Handlesblatt: Germany has a big new problem, dealing with its failed wind turbines.

[NNadir]

6. Um, um, um...

Your discussion of nuclear energy is what I was hoping for, more garbage thinking.

Cars, if this is your standard of excellence, are one of the worst environmental disasters ever to have struck planet. They are, in fact, they are the disaster of so called "distributed energy" writ large, a huge distributed network of point source pollutants which can never be reined in.

I've made this point many times. Saying the wind industry is equivalent to the car industry is an announcement that pancreatic cancer is OK, because it isn't worse than melanoma, and lots of people have melanoma.

Nuclear plants were originally designed to last 40 years, which was acceptable since they have an extraordinarily high energy to mass ratio. If humanity lived at twice the average continuous per capita power consumption, a person living 100 years would be responsible for consuming 100 grams of plutonium. This is a trivial amount of material needing to be consumed, particularly given the fact that the ocean contains 4.5 billion tons of uranium, continuously cycling through even larger amounts in the planetary crust and mantle. It is clear that they can easily be extended beyond their design lifetime, since the engineers who built them were being conservative. The plant near I live, Oyster Creek, the oldest operating plant in the United States came on line in 1969, and is still saving lives that might otherwise be lost to air pollution. I consider that plant to be a gift from my father's generation to mine.

By contrast, there is almost certainly not enough neodymium, dysprosium on this planet to make the expensive, toxic, and failed wind industry a significant player in the world energy equation, something it has never been and never will be. In the entire United States in the last ten years, the energy output of wind industry in its entirety has failed to match 50% of the increase in the use of The word "renewable" where wind turbines are concerned is like every other bit of marketing horseshit associated with the wind industry, a bald faced lie.

Nuclear energy remains the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy on this planet. A single nuclear plant, located in a small building can easily outproduce, with far greater reliability, and without the need for a single dangerous fossil fuel plant to back it up, the output of hundreds of square miles of greasy wind turbines. If Ohio does not build more nuclear plants to replace those built in the 1970's, they will burn more gas and coal, no if's and's and buts.

I am ethically and morally appalled about how people can burn coal and gas to generate electricity and prattle mindlessly about what "could" have happened at Beese Davis, without showing even a smidgen of concern for the 7 million people who die each year from air pollution, 19,000 per day. These figures for the death toll from dangerous fossil fuel waste are readily available in the scientific literature, right here: A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)

Despite the indifferent prattling on by anti-nuke defenders of "the subsidize the rich at the expense of the poor" so called "renewable energy" industry, no where in that comprehensive accounting of the major mortality risk factors associated with human disease does "nuclear accidents" even appear.

I am always amused when opponents of the nuclear industry state that things like " "spent" less radioactive fuel pulled out and stored forever."

The "forever" statement is a clear indications that anti-nukes are very, very, very, very, very unfamiliar with the contents of science books. All radioactive materials are subject to the Bateman equilibrium, defined by the Bateman equations. Unlike the mercury that is and has been and will be distributed into the flesh of every living organism on this planet by coal and gas operations while we all wait, like Godot, for the grand "renewable energy" nirvana, nuclear materials naturally decay. If one is creating new radioactive materials, one can only accumulate a fixed amount of them before they begin to decay at exactly the same rate as they are formed - generally this figure is approached asymptotically.

On some level, this is unfortunate, since radioactive materials are particularly useful in a number of ways, were they not subject to abject fear and ignorance, things like cleaning the atmosphere, water and land of intractable halogenated organics, the only sink for which, natural or otherwise, involve radiolytic cleavage. The use of used nuclear fuel has been hampered by nothing more than stupidity. We would have more hope for the future if we had more radioactive materials, not less.

As for solar industry, the solar PV industry is a joke, a very bad joke, a very toxic joke. It doesn't even produce, despite leaching trillions of dollars out of the world economy, even two of the 560 exajoules of energy that the planet now consumes. It's nothing more, like the wind industry, nothing more than a fig leaf for the gas industry. It is obvious that half a century of jawboning about this industry has probably not resulted in it producing as much energy as is required by all the electronic posts around the planet dedicated to saying how wonderful it is.

Thanks much for giving me the opportunity to vent in recognition of how appalling the lies we tell ourselves are, as I continue to grieve for what our generation, our very, very, very unnecessarily ignorant generation, is doing to all future generations.

It is a crime.

Have a nice Sunday afternoon.