Tax dollar giveaway time. Small modular reactors.

[SarahD]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/01/climate/nuclear-small-modular-reactors-us-russia-china-climate-solution-intl/index.html
There is a huge public relations effort behind the push for small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear power plants. The nuke industry is flooding the media with hyper-optimistic information describing SMR plants as The Answer to all our prayers. Reading between the lines, however, reveals that SMR development in the US lags behind Russia and China because they enjoy cheap labor and can take safety shortcuts. So SMRs may never even take off domestically, let alone develop an export market. Unless... yes, you guessed it: tax breaks, subsidies, streamlined licensing, the whole ball of wax. And we might do it. Global warming is a bitch, and it might be worth it to spend trillions of dollars to subsidize and regulate hundreds of nuke plants all over the country. Make no mistake; it will be waaaay expensive, probably with a bigger price tag than going to Mars and our coming war with Iran. What do we think? Worth it or not?

[NNadir]

1. One of the interesting things about antinukes is how bourgeois they are.

It's not a "public relations" effort to develop and deploy SMRs, and it's not done by cheap labor.

We'll leave cheap labor - specifically cobalt slavery for batteries pushed by antinukes in their stupid reactionary so called "renewable energy" scam - to the antinukes.

Modern Slavery, Cobalt Mining.

My son is training as a high level nuclear engineer; has an excellent stipend, and is working to address the issues about which bourgeois antinukes couldn't give a rat's ass: Climate change and the death toll associated with air pollution.

They do this work in the face of catcalls from the abysmally ignorant.

A highly trained, mathematically sophisticated, highly educated nuclear engineer can expect a six figure salary, pretty much out of school but that is not the reason that these young people are working long hours on highly challenging projects.

Their interest is saving what is left to be saved and restore that which can be restored from the climate change that antinuke ignorance has done so much to drive in their blind and deadly acceptance of the fossil fuel industry.

And let's be clear: Antinukes don't give a flying fuck about poverty, about the environment, sustainability or for that matter, human decency. The toxic success of their rhetoric is recorded in the 50 additional ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide dumped into the planetary atmosphere in the 21st century alone, nor do they give a rat's ass about the 7 million people their ignorance helps to kill each year:

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).

The main difference between antivaxxers and antinukes is that antivaxxers have not killed even a fraction of the people killed by antinukes. Covid at its peak didn't kill 19,000 people per day.

Nuclear power 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 that antinuke ignorance kills people.

I have never met an antinuke in this space possessed with either a shred of decency or a shred of scientific sophistication.

(I have also never met one in this space who understands even basic math, but that's another matter.)

It's all specious unreferenced and deadly innuendo, fear and ignorance.

No sense of decency, at long last, no sense of decency among these penny pinching bourgeois consumerist fossil fuel excusing fools, none.

Have a nice evening.

[SarahD]

2. So, yes.

It is worth it. Thanks.