Environment & Energy

...I do know how to read however, and I do know how answer a question. This is not a function of my father's education - he didn't finish the eighth grade before he had to go to work to feed his family - but my own.

The question I ask of every whiner about so called "nuclear waste" was to show that the storage of used nuclear fuel collected over the last 70 years killed as many people will die in the next 8 hours from air pollution generated by the combustion of fossil fuels.

I provided a reference to a scientific paper, a rather famous one with input from high level scientists around the world, showing how many people are killed each year by fossil fuels, about which antinukes couldn't care less.

My father may have been uneducated, but even so, he made sure that I knew how read for myself.

I didn't ask about anyone father's education. If someone's father had an education, and has a child who cannot answer a question on a topic, it would seem that the father in question didn't educate his children very well, which is unsurprising:

It is fairly obvious that your father, if he claimed that "no one knew what to do with nuclear fuel" was poorly educated about the subject. That he shared rhetoric involving his obviously poor education related to nuclear issues with his child is depressing, but not surprising. Almost every time I see a critic of nuclear power I am impressed by how ignorant they are of the subject.

For the record, my son is finishing a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, which I hope I inspired him to do during his upbringing, since unlike your father, I understand nuclear fuels very well. I also understand the importance of nuclear energy, invented by some of the best minds of the 20th century, to humanity and its future.

That said, my son, whose nuclear engineering skills are focused on nuclear materials under neutron irradiation, knows less about the properties of fission product and actinide chemistry than I do, since I have spent close to 40 years reading, from the primary scientific literature, on a detailed level on the subject. My son hasn't lived 40 years and hasn't had the time on the planet to absorb everything I know on this topic. Since, however, he is highly educated in nuclear engineering, I can and do learn things from him, since he is highly qualified to speak on the topic, to repeat, of nuclear engineering. Happily, unlike your father, my son avoids discussing topics about which he knows nothing. I do ask my son to discuss papers, again from the primary scientific literature, with me, and I enjoy these conversations very much, although my practice has always been to avoid making declarations on subjects about which I know nothing. It would appear that not all fathers do as much, avoid ruminating on subjects about which they clearly know zero, as evidenced from this conversation.

Antinuke ignorance is quite literally killing the planet and killing people. If one can read, one can understand this in detail if one takes the time to look into the matter. I did. If one doesn't know how to read, that's another matter.

Have a nice day.