Al Gore explicitly states that "I am not a reflexive opponent of nuclear energy."
You
are a reflexive opponent of nuclear energy. Therefore you do not listen to Al Gore, but simply repeat his name in anti-nuke post after anti-nuke post attempting to assert in an example of an "appeal to authority" logical fallacy that his position is consistent with yours.
Therefore maybe you should try Dennis Kucinich, since you cannot understand what Al Gore's position is.
If Al Gore
were a reflexive opponent of nuclear energy, he would be wrong, of course.
As it happens Al Gore is mistaken, though, on the subject of nuclear energy. He says "nuclear reactors come only in one size, large." This is surprising because the nuclear navy has many small reactors, and, Al Gore's
father was instrumental in the building of the Shippingport nuclear reactor (60 MWe) and the nuclear facilities at Oak Ridge, which also had many small reactors.
It doesn't matter what Al Gore thinks about nuclear energy - and he is
not a scientist. If he accedes to the office to which he was elected and attempts to address climate change he will
fail without massively expanding nuclear energy. This is a matter of physics and not any particular religion.
However again,
you disagree with Al Gore.
You are a reflexive opponent of nuclear energy and he is not.
You are also one of the
critics of the type that Theodore Roosevelt famously described.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat...
But here's the especially delicious part, since you take this oracular view of Al Gore's words,
albeit twisted to your own spectacularly weak interpretation and
given that you have no positive plan that you can offer for addressing global climate change:
Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.
http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/research/speech%20arena.htmFop! I love that now slightly archaic word. It fits every single reflexive anti-nuke I have ever met, ever read, or ever heard about.
I hear a lot of tepid, shallow, whining from people on this site who cower intellectually behind Al Gore, even while they ignore what he says, and even while they have no clue how to address climate change.
I have a proposal to address the 120 exajoules of primary energy produced by coal and
you don't. Since I have a positive plan on which I propose immediate action - the building of thousands of nuclear plants - while you have nothing to offer beyond "Nuclear is bad! Nuclear is bad!" - I argue that I am in no danger of being a fop. The people who built the first nuclear reactors got themselves in the arena. They took risks. In so doing they provided to humanity a workable approach to save themselves.
You don't become a nuclear engineer by citing Chapter 2, verse 11 of the "Gospel according to Al." You become a nuclear engineer by mastering difficult course work in mathematics and the physical sciences.
Al Gore famously says in his film that there is less than 10 years to get a handle on climate change. I think he is
wrong. We have already passed the point where we can control events. The best we can hope to do at this point is not to prevent catastrophe but to reduce the scale of the catastrophe. Climate change is irreversible already. Carbon dioxide molecules don't check with the Greenpeace website's predictions about 2050 before they heat the atmosphere. They heat the atmosphere right now with or without citations of chapter and verse of "The Epistle of Saint JPak to the Mainers."
Al Gore says that solar energy is a key strategy for addressing climate change. I think Al Gore is
wrong when he says this, although I understand that he, as a politician who may
run for office is inclined to tell people what they
want to hear. Be that as it may, Al Gore could not produce enough material in ten years to make an exajoule of solar electricity, and thus he is
wrong when he says this.
However Al Gore is
right when he says that climate change is the most important threat facing humanity. This is his signature statement, and this effort on his part has made me understand this issue and to think about this issue. Note that I did not learn what I learned by limiting myself to reading Al Gore's books. In fact I
never read Al Gore, since Al Gore is not a scientist and there is nothing more he can tell me that I already don't know. The IPCC mitigation report is coming out in a few days, and it will not say in that report "Just read Al Gore's book, page 17, page 23 and page 72." Instead, in almost boring detail, it will talk about nuclear energy as a vital and essential tool. I suspect that Al Gore
knows too everything I am saying here, but let's face it, if he stated this truth, he would alienate a small but vocal (and stupid) portion of his base, just as Richard Nixon would have alienated a small but vocal (and stupid) part of his base by declaring in 1968 that the capital of China is Beijing.
Again, if Al Gore assumes the office to which he was once elected he may either succeed or fail. We all think he has the potential to be a great man, but then again, many people thought that James Buchanan had the potential to be a great man just as many people thought that Abraham Lincoln was destined to be a small man. Great men act not on dogma, but on the reality of events. Lincoln did not come to office declaring that slavery must die. On the contrary, he came to office saying that he accepted that slavery should live. Roosevelt is not a great man because he declared Stalin a beast with whom he
could not cooperate, even though Stalin
was a beast. Roosevelt was a great man because he
worked with Stalin when he needed to do so.
Of course, nuclear energy is not beastly. Nuclear energy is the safest cleanest exajoule scale form of energy there is. It has already saved millions of lives, and supported by an educated public, could save many more. I am coming to know nuclear professionals lately, and almost every single one of them is proud of his or her contribution to humanity and justly so. These people work hard at a
challenging task.
It is disgraceful that there are so many fops who shit mindlessly on this noble work, especially because there are no such fops who have done the work to understand what it is about which they so freely and mindlessly pontificate.
Every single person who dies from coal today dies unnecessarily, in spite of the hard work and effort of millions of nuclear professionals around the world. Let me repeat that: Every single person killed by coal dies unnecessarily.
There is nothing superior to nuclear energy. It is the
best form of energy humanity has. That fact would not be changed if Al Gore suddenly became a Dennis Kucinich clone. All the websites in the world stating how wonderful tidal energy
could be if it actually existed will change that. One billion windmill shredded rap tors would change that. Three thousand ICC coal plants would not change that. All the day dreams about sequestration in the universe would not change that. None of these strategies has a chance in hell of being as safe as nuclear energy and all the big talk coupled with no action will revive a single person killed by air pollution.
The purpose of all the solar/wind/tidal talk is to make people comfortable with
denial. You scratch a millimeter deep on the surface of reflexive anti-nuclear dunderheads and you see it every time. (There was one anti-nuclear dunderhead here yesterday who was singing the praises of climate change because - get this - it will be wonderful for the ethanol growing season in the Midwest.)
Not one reflexive nuclear opponent on this website has ever produced a shred of evidence that nuclear power is more dangerous than its alternatives. But these people are not about evidence, since their most spectacular approach to evidence is to
ignore it. They specifically
ignore the vast risks of the forms of energy that they foppishly allow to continue unfettered, like coal, like oil, like natural gas and insist that alone among energy systems only nuclear need be perfect. Why? Because that fits their religion. Every single anti-nuclear fop on this website can cry for days about 31 people who died at Chernobyl, but there is not one, zero anti-nuclear fops on this website who gives a rat's ass about the largest energy disaster of all time, a
renewable energy disaster, the collapse of the Banjo dam, that killed hundreds of thousands of people in a single night. Not one reflexive nuclear opponent on this site, not one, zero, gives a rat's ass about any of those deaths.
It is immediately clear to anyone who can count exajoules that if, on taking office, Al Gore caters to the
stupid part of his base, the reflexive anti-nukes, he will fail.
People sometimes ask me why I use the word
stupid so much. It's simply because there is no word in the English language that better describes some of what I hear.
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