Quote of the Day

I whole heartedly agree with The New Republic's associate editor Eric Armstrong when he writes that…

perhaps the most damaging and confounding has been the left’s quixotic fight against nuclear power. There is a Shakespearean quality in the fact that one of the environmental movement’s biggest victories in the past 50 years—crippling the expansion of nuclear power—has actually done irreparable harm to the environment… What’s so strange about all this is that none of the hallmarks of nuclear power in the popular imagination have anything to do with nuclear power in reality. Those gigantic towers spewing white clouds into the atmosphere? That’s not pollution. It’s water vapor. Nuclear power plants are responsible for exactly zero greenhouse gas emissions. Zero. How’s that for clean energy?

[‘And even though,’] he continues,

A typical reactor produces in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 tons of waste (mostly spent fuel rods and contaminated incidentals like gloves and tools) per year that is usually stored on site. As far as large-scale energy sources go, that’s so tiny as to barely even register. What’s more, that waste is extremely valuable and can be recycled many times over to continue producing energy for years. Compare that to a coal plant in the U.S., which produces a staggering 125,000 tons of ash and 193,000 tons of sludge every single year.

https://newrepublic.com/article/139700/democrats-party-science-not-really Most of the critics (“deniers”) of man-caused climate change that I know about are in favor of nuclear energy, which, ironically, would mitigate carbon emissions faster and cheaper than any other alternative form of energy. Furthermore, disasters like Fukushima, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl would have completely been avoided if modern fail-safe designs and technology been available and/or in use. (They actually were available at the time of Fukushima.) We currently have about four hundred fifty nuclear reactors in use worldwide. If we want nuclear energy to be safer (it’s already very safe) we need to be replacing those plants with the new designs. But if the technology is a safe as has been demonstrated why not double or triple the number of nuclear power plants. If you are concerned about climate change isn’t that the logical way to go? That’s the surprising conclusion that this recent episode of Nova comes to: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/the-nuclear-option.htmljohn_a_designer

August 10, 2018

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