weren't given an operating manual for ourselves, we didn't know what the specifications were. In fact, not knowing the specs was part of the specification, or else we'd have been able to short-circuit the genetic imperative for survival, and we'd have gone extinct hundreds of thousand years ago.

You and the others here may not care about any of this, or think that it's a bunch of bullshit. That's OK, such reactions are part and parcel of the genetic species-protection circuitry built into the specification...

[NNadir]

5. I have personally never regarded reality as a programming exercise in automata theory.

I have always thought that the world was a little less predictable.

To each his own though.

[GliderGuider]

6. Of course. That's what you're programmed to think ;-)

We're not full automata though, or you and I wouldn't be having this conversation. It's just that the stage upon which we strut and fret our hour may actually be much smaller than we believe it is.

On edit: my hypothesis should be easy to disprove. Simply convince 1,000 random strangers to take a 90% pay cut overnight, in the interest of leaving more resources for other peoples' kids...

[NNadir]

8. I am programmed to ask you why you are programmed to choose...

...90% as a proof level.

I think that Kurt Vonnegut covered this territory some time ago, but it's always fun to be programmed to rerun the program.

Where's Jon Von Neumann when you need him?

Programmed to be dead, I'd guess.

[GliderGuider]

11. ;-)

[pscot]

4. I didn't expect to live long enough

to catch the denouement. Now it seems that I may. We live in interesting times.

[GliderGuider]

7. Same here.

It's shocking how fast that thin white line of the tsunami rushes in from the horizon...

[NoOneMan]

9. Then it couldn't be so heartbreaking if you old people just decided to shuffle off...

And free up some resources for us to slog through the mess. Now, what I suggest is not an altruistic act on your behalf. He who wills me the most will have a monument built to them in my off grid human retreat, which, centuries later, will likely become an alter to the neo-primative tribe of survivors. You'll be immortalized and bigger than Jesus. Hell, you'll be bigger than the Beatles.

Its just something I've been kicking around. My sales pitch might need some work.

[pscot]

10. What!? And miss the baby jeebus coming on a cloud

to kick your heathen behind? I'll go when I'm ready, if I don't die first. I am divesting though. I never could stand people who went away and left a mess behind. If the fools who came after build monuments to us, the myth of Human Progress will be forever laid to rest.