Environment & Energy

...and supported further by the additional remarks that you have added in this post, that your father was and is, if he is still alive, unqualified to know anything at all about nuclear energy.

Based on what you say, he is clearly ignorant on the subject of nuclear fuels, and thus uninteresting in discussion of the topic.

Saying that an automotive engineer is qualified to know something about nuclear fuels is like, to use your medical metaphor, that a proctologist is qualified to do brain surgery.

Irrespective of who your father is or was, your knowledge of engineering in general is clearly extremely poor.

Nevertheless...

Substituting remarks about your and your father's understanding of nuclear fuels, which, as I know a great deal about nuclear fuels, is clearly zero, does not resolve the fact that like every single illiterate antinuke I have ever encountered in this space, you have declined to answer the original challenge raised, which is that you show, over the entire 70 year history of the generation of used nuclear fuels, the storage of those used fuels has killed has killed as many people as will die in the next 8 hours from fossil fuel waste, aka "air pollution." Again, this is roughly 6000 deaths at a rate of roughly 800 an hour. Again, only references from the primary scientific literature will suffice in addressing the challenge and since no such references exist, the challenge is never addressed by any antinuke I have ever had the unpleasant necessity of confronting.

I will take it that like every other antinuke, given the avoidance of the challenge and refusal to address it by changing the subject to nonsense about your family, that you simply don't give a rat's ass about the 1) deaths connected with fossil fuel waste, seven million each year, and 2) the collapse of the planetary atmosphere from fossil fuel waste.

By the way, as someone who is not fond of the car CULTure, I would note that automotive engineers, given the air pollution generated by cars and trucks and their dependence on fossil fuel combustion, are responsible for vastly more deaths than nuclear engineers ever have caused or ever will cause. The same holds true for aerospace engineers.

I stand by my remarks and will add you (and your father based on your description of him) to the list of people who avoid addressing the challenge, thus demonstrating a level of ethics that I find appalling.

Nuclear energy need not be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else.

Nuclear energy saves lives by preventing the use of fossil fuels, and it stands to reason that people whose livelihoods depend on the use of fossil fuels naturally oppose nuclear energy on specious grounds.

It recalls Upton Sinclair's famous remark, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Roughly 40,000 people die each year from automotive accidents in the United States, whereas in this country, nuclear accidents are responsible for zero deaths here year after year after year.

I often point to this scientific paper to address the mechanism by which nuclear energy saves lives:

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 follows from the paper, which I regard as irrefutable, that antinuke ignorance kills people.

All antinukes give a bye to fossil fuels, about which they couldn't care less, and since the automotive industry depends of the use of fossil fuels, I certainly understand the pernicious and functionally illiterate opinions expressed in this set of remarks by an automotive engineer and his spawn.

This conversation is insipid and is thus concluded.

Have a nice weekend.