After years of doubts, hopes grow that nuclear fusion is finally for real and could help address

[NNadir]

7. Tell it to someone who might find any such horseshit it believable.

One sees this kind of stuff, and one doesn't really want to believe it's possible.

Certainly the age of anti-vax shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has lived through the age of the anti-nuke, but still it is.

They are precisely equivalent in my view.

I mean really, nuclear has never been deployed? Let me guess, France runs on dreams? Everybody in France is dead from neutrons?

Here's the text what my son and I were discussing this week after he downloaded it: Elements of Slow-Neutron Scattering Basics, Techniques, and Applications

Now if someone who wants to tell me about neutron activation experiments conducted half a century ago before the development of modern ICP/MS that their Dad did, I couldn't care less. My wife's father was a physician. This doesn't mean that when I'm sick I ask her to diagnose and treat my illnesses.

In general, neutrons are not shielded by lead, gamma rays are. Neutrons are generally reflected or absorbed, using isotopes with high neutron capture cross sections.

If one were to open the book just cited, one could learn that. Of course, if one can't do math at the level of understanding how widely and for how long nuclear power has been practiced on this planet, one surely wouldn't be able to handle the math it that text, and it's written fairly simply with cute mathematical appendices, fairly straight forward, but beyond a high school level:

Chapter 7 in this book is entirely devoted to the physics of controlling neutrons, and devices for doing so and are not based on the memory of some kid talking to his Dad in the 1960's.

A diagram relevant to neutron control:



A picture of some sample text in the chapter.




This discussion of one type of neutron collimator, a double aperture collimator is part of a chapter 50 pages long.

It is considerably more sophisticated than some drivel about herding cats.

For the record, I have, in my tenure here, written a fair number of accounts with reference to Californium:

Recovery of Trivalent Lanthanides and Transplutonium Actinides with Resin Supported Diglycomides.

As mentioned in that post, the first mass spec I supervised had a Californium ionization source, this was before the invention of ESI.

It wasn't shielded in a sea of lead.

The nuclear industry is over half a century old, and still we have senile old bastards carrying on about nuclear war.

The last nuclear war was 3/4 of a century ago; the only nuclear war..

It was also a petroleum war. Was it also the last petroleum war?

Which killed more people in Japan? Napalm or plutonium?

How many dumbass anti-nukes have called for banning petroleum? Any?

Which is more dangerous, Fukushima or climate change?

In general the rhetoric of anti-nukes is highly immoral because it kills people, since nuclear power saves lives.

I do get tired of citing this widely read and widely cited paper to address the anti-nuke ignorance that kills people:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

It's really a waste of time to do so; these malignant types are not really educable. Like antivaxxers they elevate their only paranoia over the interests of humanity.

Usually, 3;/4 of a century into the nuclear age, I ask people displaying their highly paranoid selective attention if they have any idea, or if they give a shit about the following comprehensive series of papers published in the prestigious medical journal Lancet, the latest being this one:

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).

There have been on this planet, since the 1980's well over 400 nuclear reactors operating, saving lives in spite of appeals to ignorance by people who apparently get their science out of comic books or webpages on Facebook written by other uneducated dweebs.

Thus any asshole whose paranoia about radioactivity and/or neutrons is always invited to demonstrate in this long, highly professional, internationally authored comprehensive document to show where radiation, other than NORM, is a huge risk.

Nuclear energy is not risk free and it doesn't have to be to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else which it is.

I really don't know why I bother. It's a waste of time to have discussions like these; they are as useful as discussing the need for vaccinations with Madison Cawthorn, Gym Jordan or Marjorie Taylor Green.

Theirs is not the only ignorance that kills people.

If one really wants to hand out this kind of toxic nonsense, one should find an uneducated rube with whom to share it.

I'm not interested.