Bare Metal Critical Masses of Commonly Available Plutonium Isotopes.

[NNadir]

2. I disagree with the "rightly so" statement about Chernobyl and Fukushima.

It is entirely based on selective attention.

On the scale of human tragedy connected with energy, air pollution is a tragedy that dwarfs, by at least 5 orders of magnitude, the combined effects of Chernobyl and Fukushima combined.

Seven million people die every damned year from air pollution. This means that since Fukushima occurred in 2011, 56 million people have died from air pollution. How many people died from radiation at Fukushima again?

How anyone can consider this an issue that is "rightly so" escapes my ethical purview completely.

To this, we may add the results of climate change, another related effect to the accumulation of dangerous fossil fuel waste, the total destruction of entire oceanic ecosystems such as the Great Barrier Reef.

It is pure ignorance to oppose nuclear energy because of Fukushima, and there is nothing moral or remotely ethical in even the weakest sense of deciding that fear of radiation from Fukushima justifies the death of 70 million people every decade from combustion wastes.

The idea that wind, solar and tidal energy is cheap, environmentally sustainable or desirable does not stand up to critical examination. The cost of this experiment is in the trillions of dollars. I pointed out in another post here (see below), with IEA data, that the results have been negligible.

If we are to speak of destruction of ecosystems, I note that worship at the altar of so called "renewable energy" has destroyed both the Mississippi River Delta system by eutrophication because of fertilizer runoff from Iowa farms growing corn for corn ethanol, and Borneo's rain forests being destroyed to make palm oil plantations to feed into Germany's biodiesel supplies for its "renewable fuel portfolio standards."

I'm an environmentalist, not an industrial agronomist. I object.

I also object to converting pristine wildernesses into industrial parks for wind turbines serviced by huge diesel trucks.

Look, I'm a political liberal and for many years I towed the party line - actually believing it and advocating for so called "renewable energy - believing that advancing so called "renewable energy" was a worthy cause. I note that this has become a feature of our culture of pablum, that you can make anything acceptable if you put a picture of a wind turbine next to it. But I have come understand that the means has become more important that what I personally regard as the ends of liberalism's stated goal of caring for the environment. This public meme is counterfactual. If the goal is to prevent climate change and to save the environment, it is experimentally clear that solar and wind haven't cut it, aren't cutting it and won't cut it.

It has become a sordid religion that we must worship solar and wind energy without giving a crap about what should have been its ends, which is a safe and sustainable environment.

Do you know what the fastest growing source of energy in the 21st century has been? I do. I wrote about recently in this space.

World Energy Outlook, 2017, 2018, 2019. Data Tables of Primary Energy Sources.

An improved and less confusing data table combining the 2017, 2018, and 2019 WEO reports.

Let me quote from the former:

In absolute numbers, exajoules, the fastest growing source of energy on this planet in this century has been coal. Coal use grew in the world at large between 2017 and 2018, despite what one may have heard in the American provinces.

In absolute numbers, dangerous natural gas was the second fastest growing source of energy in this century.

In absolute numbers, dangerous petroleum was the third fastest growing source of energy on this planet.

In this century, world energy demand grew by 179.15 exajoules to 599.34 exajoules.

In this century, world gas demand grew by 50.33 exajoules to 137.03 exajoules.

In this century, the use of petroleum grew by 34.79 exajoules to 188.45 exajoules.

In this century, the use of coal grew by 63.22 exajoules to 159.98 exajoules.

In this century, the solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy on which people so cheerfully have bet the entire planetary atmosphere, stealing the future from all future generations, grew by 9.76 exajoules to 12.27 exajoules.

The ends of liberalism as I define them are caught up in Article 25 Section 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the UN in 1948, and they honored only in the breech. They are still worthy human goals. This section reads as follows:

Article 25.

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

I am tired of hearing about conservation from people living in the Western World, particularly when said people complain about China's carbon emissions. The per capita consumption of a Chinese citizen is roughly 1/10 of an American. When the Chinese were consuming 1/50th of an American, should we have been lecturing them on conservation? Were they within their rights to look at our lifestyle and think, as we do, that we had a "right" to it? Why are we allowed to live on average continuous power consumption rates nearly 10,000 watts, while they live on 900? Because most of us doing this are white? Because of George Washington? Herbert Hoover? Donald Trump?

Two billion people on this planet lack access to even primitive sanitation systems; more than 600 million need to defecate in the open.

WHO fact sheet, Sanitation.

Is it ethical to talk about energy conservation to these people? Do we really believe that if we all switch to LED light bulbs that we will save the world? Might we do better at saving the world by giving these people a light bulb in a latrine?

I have been studying issues in energy flows for more than 30 years, based on an ethical view very much connected with Article 25 Section 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Realizing these rights will require broad access to energy, we must make that energy in a sustainable fashion.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, sustainable about the material requirements, owing to the low energy to mass ratio of so called "renewable energy." The worship of it is a crime against all future generations. It is, in fact, not liberal, and not connected with human development goals or compatible with them. It is rather, to the contrary, reactionary. I remind everyone that humanity existed on so called "renewable energy" for thousands of years and abandoned it during the 19th and early 20th century. Does anyone ever pause from chanting mantras about solar and wind to consider why that is?

The idea that solar and wind are cheap is also based on bad thinking. What is the use of the capital cost of a solar installation at midnight? At midnight it doesn't matter if the capital cost was zero, because the value is zero. In fact, it requires both the external and internal costs of the redundant system. If, in fact, there is so much electricity available on a bright sunny windy day that electricity prices go negative - this actually happens - the solar and wind systems are worthless to the investors, and the redundant systems are also worthless. Does anyone ever pause from chanting the mantra to ask how it is that the highest consumer electricity prices in the OECD belong to Germany and that off shore oil and gas drilling hellhole Denmark? I finally understood why and how this is from a wonderful publication by MIT's Charles Forsberg.

It is one thing to despise the right for its willful denial of climate change. It is another thing to understand that climate change is real, is driven by human activities, but otherwise to insist that a fixed belief in a pet system, as we do on the left, that has clearly and unambiguously failed is the only acceptable solution.

You sound as if you are a person who cares, or who at least wants to care. I'm an old man. I've been hearing this Amory Lovins anti-nuke "conservation and solar energy will save us" rhetoric for my entire adult life. Again, I even believed in it once. I am a political liberal; but my liberalism is secondary to my life as a scientist, because in science, no theory is valid unless it is tested by experiment.

The results of the trillion dollar experiment in "renewable energy will save us" are in. We are going to see carbon dioxide concentrations measured at Mauna Loa of over 417 ppm, maybe more, in May of 2020.

It is time to let go of dogma and wishful thinking and to get serious.

There is nothing "rightly so" about anti-nuke fear and ignorance. Nothing. It is a crime against all future generations.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

Have a nice day tomorrow.