Almost all rote objections addressed to nuclear energy rely on logical fallacies.

Anti-nukes on this website, with nearly 100%, as may be expected, being very bad thinkers use one particular fallacy a lot:

It's called ad hominem and any fool could google his or her way to thousands of websites describing this.

Here's a graphic from one of the 660,000 hits one gets for "logical fallacies," since I have noticed that many stupid people can only respond to graphics:



The Eleven Most Irritating Logical Fallacies

If I say that Ted Kaczynski "believes" in global warming - as if the verifiable fact of global warming is a "belief" - I have not proved that global warming is not occurring.

Support for nuclear power is found throughout the primary scientific literature in many places in peer reviewed articles with high impact factors. The one I cite most often Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895).

Neither of the authors are well known as right wing nut cases.

The point of the paper, which I also make often, and which is in my view irrefutable, is that we now understand that the deaths from air pollution number in the millions per year, as recently reported in the highest impact scientific journal in the world, Nature in the following paper: The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale (Nature 525, 367–371 (17 September 2015)). Since nuclear energy reduces by huge orders of magnitude the onus of this deadly air pollution, which kills every decade more people than died in World War II from all war related causes, nuclear energy saves lives.

One does not have to show support for Donald Trump in order to enter the nuclear engineering program at MIT or at UC Berkeley or Georgia Tech. One does, however, need to be an excellent student in high school and score well on high stakes exams. One needs, in order to complete a degree, to pass a rigorous program involving high level mathematics, physics, materials science and engineering course. For example here is the undergraduate requirements for an undergraduate degree from MIT in any of a number of nuclear engineering program: MIT Nuclear Engineering Undergraduate Degree Options

Nowhere in the curriculum for these degress, available only to highest levels of successful students emerging from high schools around the world, is there listed any courses in "right wing politics."

In my opinion having seen the quality of anti-nukes on this website, I doubt that there is one person among them who could pass any of the courses in the Freshman year.

Now, if I assert that 100% of the anti-nukes I have had the misfortune of confronting on this web site are ignorant, scientifically illiterate, poor thinkers, one may argue that I am engaging in an ad hominem attack. However if I point to elements of their thinking (see the Ted Kaczynski billboard above) and refute their terrible, disastrous, and frankly (since nuclear energy saves lives) deadly thinking by appeals to supportable arguments, I claim that the argument is not, in fact, ad hominem. It is merely a reasoned assertion.

Enjoy the remainder of the long holiday weekend, should one have a good enough job to have such a weekend, and not be working at say, Walmart, where even your holiday pay - if there is holiday pay - will not allow you to dream of a stupid and toxic electric car for billionaires and millionaires powered by solar cells on obscene McMansions.