Raging Bootleg Fire in Oregon threatens vital Northern California power grid lines

[NNadir]

5. You call it hyperbole. By contrast, I consider it a statement of fact.

The New York Times, which is, I admit, often hyperbolic in claiming that we need to elevate Fukushima over all other energy disasters, including the death of 7 million people per year from air pollution, and indeed climate change, used the word erased in their headline:

Heat Wave Spread Fire That ‘Erased’ Canadian Town

OK, perhaps it's a little hyperbole to say "city" rather than "town," but it's not like Lytton is the only community destroyed in heat wave generated fires, but it is North of the Canadian border, which makes a little, um, indicative of a reality, no?

I have no affection for our "giant global infrastructure" because our "giant global infrastructure" is killing us, literally. It's rather like my father's statement that he "needed" a cigarette when he had lung cancer.

As for "authority," I don't have any. If I did have any, things would be very different.

I have spent my entire adult life considering this problem with careful attention to some of the engineering details, beginning with the constituents of used nuclear fuel. I have considered heat networks, supercritical water desalination, Heather Willauer's beautiful approach to making jet fuel using ion exchange and the CO2 in seawater, (which is only a "starting point" ), the solubility of an array of transition elements in liquid actinides, reverse Allam cycles, air driven Brayton cycles to destroy ambient methane, HFC's, CFCs, N2O, SF6 etc., flows in thermochemical water splitting cycles, Rankine cycles...ad nauseum...

I shared these ideas with my rather well educated little brat recently who informed his mother they were "elegant." (Maybe she'll forgive me for all this time spent in the basement reading obscure scientific papers.) Things will be far worse for his world than they were for mine, and it is my hope he, among many other highly educated people in his magnificent generation, can understand and address the urgency, be a "great generation," something clearly in them after our generation's insipid worship of our "giant infrastructure," for which history will not forgive us.

We're still all talking about how we'd like to go to Mars with Elon Musk, while they're facing a burning Earth.

If I had "authority," I would declare "war" on our "giant global infrastructure," maybe beginning at the ironically military base at Camp Pendleton, which happens to be right next to the 4000 tons of used nuclear fuel at San Onofre. I'd build one or two small 5 or 10 MW nuclear reactors using the disgusting California "giant infrastructure" electrical grid, and use to power generated by these these to begin electrochemically refining the 4000 tons of used nuclear fuel there, on site, and let the heat network and network of additional reactors run on that refined fuel, right up into the mountains in Eastern Pendleton, refining seawater, providing water, clean energy, right out into the Imperial Valley.

There are literally hundreds of other places where similar things could be done, Indian Point on the Hudson River, Humbolt, the Long Island Sound in Connecticut, even (gasp) Fukushima, the subject of stupid hyperbole, if ever there was stupid hyperbole.

Perhaps my statements seem like hyperbole because all I ever hear is hyperbole. In the age of the celebration of the lie, both on the right and, sadly, even on the left, hyperbole has become the only means of discourse. It's our language.

Humanity is at a crossroad, a desperate crossroad. A hyperbola has two paths on two arms, two that rise and two that sink. Which path should we follow?

A town in Canada burst into flame after experiencing temperatures higher than 43°C. That's a fact.

Facts matter.

There is hell to pay that even under this extreme, we still don't get it, that it can be considered hyperbole to note it.

Maybe you think after a lifetime now approaching its end, decades of very hard work, and the realization of what might have been and isn't, I need to be cute and careful in my considerations, and engage in "debates." To what purpose, should I "debate" with what is alleged to be "reason" with allegedly "reasonable" people about "how much" nuclear power should be built? To me, the question is very similar to the question of "debating" how many people should receive Covid vaccinations. I do, rather arrogantly, claim that I know far more than most people about nuclear energy, and therefore concede that my views are therefore esoteric, but to me the question of "how much" nuclear power should be built is rather obvious.

We should call in the Marine's (base) and places like it, and built as much nuclear infrastructure as we can build, as fast as we can build it, eliminating our "giant infrastructure" as fast as it can be replaced.

OK boomer?