828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

[NNadir]

3. Oh, geeze...

I missed this um, precious, bit, which is so illustrative.

Let me start here:

One thing anti-nukes, including "I'm not an anti-nukes" should never try to do is math.

They're not good at it.

As for people telling me who or what I am and who or what they are all I can say is this:

People want to define themselves in spite of themselves all the time.

Case in point:

Donald Trump says he's a person who loves America. Um, he doesn't, because America is defined by its constitution for which he has no respect.

Who, therefore, gives a fuck what he says he is, when everything else he says definitively displays what he is.

Similarly, I don't give a fuck about people declaring that they are not anti-nukes when they glibly hand out anti-nuke bullshit as if it was remotely connected with reality.

I hear lots and lots and lots and lots of inane commentary from anti-nukes, including "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes, about so called "nuclear waste," about which they know either zero or next to zero, where "next to zero" is of comic book quality.

It's not like any of these assholes know, for example, ternary fission and the capture cross section of C-14 or how it applies to nuclear fuels, or how secular equilibrium applies to the availability Cs-137, or could comment on the ternary phase diagram of the Np-Am-Pu system, or for that matter rhodium selenide and Mo/Tc/Pd/Ru metal phases.

Rather they repeat horseshit from journalists who are dumb and as uneducated as they are.

For example, the "associated press reports..."

"[nuclear waste] ...stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years."

I've noted over the years that the dumb shits handing this crap out can never decide on whether it's "thousands," and "tens of thousands" and "hundreds of thousands" and even millions and then even billions of years that used nuclear fuel is alleged to be "dangerous." They just pull numbers out of their asses, depending on the time of day and to whom they believe they are speaking.

It would be interesting if to support the word "dangerous" with respect to used nuclear fuel a stupid journalist or a person quoting a stupid journalist would probably be compelled, were they rational, to find an instance where the small quantities of nuclear fuel actually injured someone and were they to find such a person or persons, they can ask as Nobel Laureate Burton Richter did in confronting a dumb shit anti-nuke, whether more people than the discovered "victims" - should they exist - would have died were nuclear energy avoided.

Since this is a sort - "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes and straight up honest anti-nukes - who don't open science books, and whine about and/or vilify people who do, this while whining about things like "ad hominem" attacks and "strawmen" that they learned in what appears to be a third grade logic class, they can't actually produce a quantitative statement of risk.

Nor do people engaged in this kind of whining understand that risk may involve pursuing a dangerous course of embracing what doesn't work at the expense of what does work to replace a risky system.

Risk quantitation - for which there is very sophisticated mathematics, and indeed now oodles of commercial and academic software - is important since every energy system features risk, but some are way riskier than others. Thus a system incapable of replacing or addressing a highly risky system is itself risky since it can't reduce risk.

Fifty years of inane cheering for solar energy has produced no result, if - and this is what I believe - the only result that matters is displacing dangerous fossil fuels, thus acting against both climate change and human suffering and death, reducing the risk of either or both. Unhappily the proportion of energy obtained from dangerous fossil fuels - they are dangerous because they kill whenever they operate normally - is rising not falling, while an asinine international community throws trillions upon trillions of dollars on so called "renewable energy."

It's doing nothing.

If there were anti-nukes who were were able understand risk analysis, and they're not, they might understand why the question of air pollution is relevant to any discussion of any form of energy, but it's clear they just don't give a shit. They have their selective attention heads up their asses:

They can't or won't make simple comparisons.

Nor can they understand, any more than a journalist who never passed a college level science course, that radiation may (and does) have uses, and in fact, given that these uses can accomplish what few other systems can accomplish as easily - for instance breaking fluorine carbon bonds - it may be dangerous to not accumulate used nuclear fuel.

Now to return to the point of anti-nukes whining that they're not anti-nukes:

I once was helping a friend paint is apartment, and he was telling me what his wife told him about what her friend said we should and could do the job, but his wife's friend wasn't there. I said, "don't tell me what you could do, man. Show me."

I don't care what people say they are. What matters to me is what they show themselves to be.

Donald Trump says, "he's a very stable genius."

I say he's a blithering unintelligent idiot; my opinion on this score unshakable. No amount of whining or crying by anyone can shake this opinion.

I don't give a fuck what he says about anything except to the extent that he encourages other stupid people.

As for one obscure anti-nuke or another, or even a famous anti-nuke, stating he or she is not an anti-nuke, I don't care about that either, except to the extent that other abysmally ignorant people join them to make stupid comparisons between the putative safety of useless forms of chimeric energy that don't work - so called "renewable energy" in this case - and forms of energy that do work, even when attacked repeatedly and loudly by blithering idiots, presently nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy saves lives because it prevents the use of dangerous fossil fuels.

German carbon intensity.

French carbon intensity.

One can access the current data at these links at any time of day on any day during any week and see which country is burning more coal in 2022.

In the United States, nuclear power is nearly 3/4 of a century old. In that time - punctuated by catcalls about "danger" the industry has a vanishingly small record of causing injury and death, this while producing prodigious amounts of energy, slowing the use of coal and gas. This calls into question whether any idiot at the Associated Press or elsewhere is remotely rational in inventing a "danger."

It doesn't matter if dumb shit "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes know shit from shinola about energy density, or the toxicology related to the semiconductor industry, or how batteries are made, or how steel and aluminum are made. They don't, but no matter.

The solar industry is dangerous because he relies on the use of dangerous fossil fuels to back it up and thus, because it is incapable of arresting the use of dangerous fossil fuels or even the growth of it's use. Fossil fuels kill whenever they are used. The toxicology and low energy to mass density are just icing on the cake.

When anti-nukes, including "I'm not an anti-nuke anti-nukes" announce, however, that they "do their own research" it has a familiar ring, which is why I place a precise equivalence between anti-nukes and anti-vaxxers. In both cases, their ignorance kills people.

We're over 421 ppm concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere this week. Anti-nukes of various stripes, obvious, honest, or deliberately disingenuous would be slightly more interesting if they actually cared about stuff that mattered.

They don't.

May 13: 421.95 ppm
May 12: 421.87 ppm
May 11: 421.71 ppm
May 10: 421.13 ppm
May 09: 419.36 ppm
Last Updated: May 14, 2022

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

Tell me if I should congratulate all the assholes in the media and elsewhere who were so concerned about used nuclear fuel while these accumulations happened?

Or don't tell me. I couldn't fucking care less.

Have a pleasant Sunday.