I train scientists and I engage scientists all over the world.
I hire and contract people to calibrate instruments with sensitivity at the parts per trillion. There are very few days in the last 30 years that I haven't been involved in at least reading cutting edge science. Some of it I do professionally, and some of it I do because I give a fuck about the world.
As for the people I hire or contract to calibrate and or repair instruments:
Some of them are great. Others are doofuses, frankly. I had a real shit storm with one just recently, losing eight weeks of lab productivity because of what can only be called incompetence.
As for dumb rants about nuclear energy and it's history and/or its prospects. I really don't care what dogmatic anti-nukes think. My son is entering a Ph.D nuclear engineering program and is a trained materials scientist who graduated Summa Cum Laude and was given a free year at his university to get a M.S., which he did with honors. He doesn't give a shit about anti-nukes either. Bless him.
Nuclear engineers matter. Techs are a dime a dozen.
If the world is saved - and it may not be given the insistent ignorance of the preternaturally ignorant pontificating on subjects about which they clearly know nothing - nuclear engineers will save it.
By the way, "the too cheap to meter" reference, that anti-nukes, with their fondness for ignorance and dogma, like to quote, was by Lewis Strauss, one of the persecutors of Robert Oppenheimer in 1954. He was an attorney, and an investment banker, not an engineer. He was a right wing ass hat. As he was an ass hat, I perfectly understand why anti-nukes quote him so readily. He executed a break-in at a Democratic Party Office about 30 years before Nixon did the same thing, and then went on, in the "Red Scare" to commit one of the most egregious crimes against science ever perpetuated in the United States, the removal of Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance because he opposed the hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer was a great man. Strauss was a dumb assed clerk.
If one's mind set is in the 1950's, Strauss, Mayak, and all this other tiresome bullshit while the planetary atmosphere is collapsing, one is pretty much useless in this emergency.
If one can't tell the difference between 7 million deaths per year from dangerous fossil fuel waste and the risk associated with fission products and actinides, while giving no evidence that one knows a fucking thing about said fission products and actinides or being able to demonstrate a loss of life connected with the storage of used nuclear fuels over half a century comparable to the odious figure just cited for fossil fuel waste, and instead want to carry on about so called "nuclear waste," and/or if one wants to compare a calibration specialist with a nuclear engineer, well there certainly is no conversation worth having with me that would involve either ethical or technical issues, among other things.
I'd simply be disgusted. I am disgusted.
Have a nice evening.
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