"One cannot make peace with one's friends. One can only make peace with one's enemies."
The sentiment you express so succinctly is worthy and very clearly on a high moral level.
That said,
I am not at a high moral level, inasmuch as I freely and unrelentingly express my contempt.
What I note of Yitzak Rabin and for that matter, Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, is that they were all shot.
Thus I am not
interested in making peace with these people whatsoever. I consider that they are engaged in the
active act of trying to kill my children through poisoning with dangerous fossil fuel waste. Their attempt to vandalize the Oyster Creek nuclear plant is not an abstraction with me. It is, on the contrary, involved with my children's lung tissue.
Quoth I more than a year ago:
I cannot prevent bad things from happening to my sons. I put my little guy on the school bus this morning and that is dangerous, because there could be a patch of ice, or poorly maintained brakes. I try to advocate for school bus safety, but I am fully aware that something could go wrong. You can't do much more than minimize the probability of death or injury to your children. I want my children to have the best chance possible to thrive, to be healthy, to experience all the intense beauty of the world for as long as they can. So I'm writing all about nuclear power for a wholly selfish reason, to protect my own. More nuclear reactors in my view will give everybody's children, including my own, their best shot.
Profile of A "Dangerous Nuclear Waste:" Cesium, Part 3.I have added the bold for this occasion.
To answer some of your other questions, I believe that the failure to "agree" on this matter goes back much further than the twentieth century when the
last form of
new primary energy was discovered - that would be nuclear energy. (Solar power, wind power, biofuel power and even coal and oil have been in use for many thousands of years, though none on a scale to support one billion people, never mind 6 billion people.)
The reason I say this argument is older than nuclear energy is pretty simple. Some people subsist totally on faith and its sister, dogma, and others live only for morsels of reason.
I note that one of the world's first known expositors of the nature of reason - that would be Socrates - was forced to drink poison. It wasn't because he relied in his arguments on the
Bandwagon Fallacy that he was forced to drink hemlock. It wasn't because a rival group was competing with him for control of a Temple of Zeus. On the contrary, he was forced to kill himself because he elevated the value of reason over faith.
In general, those who rely on faith are entirely driven emotions - almost all of them irrational - and
fear is almost always near the top of the list. But appeal to fear does not explain the entire thing.
Consider this. Lots of these hooples have
driven to giant solar festivals to talk about how wonderful solar energy is. They post this kind of crap here all the time, about how noble their attendance at the solar road shows is. Now, about 50,000 people
die - in the United States alone - from automobile accidents. By contrast zero people die each year in the United States from nuclear accidents. Thus, with appeal to pure reason, one might ask whether it is more dangerous to drive to a solar festival than to live next to a nuclear power plant.
Mind you. These people fall all over themselves trying to put lipstick on the car culture pig. To a man and woman they all have some kind of cult around the Amory Lovins, hydrogen HYPErcar, kind of rhetoric, presumably believing that if they all wish hard enough Lovins' fantasy cars will not only allow them to live in their obscene 12,000 watt lifestyle, but somehow they will be able to drive a massive self propelled vehicle that will talismanically protect them from
accidents.
Now for the question of spills: These people couldn't care less if dangerous fossil fuel leaks all all over a street and ignites the street. They couldn't care less about
any of the vast dangerous fossil fuel leaks that have destroyed marine biospheres for centuries. They do not care if dangerous fossil fuel waste is
deliberately leaked into the atmosphere. Not one of them takes the dangerous fossil fuel waste from their cars - which they may have used to drive to solar festivals - and collects it in a balloon that they store "in their backyards" for
eternity.
Thus fear of
leaks is not involved.
As for fear of big business, my view - contemptuous as always - is that these types are generally paranoid libertarians of the "I'm going to hole up in Idaho with 10,000 rounds, 100,000 gallons of gasoline, and a ten year supply of grain" type. They couldn't care less about co-operation on a grand scale because in general, they are self absorbed solipsists. The construction of a nuclear power plant involves the interaction and difficult intense education of many of thousands of people, even tens of thousands of people. Holing up in Idaho with a bag of gold, some guns and some solar cells involves, often, just
one person, the solipsist himself or herself.
As for the etiology of my nuclear opinions let me say this: I grew up on Long Island in New York. When I was a small kid, LILCO proposed building 3 nuclear reactors, one in Shoreham - which became famous because it
was built and prevented from operating by
ignorance - and two others, one in Jamesport, on the North Fork, and the other in Lloyd's Neck.
The last of these proposals accounts for a critical development in the anti-nuclear movement, since Lloyd's Neck is one of the wealthiest places in the world, and it was just so back then. I personally knew people who lived in this community - mostly through my parent's church. They were no smarter than anyone else - they were
born into their wealth mostly - and most of them had very cushy jobs that they got through
connections. These were people who controlled lots of things, including but not limited to, advertising.
This was a set that was strong on contempt. They understood that power plants are things that are built in
poor people's communities, not in Lloyd's Neck. Knowing that there are few appeals to the public that are more powerful than self-referential ignorance, they engineered a campaign of selective attention because someone had the unmitigated gall to propose a power plant in their backyard.
LILCO quickly abandoned the Lloyd's Neck proposal, but it was too late. One thing that one cannot stop is a rabid mob convinced of its own righteousness.
Who, here, among us, was in that rabid mob?
So far as I know, I am the
only writer on this website in this forum who was active in the fight against Shoreham.
This was a great disgrace, and I have never stopped feeling the guilt over what I did. I cannot excuse myself on the grounds that I was young. There is an interview with Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary, who was 22 when she went to work for the infamous murderer, recorded just before she died in her 80's during which she confessed that - given the existence of Sophie Scholl, almost exactly her age, who gave her life to oppose the Nazis - that mere youth is no excuse.
My writings here, are, in part, expiation for my crime.
My change of opinion about nuclear energy occurred shortly after Chernobyl blew up. Let's face it. This accident was the worst
imaginable. Almost the entire core of a large nuclear reactor precisely at its
most radioactive moment - the end of its fuel cycle at full power - exploded under the most active volatilization conditions imaginable.
I fully expected this accident to be comparable to the black plague, or at least a major war.
It was no such thing. Kiev, for instance, is still there. It is a thriving city and from what I read, an interesting and exciting place to live.
As I contemplated the accident before the survival of Kiev was a foregone conclusion, I was compelled to look in the
Handbook of Chemistry and Physics to find the half lives of some major isotopes reported by the press to have been released.
I noted a column called "neutron capture cross sections," a concept of which I knew little at the time. Certain kinds of ideas - few of which proved to be original - began to turn over in my mind.
I have always been involved in work that requires review of the scientific literature. This event, Chernobyl, set in motion a process of
critical thinking wherein I got my hands on every single piece of literature about nuclear technology I could get my hands on. It was fascinating because while few of my ideas proved at first to be original - I soon found that many of the things I thought were original had been thought of long before I thought of them - many of the later ones I developed, I think, are unique.
Of course, part of this process of obsessive investigation - and there is no other word for it other than "obsessive" allowed me to understand the origins of the anti-nuke position - my own and that of the oppressively dumb anti-nukes who persist here - and it has allowed me to understand in very, very, very, very, very, very precise terms that
all of these arguments fall apart in the absence of ignorance.
Internationally the wolf is at the door. Now, more than at other time in history, we are morally obligated to
scream that ignorance
kills.
All of my writings are
screams. I cannot help it. Every morning when I get up I have to face the children. It is their flesh, and not my car and lifestyle, that I am trying to save.
Thank you though, for your appeal to peace. I am sorry that I find myself explaining why I reject it.
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