...thing on this planet, and unlike used nuclear fuel, it kills people, animals, and (not that antinukes give a shit) the planetary atmosphere.
There is no way I can avoid fossil fuel waste in my neighborhood, or, in fact, any neighborhood anywhere on the surface of this planet.
I would have no problem with used nuclear fuel in my neighborhood. That's because I understand the stuff very well. In fact, I am encouraging my son to find a position to work with it. It is absolutely essential material for the rapid scale up of nuclear energy, which is now required because the planet is burning, not that there is a single antinuke on this planet who gives a shit.
(I have personally worked with radioactive substances, albeit 40 years ago, in making tools for biomarker analysis.)
I regard the belief that used nuclear fuel should be buried as obscene. It should be used; and would be used were it not for paranoia promulgated by people with weak educations. This is entirely a function of the waste mentality that needs to go.
The reason that we do not reprocess nuclear fuel in this country is because there are so many dumb people with an irrational fear of it, and like Magats, people have bought into the line of emotive and destructive shit, thus preventing a better world. These people are the equivalent of anti-vaxxers if one thinks about it, people who seek to export and promote their abysmal ignorance causing great harm to other people.
Nuclear energy saves lives.
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)
It follows that antinukes, like antivaxxers, kill people by omission. It's quite the equivalent of RFK Jr. territory, only worse, since air pollution and climatic meltdowns have killed vastly more people than even Covid killed, than measles killed, more than any infectious disease in this century or the last half of the previous century.
For the record, used nuclear fuel has been reprocessed around the world, and the plutonium therein returned to reactors to save lives and the environment. France, Germany and Japan have all operated reactors using plutonium recovered from commercial nuclear reactors.
I have literally hundreds (if not thousands) of scientific papers on the topic in my files, collected over decades, covering both on current industrial processes and proposed superior processes. The number of people killed from reprocessing nuclear fuels over the entire last 70 years is vanishingly small compared to the number of people who will die from exposure to gasoline today.
Most antinukes like to make the highly immoral statement that "we don't need nuclear energy."
That's because they don't give a shit about fossil fuels, the environment, the collapse of the planetary atmosphere, and the millions of deaths that fossil fuels cause each year.
If one gives a shit about fossil fuels one would never be inclined to make such a absurd statement as "we don't need nuclear energy."
If one scratches the surface of any antinuke, anywhere, any time and one will find an apologist for fossil fuels. There are no exceptions.
These people perfectly happy with the status quo, a burning planet, polluted air, dying seas. In their little bubble things are just fine.
I regard this set, antinukes, as having the ethics of turnips, which is not intended to insult turnips with the comparison, since some people actually like turnips. Afterall, turnips have some nutritional value, and in direct opposition to antinukes, help some people to survive and even flourish, and don't cause irreparable harm like antinukes do.
Nuclear engineers - highly educated people, including my own son - really don't give a shit anymore about antinukes and their paranoid blather, any more than medical researchers give a shit about the "thoughts" of RFK, Jr. while they try to press on with their work. Antinukes have done their worst, and the days that they are able to kill people with the application of their ignorance are over. Nuclear engineers can't be bothered with clowns. They have important work to do, involved with trying to save a dying world.
Have a wonderful day tomorrow and a pleasant holiday season.
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