The anti-nuke squad tries to steal Jim Hansen's thunder and manages to look stupid again.

[NNadir]

In 2013, the famous climate scientist, Jim Hansen, working with lead author Pushker A. Kharecha published a now fairly famous and widely cited paper showing that nuclear power saves lives: Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power( Pushker A. Kharecha and James E. Hansen
Environmental Science & Technology 2013 47 (9), 4889-4895).

Almost immediately, the "renewables will save us" anti-nukes Benjamin Sovacool, and filer of lawsuits against PNAS, Mark Z. Jacobson, piped in to say that "nuclear energy is too expensive...too dangerous...blah...blah...blah..." and that wind and solar and finding whatever rivers are left to destroy and destroying them, would save the world better than nuclear could. (Jacobson's lawsuit against PNAS involved PNAS publishing a criticism authored by a plethora of other scientists, including some at his own institution, of his "renewable energy will save the world," paper published in um, PNAS, suggesting that his "save the world" ideas wouldn't work.) Apparently neither 1.8 million lives (as of 2013) already saved by nuclear power were "too expensive" and "too dangerous." This took place in the comments section of a subsequent issue of EST.

Kharecha and Hansen's dismissal of their whining was a joy to behold.

Of course, I've been hearing my whole adult life that "renewable energy will save the world," and I'm certainly not young. It's been going on loudly, pronounced by anti-nukes like Sovacool but it hasn't done shit to save lives historically. Since 2013, eight years ago, somewhere around 50 million people lost their lives to air pollution, this while trillion dollar quantities of money were thrown at solar and wind fantasies for no result.

Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks, 1990–2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 (Lancet 2016; 388: 1659–724) One can easily locate in this open sourced document compiled by an international consortium of medical and scientific professionals how many people die from causes related to air pollution, particulates, ozone, etc.

Now Sovacool, is pretending to have a brain by parroting Hansen's methodology and applying it to putative solar and wind fantasies that haven't come, aren't here, and won't be here at any time on any scale that is meaningful despite more than half a century of loud cheering: Positive Externalities of Decarbonization: Quantifying the Full Potential of Avoided Deaths and Displaced Carbon Emissions from Renewable Energy and Nuclear Power (Benjamin K. Sovacool and Chukwuka G. Monyei, Environmental Science & Technology 2021 55 (8), 5258-5271.

Let me reprint the title of their paper: Positive Externalities of Decarbonization: Quantifying the Full Potential of Avoided Deaths and Displaced Carbon Emissions from Renewable Energy and Nuclear Power.

The italics and bold in the repeated title are mine.

It is worth noting that Kharecha's and Hansen's paper included the word "historical," which means that it's based on real data, and not modeling or projection.

I have called up the full text of this appalling paper of Sovacool's. Nowhere in it do the words "steel" or "copper" or "lanthanides" (or the oft used term for "lanthanides," "rare earths" ) appear. No LCA (life cycle analysis) is mentioned except to cite a single 2008 paper (among thousands of papers) about the LCA of nuclear energy, with no data from it reported in the text. Um, firing up a steel retort filled with coke made by heating coal with coal does in fact, kill people, in normal operations.

I know from experience with reading Benny-boy's tripe that he himself knows essentially zero about nuclear engineering, or for that matter, nuclear fuel. (I've read his Ph.D. thesis which involved among other things, interviewing anonymous power company executives.)

It took Sovacool 8 years, again measured by 50 million air pollution deaths, to come up with this list of offering, in lieu of real data about real energy produced, a list of scenarios, about so called "renewable energy," "could" do if only this or only that... All of these scenarios have been falling by the wayside decade after decade while people die and the atmosphere collapses, wildernesses are destroyed to chase after bourgeois fantasies, poor people are consigned to dig cobalt for electric cars and otherwise ignored, etc., etc., etc.

This statement from the paper is as fallacious as a statement that chloroquinine cures Covid:

Third, despite a declining contribution of major fossil fuel sources such as oil and coal to primary energy generation, projections show natural gas maintaining a significant role as a primary energy source. For instance, while gas is estimated to contribute to 13.2% of the historical emissions, computed projections show it increasing its share of emissions to 18.3%. This is despite a considerable decrease of about 62% between historical and projected values. A reason for this may be hinged on the ability of gas to help balance the intermittency of some renewable energy sources, notably wind and solar, and to also assist with compressed air energy storage. However, caution is advocated to ensure gas serves as a transitory energy provider rather than acting as a permanent replacement.

The use of every fossil fuel in this century has been rising, not falling, and gas is hardly "transitional" - this is the really, really, really big lie - because the increase in the use of gas has been vastly outstripping the use (measured in units of energy, exajoules) much faster than all the solar and wind energy generated on the planet.

Here is the data posted this morning of the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory over the last 5 days as of this writing:

April 30: 420.54 ppm
April 29: 419.85 ppm
April 28: 419.75 ppm
April 27: 419.49 ppm
April 26: 420.01 ppm
Last Updated: May 1, 2021

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2 (Accessed 5/2/21, 12:01 pm)

The first time we ever saw a weekly average reading higher than 400 ppm (400.03 ppm), was on May 26, 2013, the year Hansen's paper was published. Less than 8 years later, we're scraping 420 ppm.

In the year 2000, around the time that Benny Boy types and their cohorts got their way in a major industrial nation when Germany signed on to shut its nuclear plants and go reactionary with so called renewable energy, the highest reading of that year was recorded for the week beginning April 26, 2000: 372.42 ppm.

Twenty-one years, almost 50 ppm higher! And you know what, the rate of increases in carbon dioxide is accelerating, not decelerating.

Sorry Benny Boy, but the time for so called "renewable energy" to shit or get off the pot was decades ago. It didn't. In fact, there is a reason it was abandoned in the 19th century. You ought to look it up. It's way too fucking late for more "scenarios." All the money in the world is not going to make so called "renewable energy" work. Maybe, just maybe, it's beginning, slightly, to seep in, I did see the Benny Boy paper about how we could "just" mine the ocean floor for metals because so called "renewable energy" might use up all those on land.

To wit:

Although mining in terrestrial areas is likely to continue to meet the demands of low-carbon technologies in the nearer term, we need to carefully consider mineral sources beneath the oceans in the longer term. The International Seabed Authority, set up under the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Law of the Sea, is in the process of issuing regulations related to oceanic mineral extraction. This process is a rare opportunity to be proactive in setting forth science-based environmental safeguards for mineral extraction. For metals such as cobalt and nickel, ocean minerals hold important prospects on the continental shelf within states' exclusive economic zones as well as the outer continental shelf regions. Within international waters, metallic nodules found in the vast Clarion-Clipperton Zone of the Pacific as well as in cobalt and tellurium crusts, which are found in seamounts worldwide, provide some of the richest deposits of metals for green technologies.

Sovacool et al., Science 03 Jan 2020: Vol. 367, Issue 6473, pp. 30-33 (Sustainable minerals and metals for a low-carbon future.)

One would have to be completely out one's fucking mind to write something quite so delusional. You're going to mine the ocean floor powered by the sun and the wind only?

Out of your fucking mind...

This would be a good time to start thinking Benny boy, not that I expect it, since I've been suffering your insufferable ignorance for a long time.

Ignorance kills people; since 2013, again, about 50 million of them, all dead because we didn't commit to going nuclear, long ago, as Hansen suggested we should have done long ago, by appeal to historical data.

If I sound angry, it's because I am.

Have a pleasant Sunday.

[-misanthroptimist]

1. I get it.

Everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot, probably delusional. So, I will put you on ignore.

Enjoy your nuclear waste...oh, and those fusion reactors which stay a constant 20 years in the future!

[NNadir]

2. No you don't get it.

If you did, instead of whining about so called "nuclear waste," which has a spectacular record of being stored on site without killing anyone, you would at least pretend to care about the 19,000 people who died yesterday from fossil fuel and biomass waste (aka air pollution), 19,000 people who will die today from fossil fuel and biomass waste (aka air pollution), and 19,000 people who will die tomorrow from fossil fuel and biomass waste (aka air pollution), and every damned day after that.

You know how I generate my energy ideas? I read scientific journals, assemble something called data. I, um, think.

I don't mumble tired half a century old slogans about "dangerous nuclear waste," without being able to show a single person in this country who died from its storage for more than half a century.

I make infinitely clear how I feel about the intellectual and moral status of people who do parrot these tired slogans, year after year, after year, decade after decade, and if a sloganeer correctly interprets how I regard them, well, you know what they say, the hands on a broken clock is right two times a day.

Have a nice life.

[Eko]

5. Just because people dont share the same thoughts as you on nuclear

doesn't mean that they dont care about the 19,000 people who died yesterday from fossil fuel and biomass waste. Your continued use of straw man on people shows a certain level of intellectual and moral status of yourself.

[Bobstandard]

3. You don't sound angry. Truculent, yes.

From you tone, especially in your reply to a commenter, you sound like someone wildly invested in the nuclear power industry. I hope you’re getting paid.

[NNadir]

4. If one makes an assertion that the only reason another person can take a moral position...

...is for money, it says more about the person making the assertion than it does about the person about whom the assertion is being made.

In my experience, having been writing about nuclear energy and studying it intensely ever since Chernobyl established the "worst case," is that people who wonder about my professional relationship to nuclear energy are generally bourgeois consumer types.

They're really not my kind of people.

They're the people who say that "nuclear energy is too expensive" for example, without understanding that the construction of a nuclear plant builds infrastructure that can operate for up to 80 years, and thus each plant represents a gift from one generation to another.

If one doesn't give a shit about future generations, one can take the position that if "If I have to pay for something that will be be most valuable to people after I die, I won't do it."

That's not my position. My position on nuclear energy has cost me in a number of ways; but since ethics and morality are extremely important to me, particularly as I approach the end of my life, I can take no other position but one that is respectful of future generations.

Do you understand?

No?

That's not my problem.

Have a nice Sunday afternoon.

[hunter]

6. Wind and solar enthusiasts inevitably become shills for the filthy natural gas industry.

Without natural gas their fantasy falls apart.

Alas, there's enough natural gas in the ground to obliterate the biosphere as we know it, and we seem hell bent on extracting it.

We need to quit fossil fuels now, not at some indefinite time in the future.

[NNadir]

8. The dependence of so called "renewable energy" on access to...

...dangerous natural gas is obviated in one of my recent posts here about India, electricity and water supplies. The authors of the paper discussed didn't state as much explicitly but the implicit relationship was thinly veiled.

What bugs me about this group of gas apologists hyping the failed "solar and wind will save us" lie is that they keep using this outright lie about gas being "transitional" ignoring the fact that in units of energy, Joules or Exajoules, the increases in use of gas each year easily outstrips by an appreciable factor, increases in the energy generated by solar and wind.

Sovacool is such a poor thinker, and his "ideas" if they can be called that - ripping up the ocean floor to satiate his idiotic fantasy for example - are so outrageous, that it mystifies me that he continues to be published in major scientific journals.

I don't expect to see many papers published by the guy he acknowledges in the present tripe, Jacobson, in PNAS in the future. Jacobson is a walking advertisement for the argument that sending your kids to Stanford may be a bad idea. One hopes he's never asked to teach a course on science professionalism.