...have been, were it not for fear and ignorance, would have been the only new form of primary energy discovered in the last several centuries, nuclear energy.
It was invented by some of the finest minds of the 20th century, and trashed by some of the most distracted and poorly educated mobs in history.
Nuclear energy already reduced the carbon output by roughly 60 billion tons - equivalent to roughly two years of output at current levels - and it saved 1.8 million lives that other wise would have been lost to air pollution, which kills seven million people a year, every year while assholes burn coal and gas to generates electricity that runs computers to speculate whether someone somewhere might die some day from radiation connected to Chernobyl.
This is not my opinion, but is the fact published in one of the world's most prestigious Environmental scientific journals in a paper co-authored by one of the world's most prominent climate scientists.
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895) It has continuously remained on the 12 month "most read" lists of that journal since publication.
We squandered two trillion bucks on so called "renewable energy" in the last ten years for no result except that gas, oil and coal use is increasing everywhere, and the accumulation of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere is growing a newly incomprehensible rate.
The infrastructure created with this squandering will be landfill in the next twenty to thirty years, pretty toxic landfill at that.
For two trillion dollars, we could have built at least 200 new nuclear plants designed to last 80 years, more if we didn't insist that nuclear plants be nearly without risk even as fossil fuel waste has killed tens of millions of people in the last decade. Nuclear plants, built and operated by highly trained engineers, would be producing, every year, for the majority of this century, about 15 exajoules of energy.
Unfortunately people have chosen, instead, to repeat mindless pablum insisting that the only option is to engage in a reactionary program to rely on so called "renewable energy" which, afterall, was abandoned around the 19th century on the grounds that it, um, left most of humanity impoverished even beyond the scale we see today.
Our ignorance, and our willingness to repeat this reactionary pablum is a crime against all future generations.
We are destroying the future because we are so lazy, so badly informed, so willing to hear only what we want to hear, and insist, even though it's a dumb idea which hasn't worked, isn't working and won't wake that we must "try to develop renewables."
I note that when faced with a comparable crisis in the equally superstitious middle ages, the bubonic plague, people crowded into rat infested churches to try to develop prayer strategies to stop the epidemics.
That didn't work either, even though practically everyone was convinced that this was the answer.
Enjoy the waning weeks of this unbelievable hot summer.
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