France building 600 miles of solar roadway over next 5 years

[NNadir]

13. Like a broken clock, you are again, correct, albeit rarely.

At least in the title of your response you are correct.

I do in fact, think that nuclear energy, the form of energy invented by some of the finest minds of the 20th century, advanced and promoted by Nobel Laureates like Glenn Seaborg, is great.

I have never said anything other than that, and, since I am very well educated, and have almost certainly read or at least scanned tens of thousands of papers on the subject of nuclear energy, I am very unlikely to change my mind.

I consider all of my defense of nuclear technology against dunderheads who hate it (because they know nothing at all about it), to be an ethical issue because...

...nuclear energy saves lives: Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

I would not be able to live with myself if I didn't confront the tiresome little bourgeois electric car worshiping brats who attack a form of energy that saves lives. This is because unlike a dumb anti-nuke who is disinterested in human lives, who for instance doesn't give a fuck about people who die from air pollution, I am interested in human rights and human lives, including the right to live in a clean commons.

As for despising so called "renewables," I will confess that I used to be stupid enough and uninformed enough to think they were a good idea. But yes. Today I despise them. You know, if you spend as much time in the scientific literature as I do; ten to twenty hours a week typically, although not all of it is about energy and the environment though much is, you can't help learning the details of what so called "renewable energy" is and how it works.

I know what cadmium and indium handling involves. I know all about epitaxy and vapor phase deposition, etc, etc.

Now, the defenders of this garbage all demonstrate, repeatedly, that they are unfamiliar with the contents of science books. Therefore it follows that there's not a single one of them who knows how a solar cell is manufactured, the technology on which it relies, and the external cost of said manufacture and the following life cycle.

Only someone with such an indifferent attitude toward human beings could possibly applaud an experiment, under uncontrolled conditions, where a possible leachable and toxic brand new electronic product is covered on roadways with no research into things like it's a) leachability, b) its behavior under extreme conditions such as an automobile fire or a severe accident, c) its response to weather conditions, including its coefficient of friction in the rain, or its behavior under a snow plow, etc, etc, etc.

Now. This dump approach of putting solar garbage on roadways is an experiment involving human lives. It's surprising, and a little appalling actually that no Institutional Review Board has looked into the potential consequences.

The fact is though, through slick marketing worthy of bourgeois brats, the external costs of the solar nightmare have been given a bye. The social costs have as well. It's apparently OK to have poor people subsidize rich people's "renewable energy" fantasies, which by the way have done zero to address climate change, "fuck 'em if they can't afford electricity rates involved in giving subsidies to rich folks who can afford these stupid solar cells."

The really amusing thing about this entire scheme though kind of reminds me of the National Lampoon cover that showed Gerald Ford with an ice cream cone stuck in his forehead. I generally regard the rabid advocates of so called "renewable energy" to be intellectually challenged, particularly the very stupid ones who don't give a shit about dangerous fossil fuels but feel justified in attacking the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy, still, nuclear energy. But one would suspect that even they would be smart enough to consider that solar cells, with already miserable capacity utilization, often at or less than 10% the rated peak power, will function even less well when they're covered with cars stuck in a traffic jam.

But unsurprisingly, they missed the point entirely. They really are as dumb as stumps; although one should not seek to demean stumps.

Have a nice evening.