One usually expects an incoherent response from an anti-nuke and one almost always gets it.
For the record, the oldest operating nuclear reactor in the United States is located in New Jersey. Chris Christie was a child when it was built.
It came on line in 1969, with construction beginning in 1965. The plant has operated up to the present day without a single loss of life, a condition that would not have been obtained had a coal plant been built instead.
The plant has undoubtedly saved tens of thousands of lives in New Jersey, despite the efforts of exceedingly stupid people to shut it.
In 1965, the President of the United States was Lyndon Johnson, and one of his chief advisers was Glenn Seaborg, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, negotiator of the nuclear test ban treaty, discoverer or co-discoverer of more elements in the Periodic Table than any other human being in history. Seaborg had served at the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, and was instrumental in the construction of the vast majority of nuclear reactors in this country.
The reactor cost (2007 dollars) $488 million dollars, showing that it is possible - or was possible before stupidity took over - to save lives with nuclear energy at a very low cost. That investment by my parents generation is still protecting the lives of their grandchildren's generation.
Both President Johnson and Glenn Seaborg were Democrats; although both would die before the Democratic Party would develop a wing of anti-science dunderheads as odious as the creationists in the Republican party, the sort of people who simply ignore all evidence to cite their tiresome dogma repeatedly. (I am, of course, referring to the dumb ass anti-nuke wing of our party.)
When the ground was broken Oyster Creek nuclear reactor, which has been saving lives for almost half a century in New Jersey by preventing the use of dangerous fossil fuels to generate electricity, the Governor of New Jersey was Richard Hughes, a Democrat.
There was a time when science held high esteem in the Democratic Party, and it is disturbing that there now is a wing of this party that consists of blithering fools muttering vague and essentially meaningless statements.
The EPA...
The first Secretary of Energy in the current administration was also a Nobel Laureate in science, this time physics. He has noted repeatedly that he is proud of getting the first construction of a nuclear reactor started under his administration of the DOE.
Secretary Chu's Remarks at Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant
Now, nuclear power isn't saving lives because Steven Chu supports it. It would be saving lives if he came out as another dumb anti-nuke, although clearly he isn't a dumb anti-nuke, if one reads his remarks.
Nuclear energy is saving lives because has prevented the burning of billions of tons of coal, not there is any dumb anti-nuke on the face of the planet who cares a whit about the tens of millions of people who die each decade from dangerous coal waste.
All the barely literate muttering, whatever it should actually mean, about Chris Christie, who is certainly as dumb as an anti-nuke whether he claims to support nuclear energy or not is meaningless.
As for the EPA...I've met lots of EPA scientists over the years in various professional settings. Having done so, I really can't say that I've met many who are dumb anti-nukes. There may be some, but of the hundreds I've met, they're concerned about things like, pollution and, um, climate change.
Anti-nukes are spectacularly unconcerned with climate change, since by definition, they oppose the most successfully demonstrated technology for fighting it.
If the EPA is an anti-nuke organization, someone should have informed Stephen Chu about it.
Anti-nukes are not environmentalists. To be an environmentalist, one must know something about biology, chemistry (physical, organic, and inorganic), meteorology, mathematics and physics, unless one simply wishes to issue insipid platitudes. In general I have never observed a single anti-nuke online or elsewhere who is even remotely competent to discuss these subjects, meaning of course, that these are precisely the people who do the most damage to the environment, simply because that is all they are capable of providing, insipid platitudes, this at a time of growing danger to the environment.
Have a good week. It's been, um, "enlightening" to hear this stuff, as always, although probably not for the reasons you might think.
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