First ACPR-1000 Nuclear Unit Begins Commercial Operation in China

[NNadir]

15. By your logic...

...if I'm nice to Mitch McConnell he'll become a Democrat.

Sorry, but some assholes are assholes. They cannot be convinced of anything. If one is discussing the origin of life in connection with the asymmetry of amino acids found in the Murchinson meteorite, it isn't going to be useful to continue the discussion if the subject turns to quotes from Genesis.

As for your comments about "board rooms," it may be suitable for people who only care about money, and nothing else.

I am not making an argument saying that I'm personally OK with people who care only about money and nothing else. I do find amusing that people who make noise about being environmentalists and liberals turn into laissez faire capitalists of the Ayn Rand ilk whenever nuclear energy is discussed.

Neither am I concerned about the use of the word "could" as in "harm nuclear could cause," but with with the word "are"
as in "7,000,000 people are killed each by air pollution."

I link this paper from one of the world's most prestigious medical journals again and again and again, but somehow the very, very, very, very basic fact concerning the death toll of air pollution can't get through to people who elevate their fantasies about "nuclear danger" over the reality of fossil fuel and biomass's death toll doesn't get through:

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 often invite people who tell me they are "honestly curious" to use one such evocation, while they are concerned about "nuclear dangers" to travel to a basic scientific library - in your case this might involve taking the BART to Berkeley - to access the paper and see where, in the huge tables reporting the overall causes of human mortality on this planet, "nuclear accidents" is listed, or "exposure to (so called) 'nuclear waste'" is listed.

You know what the difference between so called "nuclear waste" and dangerous fossil fuel waste is? Used nuclear fuels in this country have been successfully contained at the place where they were used for half a century without killing anyone, whereas dangerous fossil fuel waste is indiscriminately dumped directly into what they regard (in board rooms and common parlance) as a waste dump, the planetary atmosphere.

Coal waste contains mercury, solar wastes contain cadmium. Do these materials have half lives? Do they obey the Bateman equation and are thus subject to maximum accumulations dictated by secular equilibria? No, they do not and are not.

I'll take this argument more seriously when the same people making it report that natural gas, coal and petroleum should be required to keep their "waste" contained for eternity in such a way that no one can imagine anyone, anywhere ever dying at any time ever.

I hear all the time from people making this specious selective attention argument that what they (not I) call "nuclear waste" lasts for "x million years" where the value of x is defined by how poor their scientific educations are.

Now, about regulation: If I were to regulate anything - and I won't be allowed to do so because I'm a voice in the wilderness - I would make regulations requiring that each current generation do the best for future generations.

An asshole - and yes is the correct word - who sits in a board room thinking only about short term profits and building gas and subsidized toxic solar garbage plants to gain short time profits is deliberately making future generations pay for his or her decision. If gas were required - as nuclear is - to contain it's external costs, there wouldn't be one fucking gas plant on this planet. The subsidy for the gas industry is climate change; it's the radium laced flowback water in Pennsylvania, it's the chemical pollutants from fracturing operations in surface and ground water, it's leaving all future generations with no resources and vast amounts of waste to clean up, including waste in a destroyed atmosphere.

I am rabidly against so called "renewables," because the word "renewable" as applied to short term crap with an extremely low energy to mass ratio is a Trump scale distortion - a lie - particularly when it requires redundant systems to operate, systems that are almost always gas based because of very low capacity utilization and random availability. A similar distortion is the tiresome and often repeated lie that so called "renewables" replace coal. They do not, because they cannot not. No system that operates at the whim of the weather can displace a system that has high capacity utilization. Coal plants have the second highest capacity utilization in the United States, roughly 70-80% as compared to nuclear's 90%. If one shuts a coal plant because the wind is blowing for a few hours, a very simple experiment that anyone with a kitchen, a faucet, and a pot can do shows what happens in terms of energy. The experiment involves boiling water, shutting the boiling pot off for an hour and turning it on again. In the period during which the pot cools energy is being wasted.

If you are serious, think.

I'm unimpressed, by the way, that you lived next to nuclear engineers at Oak Ridge. I'm a chemist. I've talked to my neighbor's kids at various times, sometimes about chemistry. None of them are, as a result, competent however to understand advanced chemistry, although it may have helped them in a tiny bit in their high school chemistry classes. From your remarks, you seem not to have learned very much from your neighbors at Oak Ridge. That's too bad. It should have been a better place to grow up than what you apparently made of it.

I have, by the way, no sympathy with the specious argument about "capitalism" being the subject about which my argument is It is very much about solar and wind; the fact that two trillion dollars has been squandered on them in the last ten years alone, this on a planet where two billion people lack access to basic sanitation, squandered for no result. My argument is about climate change. Despite these trillions of dollars, the rate of accumulation of dangerous fossil fuel waste accumulation is accelerating, not decelerating.

I'm a highly educated person who has read widely, often on topics that have nothing to do with my professional work. I don't like simplistic statements. They're lazy and they're garbage. (Regrettably we live in the twitter age, where no thoughts are expressed in more than 20 or 30 words are valued.) I find an argument that some big, bad capitalist somewhere is responsible for all the world's ills and that all other individuals are excused to be obscene and, on the part of people making them, self serving.

I note that most of the people I personally encounter handing out this self excusing nonsense are appallingly bourgeois.

In your comment, you have dragged out many of the tiresome and again, specious arguments that anti-nukes make, including some of the worst, including the obviously fraudulent statement that so called "renewables" are an alternative to coal.

If we were serious, we'd stop lying to ourselves.

I would submit that all of us, myself included since I am using electricity to write this post that is partially generated by dangerous fossil fuels - although some comes from New Jersey's nuclear plants - have responsibility for this grotesque attack we are conducting on all future generations.

If you want to know why in 2018, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere hit 411 ppm, and why, in the 21st century the rate of accumulation has doubled as compared to the rate in the 21st century, you might try looking in the mirror.

Have a pleasant Sunday and enjoy drinking that San Francisco water - however much of it remains - access for which the Hetch Hetchy Valley was destroyed, giving us all the privilege of "renewable" electricity on the side. Although it's probably some of the best water in the world, whenever I think of it, it breaks my heart a little.