beyond cost (I'm not excluding myself here, I'm as guilty as anyone else). So it seems like we need to impose much larger costs on energy usage. Like perhaps the true cost, by including as many externalities as can be accounted for and compensating those who suffer the costs of those externalities.

I mean, that isn't gonna happen, but I don't see how to wake people up any other way.

Unfortunately humanity including me have been able to keep the true cost away from us. Shoot, not just humanity, all life does this I think. It's always eating and growing until it's environment makes it stop. The stopping part though, that can be rough. Its one thing for deer to overpopulate and create a scarcity of food in a region or even a continent, its another to do it on a planet wide scale. People think nature has a kind way of achieving the balance but that's just not true. The balance always seems to come, and it comes with a hard price. One would hope we would be smart enough to not fall into this trap but all evidence shows we are not. I can hope though. Thanks for commenting!
Eko

...simple engineering or science.

These are the sort of people who can't add and subtract and who isolate nuclear energy from the vast destruction their appalling ignorance causes.

We spent over 3 trillion dollars on solar and wind junk, between 2004 and 2019, all of which will be toxic landfill in less than 20 years.

The children who are toddlers today will be stuck with this mess, vast stretches of destroyed wilderness laced with access roads and rotting electronic waste just as they leave college. They will do so in an atmosphere containing close to 500 ppm of carbon dioxide, vast stretches of wilderness rendered into rotting industrial parks by wind and solar fantasies, the residue of huge tracts of mine tailings and slag unnecessarily dug to service an unsustainable reactionary fantasy of returning to the dependence on the weather for energy abandoned in the 19th century for a reason, all because a set of antinukes - the intellectual and moral equivalents of antivaxxers, although antivaxxers are responsible for far fewer deaths - couldn't be bothered to have opened a science book or a scientific paper.

Here's the fucking result:

April 27: 424.60 ppm
April 26: 424.34 ppm
April 25: 424.78 ppm
April 24: 423.96 ppm
April 23: 423.64 ppm
Last Updated: April 28, 2023

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

I have never met or heard of a whiny bourgeois shit for brains antinuke who ever considers the cost of seven million deaths from air pollution each year, or the even larger cost of climate change. I have never met one who gave a fuck about future generations and what idiotic consumerism driven by bourgeois penny pinchers will cost them..

But build a nuclear plant, they all suddenly morph to Ayn Rand wannabe morons, who blithely accept the status quo because they're overly concerned about their pocket change.

They are not merely intellectually appalling; they are morally appalling. In general, they disgust me.

Now, anti-nukes have spent decades, whipping up fear and ignorance, to destroy nuclear manufacturing infrastructure. The Vogtle reactors are basically hand made, because they had to be because ignorance won the day.

My son is a nuclear engineering Ph.D. student, a member of a group of people who are mostly there for the subject about which anti-nukes couldn't give a rat's ass, climate change.

They are going to print nuclear reactors; they are going to rebuild the infrastructure - build back better - that was destroyed by penny pinching paranoids who just don't give a fuck.

Nuclear engineers, highly trained and highly educated people, don't give a fuck what antinukes, the tiresome ignoramuses who brought us here, at CO2 concentrations of over 424 ppm less than 10 years after we first saw readings of 400 ppm at Mauna Loa. They're way too smart to make the toxic and deadly suggestion that nuclear power is "too expensive" and climate change isn't "too expensive." They're way too smart to make the toxic and deadly suggestion that nuclear power is "too dangerous" and climate change isn't "too dangerous."

Being educated, they, I'm sure would find such anti-science, anti-engineering, anti-environmental solipsistic nonsense as appalling as I do. I'll run it by them this summer when I hang out with them.

They. Give. A. Shit.

They. Work.

They don't sit on their asses picking lint out of their navels criticizing stuff they are incompetent to understand.

So called "renewable energy" solar and wind junk is garbage, an unsustainable affectation that squandered three trillion dollars and still can't produce 13 Exajoules of the 634 humanity was consuming as of 2021 according to the WEO, a text that I'm quite sure zero anti-nukes ever bothered to peruse, mostly because they just don't give a shit.

The Vogtle plants will be operating at the dawn of the 22nd century, perhaps longer if refurbished, more than 60 years after every fucking fossil fuel dependent wind turbine on this planet will have spent six decades as landfill. Toddlers today will be twenty years into their retirement and will still be getting power from Vogtle.

The Vogtle are a gift from our generation - at least the less stupid and less self serving members of our generation - to the next several generations. They were built to prevent energy poverty, for generations to come.

This said, they are probably examples of a technology that will soon go away, this after having saved millions of lives, the large scale pressurized water reactor running on a Rankine cycle to produce electricity. The reactors we'll be building in about ten years will be small, flexible reactors designed to go way beyond merely producing electricity. Printed reactors will be a key tool in restoring the infrastructure destroyed by fear and ignorance.

The "victory" of antinukes - and let's be clear, they "won" the argument by appeals to public stupidity, nuclear infrastructure was willfully destroyed - is a loss to humanity.

Nuclear advocates, and nuclear engineers, and nuclear engineering students - I'm proud to have a son among them - are tired and disgusted by the sort of people, with the planet literally burning, who lack the decency if not to be supportive of their hard and challenging work, at least would have the decency to get the fuck out of the way.

However, having observed this sort, antinukes, for many years, I can assure you that decency is not among their notable attributes.

Antinukes won't get out of the fucking way. They'll just blather on with the same tiresome chants until they die, and it will fall to history to record their malign influence that did so much to work for the destruction of the planet, to prevent saving what might have been saved, to make it too late to restore what might have been restored. There is still something left to save, and still things that might be restored, but only if the solar/wind/gas/oil/coal codependents are swept aside by the "better angels of our nature."

Have a nice weekend.

Are they? What are you Nostradamus? You are telling me what you think is going to happen, nothing more nothing less. Pray Nostradamus, when is this going to happen? Will it be 10 years? 20 years? Will that be soon enough? What will be the time frame on "printing" each nuclear plant? How much will it cost great Nostradamus? Can you tell us how much it will cost and how long it will take with evidence Nostradamus, cause that would be way more helpful than you just coming on here predicting and insulting people.
Thanks, Eko

I've just lived through half a century of soothsaying about "100% renewable energy" "by 2000", then "by 2010" then "by 2020" and now "by 2030" and "by 2040..." ad nauseum.

How's that panning out? Would more than 424 ppm of CO2 measured in the planetary atmosphere measured yesterday give some insight to that bit of soothsaying over 50 years, or is that just another thing anti-nukes don't bother to look into because they're too busy whining about nuclear power.

I'm not Nostradamus because I don't sit on my ass and make stuff up out of mocking paranoia. I have spent a vast amount of time over decades digging into the details of engineering and science, as my journal in this space, referencing the primary scientific literature, reflects.

I think I just explained that I have familial experience, a brilliant son, who is working in the lab of one of the world's leading nuclear thinkers. My son is doing SEM and TEM analysis of printed ODS steel. He's just getting started.

I recently noted in this space, not that anti-nukes bother to look very far beyond the lint in their navels, that the Brown's Ferry nuclear reactor set an operational record with solid phase printed components. It's not soothsaying, it's fucking reality, not the reality that anyone with a brain and inclination could find out about. If my contrast, one isn't too bright, and lives in a cave, they'll just remain ignorant of what is happening.

An Oak Ridge Video of 3D Printing Parts for Nuclear Reactors.

Browns Ferry 2 Nuclear Reactor, Set a Record for Reliable Operation With 3D Printed Parts.

If one wished to be literate, one could access this information readily. I do. I don't know why pontificating antinukes can't fucking be bothered to find stuff out, to check their assumptions. You know, I was a dumb shit antinuke at one point in my life, up until around 1987, but I checked my assumptions rather than wallow in what was a rather stupid ideology.

I'm not here chanting. I'm doing something our "renewable energy will save us" soothsayers don't ever bother to do, wade through the dense scientific literature to understand something called "reality."

By contrast, we have anti-nukes who come here to display the same stupidity over and over and over and over. For example, they come here with "I'm not an antinuke" statements and then carry on about so called "nuclear waste." If you ask one of them to show that in the 70 year history of the generation of used nuclear fuel, its storage has killed as many people as air pollution will kill in the next six hours - that would be around 4500 people - they either turn into clowns, change the subject, or slither away to come back later to advocate for killing more people as they wait for the "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here, and won't come, no matter how many resources are squandered on pretending it matters.

Have a wonderful weekend.

From this you extrapolate a whole bunch of stuff. Great science buddy. Great science. "Aw look, its 1940, we have created a vertical flying craft, everyone by 1980 will have that instead of a car!!!
Im not arguing for renewable energy Nostradamus, I'm just asking for a price and timeline on Nuclear to save us and you have been way scant in giving any evidence for that. Please do so. The numbers are there so just do it. Not what you think might happen, but what is. How many more nuclear plants will we need at the current level, how much will it cost at the current cost. I mean we are talking about what is, not what might be right? It could be that a super battery is designed for renewable energy that will save us and for me to use that argument would be, crazy, right? Time is also of the essence I'm sure you agree? So lets go with what is. Give me the numbers. Put up or shut up.
Eko.

and your son is a legend in science. So tell me how much its going to cost and how long it will take. Give me the data. 30m for the last nuclear plant in the US, all nuclear plants we have produce just under 20% of energy production, we have 90 plants so we need 5 times more. 90x5= 450-90= 360. 360x30m=10.2 trillion. That's how much we need now to fix this. That's how much we need to fix this with nuclear at this time. Do you argue that this is not true going with available information that we have now? Not suppositions, real data?.
seriously

I offered a cost benefit analysis, an amateur one no doubt although based on researched facts and your response was predictions and insults. You should be ashamed of yourself since you consider yourself a scientist. Science is about what is real, I gave real facts and you came back with fantasy. It could happen, but it might not. That's not science, that's science fiction.

There is no references in it; it's just a declared opinion, one I personally find weak.

Here is what a post with references might look like, one I wrote while musing about the stupidity of antinuke carrying on insipidly about a collapsed tunnel at Hanford:

828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels.

It has over 25 references, with links, most of them from the primary scientific literature.

Now, of course, I didn't write it for the benefit of the antinuke in question. I know that no amount of information can change the mind of cultists, be they antivaxxers or antinukes, peas in a pod. I wrote it because a stupid comment caused me to think about the geochemistry at Hanford. By accessing and reading the references in that post I expanded my knowledge, understanding that it was all over the head of antiscience types.

For the record, I don't make any distinctions between antinukes other than to note that there is a subset of antinukes here who are "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes, not a particularly honest telling from where I sit, particularly when they drag out the same horseshit, year after year, decade after decade while the fucking planet is literally on fire. They're generic. Each of them is more or less the same is the same as the others. In 20 years at DU, I've seen them come and go, one after another, handing out the same shit. In those 20 years, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere grew by almost 50 ppm. People will die this year from simply being outside in the heat.

Should I congratulate the antinuke community on their "victory?" I don't think so.

I have no reason to be ashamed of anything about my scientific career, particularly when I'm told to do so by appeal to "reality" by people who clearly have no idea what reality is or what it might be.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Nice running away.