Again, irrespective of what one claims for himself, herself, or theirself, if a strawman exists I like the one who wanted a brain, the one in the Wizard of Oz.
I am responding, I claim, to a regurgitated assertion by a syndic at the IEA. Now, if someone thinks I need to agree with everything that comes from a regurgitated source or else one holds the source in contempt, it does not fall to me to help them understand what critical thinking is.
I have spent my entire adult life reading technical documents. I have overseen experiments to check the reproducibility of their claims. It's a mixed bag to be honest. What one learns in practice is called "critical thinking."
A publication of the IEA authored by a scientist or writer there is not a religious text. It's an opinion.
Now if one reads the regurgitated text with respect to nuclear energy, the author states that for nuclear energy to reach a certain level - one that no other system of energy may be able to meet - it would require doing what has never been done before. In 1970 no nation had ever eliminated coal dependence by building nuclear reactors. This did not stop the French from doing it. In that same year, no nation had built more than 100 reactors. That did not stop the Americans from doing it.
My political heroine is Eleanor Roosevelt who is represented in my avatar on this website. I live by many of her aphorusms.
A favorite is "You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
I think that nuclear engineers are quite capable of doing what has never been done before. In at least three countries, the US, France and China they have done precisely that, done what's not been done before.
If one wants respect, learning how to understand what a writer actually is saying, strikes me as a reasonable path to earning it. However no one offering an opinion should be treated as oracular. This includes writers at the IEA. The opinions there are not like tablets carried down a mountain by Moses. They're opinions.
Now on a personal level, I don't care if my remarks represent the creation of "straw men." This claim is often directed at me by the class of people I designate as "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes, a designation I attach to my opinion of their level of intellectual honesty, if "intellectual" is the right term to apply.
However, again, to do what I often do, to repeat, if I were creating strawman, I would prefer to create those who wished they had a brain.
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