Environment & Energy

...nuclear engineering. The community of nuclear engineers is on the front lines of fighting antinuclear ignorance, I assure anyone who asks that the science is seeing a resurgence, entering an era as dynamic as that described by the nuclear energy pioneer, Alvin Weinberg - the one time director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory - in his wonderful book, The First Nuclear Era. Nuclear engineering creativity is surging.

The data on China's 56 reactors built in this century is here:

China, Reactor Database

(They built one reactor in the 1990's.)

Note that the Chinese have 30 reactors under construction. They're putting them out as fast as the US did in the 1970's. I note that many of those reactors built in the US nearly 50 years ago, developed and engineered by some of the finest minds of their times, still are functioning and saving lives. I also note that those nuclear reactors were designed and built by engineers with slide rules, absent the computational power we now possess.

Apparently the Chinese do not hold the belief put forth by people who don't give a shit as to whether the extreme global heating we are now observing is not "too expensive," the external costs of fossil fuels, measured in millions of deaths each year is not "too expensive," but that nuclear energy is "too expensive."

But then again, in this country, which is competing with Afghanistan and the like to see which of them can be more ruled by ignorance, we have a cult of antinukes who have helped to leave the planetary atmosphere in ruins. In general, they're libertarian types, rugged individuals, Ayn Rand clones, that cooperative efforts involving high intelligence, education are inferior to home installed junk that will be rotting in 20 years, distributed all over the world.

I note that there are many people who would be clueless to be able to understand how to generate the solutions to the Bateman equations that are important in nuclear engineering, while any individual can log on to an antinuke website to get pablum to repeat. This in no way implies that the ability logging on to websites to get ignorant talking points is superior to being able to know how to solve the Bateman equations.

I'm very, very, very proud of my son, who regrettably now lives in a much worse world than the one into which his father was born. I have raised him to fight ignorance and chanting, and I've told him that it is an ethical imperative to put his fine mind to use in service to humanity. It is I believe, an ethical imperative for all people with the skills and intelligence to be engineers 0 not limited of course to nuclear engineers, but also applies to chemical engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, thermal engineers, and materials science engineers - to apply their skills for the betterment of humanity. (My son's summa cum laude undergraduate degree and his summa cum laude Masters degree are both in the latter, materials science, the perfect and critical topic for nuclear engineering, particularly if we wish to address the need to use nuclear heat to eliminate fossil fuels instead of just producing thermodynamically degraded electricity.)

Sadly, we are observing that ignorance often wins, as we are seeing now politically. I wish i could say that only right wingers are extremely ignorant, but my experience with antinukes on our end of the political spectrum, unhappily precludes me from doing so. We've seen in the long antinuclear era, a celebration and orgy of ignorance that has left the planet in flames, and regrettably, some came from the left, not the right. That is no reason to surrender to ignorance. We can change. We should change. For nuclear engineers on the front lines, the task is to get up, dust off, and fight again, to rebuild the intellectual skills and infrastructure destroyed by the antinuke cults. It's what my son and his colleagues are doing. They are printing reactor cores, something that would have been impossible in the 1970s. Their work is about saving what is left to save, and to restore that which might be restored. The breadth of the latter is shrinking, not growing, because, again, ignorance has won.

Thanks for sharing and give me the opportunity to counter the claim which I reject by appeal to numbers.

Have a nice evening.