The world is waking up from a long stupid slumber...

[NNadir]

3. The fossil fuel industry dumps toxic and deadly waste into the atmosphere continuously.

No one gives a shit, except for lip service.

The difference between dangerous fossil fuel waste, about which no one actually gives a shit, and so called "nuclear waste" - a valuable and important resource that is critical to the survival of the planet - is that fossil fuel waste kills people, and used nuclear fuel has a spectacular record of not killing anyone.

I recently returned to my ignore list here, an infuriating idiot who once said, in a defacto sense, it was OK for 7 million people to die each year each year from air pollution because a tunnel at the Hanford nuclear weapons site.

This same functional illiterate badgered me by claiming nuclear waste was "dangerous."

I challenged the moron to show that in the 70 year history of the accumulation of used nuclear fuel as many people as were killed will be killed by air pollution in the next six hours, that would be about 4500 people.

In the annals of selective attention, indifference to the destruction of climate change, indifference to the vast death toll caused by air pollution, about 70 million people every decade, people like to quote the 1954 remark of the right wing red baiter and persecutor of Robert Oppenheimer (in one our history's most disgraceful episodes) Lewis Strauss, the very stupid "too cheap to meter" remark.

I note that the same people can't name any form of energy, including those undergoing a deadly subsidy in the form of the right to indiscriminately kill people and ecosystems by dumping for free, its waste into the planetary atmosphere, in the seas or on land, that is "too cheap to meter."

Frankly, it's just another example of selective attention.

The hatred of the last, best hope of humanity by people who lack even a modicum of a scientific education, who know next to zero about nuclear fuels, nuclear energy other than that they hate it and that it's not "too cheap to meter," is an indication why, as of this morning, we saw a weekly average of 424.40 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere, less than ten years after we first saw readings of 400 ppm, during the week beginning March 16, 2014.

The bizarre belief that we can return to dependence on the weather for energy, an idea that was abandoned in the 19th century for a reason, an idea as reactionary as the red baiter Lewis Strauss "too cheap to meter" fame, is absurd.

I labored for more than 30 years to understand the chemistry and physics of actinides and fission products, again in nearly compete isolation, struggling through difficult primary scientific literature, to come to this moment of joy, to see my vision realized beyond the confines of my mind, and I frankly resent after decades of insipid chanting about "too cheap to meter," at this sublime moment, if you must know.

There is hope for the world, and quoting a right wing sonofabitch making a stupid remark - a right wing sonofabitch who had zero scientific or engineering experience and was Eisenhower's most dubious appointment to work on anything related to nuclear energy - and who was talking about fusion and not fission - a right wing sonofabitch who was in the habit of persecuting some of the greatest scientists who ever lived, will in no way dissuade me from my joy at seeing this scientific symposium being offered.

I've been sloughing off this particular appeal to ignorance for decades.

There is hope, growing hope, that fear and ignorance will not triumph and that intelligence, courage and hard work will.

About those 4500 people who will die in the next six hours, any evidence that the storage of used nuclear fuel over the last 70 years matches the death toll of these six hours...

Feel free to let me know if someone can find them.

Whenever I ask this question, people have declined to get back to me with even a good lie. (The moron I returned to my "ignore list" did a goofy, puerile, Pee-Wee Herman imitation when I asked this question. He, she or they is/are a fool, a deadly fool, a toxic fool, a fool whose ignorance kills people, but a fool all the same.)

Have a nice evening.