Major biological discovery…inside the Chernobyl reactor??

[NNadir]

30. Whatever. In the next hour, around 400 people will die from air pollution.

Some of that air pollution will come from coal, gas, and oil burned by people carrying on about radiation that thus far has killed no one.

Every 15 years or so, plus or minus a few, air pollution, in fact, kills about as many people as all of World War II killed by all causes, combat, bombing, genocide, etc.

I spend much of my free time reading in the primary scientific literature about risk, engineering, climate change, environmental chemistry, physics, etc.

There is a word for people who do what I do: Autodidacts.

I'm not some rube living by googling his or her way every damn day to a link that will tell him or her what she wants to hear.

Quick: Which killed more people, Chernobyl or the serial dam collapse at Banqiao in 1975? Don't know about Banqiao, couldn't care less? Why am I not surprised? I'll bet you've spent days and days and days in the last twenty years carrying on about Chernobyl though.

Which caused more deaths? The destruction of 4 nuclear reactors at Fukushima or the last three hours of air pollution?

I have never, not once, met anyone who burns coal, oil, and gas - this while waiting insipidly for the imaginary wind and solar nirvana that never comes despite sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out the pockets of the poor, among others - who complains about Fukushima, who has even a remote passing acquaintance with the primary scientific literature.

Usually, despite their tremendous lack of sophistication, their obsessive indifference to reality, they nonetheless insist on being taken seriously, even they in no way deserve to be so taken.

They are not serious. They are clueless.

Recently one of the world's most important climate scientists, Jim Hansen, wrote a compelling and widely read - by scientists - paper that demonstrates that Fukushima, Chernobyl, mining, storage of used nuclear fuel, all issues - nuclear energy saves lives.

The paper is here, and it is open access, anyone, even a fool, can read it:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197

Why don't you read the paper and then get back to me giving me one reason, any reason, why you should be taken seriously.

Now let me be clear on something, OK? The paper, again, demonstrates that nuclear energy has saved almost 2 million lives, despite the insane attacks on it by people who are ill informed, indifferent, obsessive, and completely divorced from comparing nuclear energy to its alternatives.

It might save millions more, were it immune from fear and ignorance, which regrettably, it is not, nor is it likely to ever be.

Thus it is fear and ignorance, and not nuclear energy, that will cause millions to die unnecessarily.

Nuclear energy need not be perfect; it need not address the selective attention concerns of every scientifically illiterate opponent of it spouting 50 year old dogma; it need not be harmless; to be vastly superior to everything else.

It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.

Now, I have yet, even once, in a long tenure of having confronted people who are among other things about this issue who I would regard to be as bright as any fourteen year old, never mind the several 14 year olds who I happen to know who are very bright for their ages.

The overwhelming majority people who are going to be hurt by Fukushima will not be injured by radiation or radiation related causes. The overwhelming majority of people who will lose their lives will lose them because obsessive and ill informed asinine fools caused nuclear power plants to be shut and replaced by dangerous fossil fuels, which kill people whenever they operate, whether they do so in normal operations or in accident situations.

Thank you though for your comment. I wasn't feeling as disgusted as I should be by how ignorance is causing the destruction of the planet, and thus thank you for bringing be back to reality.