A Sophisticated Examination of the Electrochemical Reduction of Carbon Dioxide to Give C2 Compounds.

[NNadir]

3. Safer than what?

Right now 7 million people die every year from air pollution, according to the following comprehensive list of all causes of human mortality:

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.)

I invite anyone who wants to prattle on about how "dangerous" nuclear energy is to drag their butts to a scientific library, open the paper, and see if they can find the death toll of the allegedly "dangerous" nuclear energy industry.

Today 19,000 human beings died from air pollution. Tomorrow will be the same.

It is appalling, absolutely appalling that we live in a moral universe where 19,000 die every damned day because of the selective attention of a squad of people who insist that nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy needs to be perfect or other forms of energy will be allowed to kill vast numbers of people with no attention paid at all.

Nuclear energy need not be perfect, it need not be risk, to be vastly superior to everything else.

The rhetoric to the contrary is dangerous, immoral and it kills people, because even including the big boogeymen at Fukushima and Chernobyl, nuclear energy saves lives, according to the irrefutable information in one of the most widely read papers in a major scientific journal.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

Again, the rote Pavlovian rhetoric about nuclear energy being "dangerous" is a Trumpian scale lie.

Things that routinely kill more people than nuclear energy will ever kill, besides air pollution, are fatty foods, automobile accidents, air craft accidents, railroad accidents, coal mining accidents, oh, and, um, mining cadmium for solar cells.

On moral grounds, I completely and wholly reject this nonsensical claim. I don't get my information from websites in the great circle jerk of anti-nuke ignoramuses quoting one another.

I get my information from the primary scientific literature.

I wish you a pleasant Friday.