Guest essay by James Wanliss
Every technology has costs and benefits. Horses and oxen can draw carts but they also draw flies. Fire can cook food, but can also burn down the kitchen. Energy use allows us to feed our children, but environmentalists claim human energy use causes global warming, which will fatally transform the planet.
Yet one of the safest and cleanest energy sources, one which emits no carbon dioxide gas, also elicits hysterical behavior from the Green movement. Environmentalists have a knee jerk reaction to nuclear power. They are against it.
For instance, advocacy group Greenpeace writes that it “has always fought – and will continue to fight – vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt expansion of nuclear power, and to shut down existing plants.”
Environmentalist policy causes consumers to pay higher bills for renewables compared to coal and nuclear. Environmentalist ideology is backward looking because it thinks of de-development of industrial society as positive. The result—one hopes it is an unintended consequence—of environmentalist policy is poor countries staying poor because energy on a massive scale is requisite for human development. Green energy policy shows only contempt for the aspirations of the poor.
Environmentalist ideology afflicts not only energy policy, but other technologies too. Take spaceflight as an example.
The past year has been a stunning time in the space sciences. On July 14, 2015, NASA’s nuclear-powered New Horizons probe breezed past Pluto, capturing history’s first close-up looks at the little rock that couldn’t. You may remember, until recently Pluto was the ninth and smallest planet in our solar system. Pluto was then declared a dwarf planet, but the mighty mite could make a comeback because of data gleaned from New Horizons.
The $723 million New Horizons mission launched in January 2006. It was proposed in 1989, the same year NASA’s Voyager 2 probe zoomed past Neptune, getting the first up-close looks at that stunning, blue “ice giant.” But is questionable whether the mission could fly today because of the political clout of the out of control environmental movement, represented first of all by Barack Obama, arguably America’s first truly green president.
It took more than a decade of hard work and wrangling before New Horizons graduated from concept to full-fledged NASA mission. Forgotten in the excitement of the flyby is the tortured history of New Horizons as environmentalists sought to block the mission at every turn.
Environmentalist knee-jerk opposition to nuclear power was the central complaint.
The powerful advocacy groups Greenpeace and ‘Friends of the Earth’ were at the forefront of opposition and many environmentalists picketed the launch site.
Nonetheless, with the Bush administration friendly to nuclear power and open to scientific innovation, just less than a decade ago New Horizons defied the greens and blasted off to Pluto – a target nearly 3 billion miles (4.8 billion km) from our planet.
Thanks to nuclear powered engines the robot ship sped away from earth at speeds approaching 36,000 miles per hour. This is the fastest flight of any spacecraft and allowed New Horizons to speed past the Moon about nine hours from launch. Less than a decade later it threaded the needle of Pluto’s orbit.
Not too shabby of an achievement when one considers that this is equivalent to shooting a thread through the eye of a needle located 300 m (1000 ft) away, or sinking a hole in one between Jerusalem and Kathmandu. Not too shabby.
The launch of another nuclear powered mission would be impossible today. The green ideology—flower power—has consequences not only in the energy sector but in virtually every aspect of modern life. Going green means not only increased poverty, it means not going to Pluto. The choice really is ‘Pluto or bust’.
James Wanliss, Ph.D., is Professor of Physics at Presbyterian College, Clinton, SC. He is a Senior Fellow and Contributing Writer for The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, and author of Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Not Death. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed physics articles, has held the NSF CAREER award, and does research in space science and nonlinear dynamical systems under grants from NASA and NSF.
@cgh
I would be interested in the source of your claims. Repeating a lie is still lying. Think about that before making serious accusations. For the record, I had a lot of billable hours working on mitigation for US plants. So I had lots of references.
“So by and large they sat unused until hydrogen buildup blew the secondary containment.”
The secondary containment did not blow up. The refueling floor and above on a Mark I & II containment design is not part of secondary containment. It is one of the confusing aspects of a BWR that anti-nukes like to exploit when telling a carefully crafted lie. It is just an industrial building with blow panels.
Modern containment buildings for PWRs and BWRs are two structures. The outer building is a shield building to protect against tornadoes and airplane crashes. The inner build in the containment building designed to contain steam released if a pipe breaks. The annulus area is connected to ventilation to maintain a negative pressure.
“Not too shabby of an achievement when one considers that this is equivalent to … sinking a hole in one between Jerusalem and Kathmandu.”
The golf analogy is brilliant. Just replace “Jerusalem” with a different city and present that comparison to nuclear power to Obama. That massive carbon footprint (moreso than anyone else on Earth – ever) leisure man will support it in a heartbeat.
Sigh, these types of articles always bring out the “man-was-never-meant-to-fly” -type antediluvian Cro Magnons who want us all to huddle in fear. They dust off the 1940s-50s views of nuclear and seem unaware that the number of people who have been killed by nuclear power plants and even nuclear experimental laboratories since the 1950s is about 75 people, over half of which were killed in the Soviet built, zero safety factor design at Chernobyl.
China kills over 4000 coal miners a year. Windmills and solar panels installation (they don’t include electrocutions and manufacturing accidents) have killed over 50 people in the US alone, so they have in a few years surpassed the deaths over 60years from nuclear electrical generation several fold.
https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/05/green-deaths-the-forgotten-dangers-of-solar-panels/
France, the most nuke/electrical country on earth with about 80% of their power from nukes has had…. wait for it…. 1 (one, uno, ein) death in the industry and it may have been from a forklift accident in a fuel rod processing plant! We’ve had a technological revolution of unprecedented magnitude with the computer age (largely accelerated by space exploration) that has refined controls and safety equipment in all, including nuclear, mining/processing, manufacturing,etc. etc. Many of the deaths of the early days wouldn’t happen today.
Why do we let these unelected goons who want to destroy civilization cause us so much cost and pain? Under the dumbing down policy and endemic lefty propaganda we are burdened to the limit economically and in every other way. We need a revolution in politics with an agenda of high quality, engaging education to rid ourselves of useful idiots, and we need leaders with the guts to battle against the antediluvians. They represent the biggest tax rate on humanity. Trump may not be the model politician and he may have said a lot of stupid things. I think he is getting that part of his act together, thankfully. But he is absolutely right about the major issues. He is the only one who intends to take nothing for granted in all the policy tangle that has gone before. None of the “progressives” policies are too big too fail if they don’t pass an obvious utility test.
That beautiful image of Pluto should be a rallying cry for people being dragged back into the dark ages.
PS write me down as a supporter of reinstatement of that obvious planet!
From radiation-related deaths or injuries in France, the answer is zero. All industries will have conventional industrial accidents. The lost time injury rate for workers in the electricity industry in general is about 1/10 the industrial average in most western nations. The lost time injury rate in the nuclear industry is about 1/10 the average of the electricity industry. Even more extreme variances from the mining average prevail in the uranium mining industry.
“China kills over 4000 coal miners a year. ”
Gary your data is out of date. China has made huge improvements in safety mining coal. When I worked in China, accidents at coal mines made the news. Responsible managers were in jail by the end of the week.
Also, the US produces the most electricity with nuclear power.
Gary. I think the antediluvian Cro Magnons who want us all to huddle in fear you speak of have always been around, we just never paid attention to them. Must be television and the Internet.
“The teams going back into Fukushima are truly hero’s, …”
Micro, I agree but not because of radiation. It is easy to measure radiation at harmless levels. It is all the weird things after natural disasters or things like fires.
The plant manager did not pull people back until the hydrogen explosion nearly killed plant operators. This was after civilians had been evacuated. Hydrogen is really scary stuff and is released from reactor coolant when it is depressurized. One of many sources at power plants.
I the responsible engineer for waste gas systems at both BWRs and PWRs. At one plant there had been a history of problems with leakage for years so I was monitoring the operation at about 3 am. The problem became obvious when the HEPA filter overpressurized and a gasket blew out releasing hydrogen to the room. As I was getting the hell of Dodge, the rad detector was ejected missing my head by inches.
In the last few years, one worker at a coal plant and 5 at metal processing plant were killed. If it had been at a nuke plant, the news media would be all over it.