Environment & Energy

NNadir

(36,430 posts)

11. I think that the authors of the paper referenced have demonstrated an ethical argument that clearly escapes the...

Sat Aug 16, 2025, 02:38 AM

Aug 16

withered amoral (or worse) immoral perceptions of antinukes.

I frequently point out in this space how many people are killed by fossil fuels each year by reference to the prestigious medical journal Lancet.

It is here: 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).

Let's be clear on something, OK? The entire purpose of the useless solar and wind enterprise that has done nothing to address extreme global heating is to attack nuclear energy. Antinukes, as noted in the OP, don't give a flying fuck about fossil fuels. They never have. They never will. I made this point in the OP:

In my experience antinukes couldn't care less about extreme global heating, nor about the deaths from fossil fuel waste, primarily but not limited to air pollution.

The premise of the attack on nuclear energy by ethical and moral Lilliputians is that if anyone anywhere at any time over any period is killed by radiation exposure, this justifies around 20,000 deaths every damned day from air pollution.

The moral opacity of this argument should, in my view, disgust any decent person. It certainly disgusts me.

The solar and wind industries are responsible for these deaths in my view, using the logic of the fine and highly intelligent and clearly ethical authors of the excellent paper referenced in the OP, since the only role that solar and wind serves is to entrench the use of fossil fuels, about which, again, antinukes couldn't care less. Fossil fuels kill people when they operate normally. Without access to fossil fuels, the wind and solar industries could not operate. Thus it follows that the wind and solar industries are responsible for killing people, lots of them.

We cannot "evacuate" the planet that is being destroyed by fossil fuels, about which to repeat, antinukes couldn't give a flying fuck.

For the record, when I was a stupid bourgeois kid I was an antinuke. At the time it seemed de rigueur at the time for political liberals; antinuke attitudes on our end of the political spectrum, which are happily fading, was our answer to their creationism, a scientifically absurdist dogma.

Then Chernobyl blew up, demonstrating for all time, the worst case possible for a nuclear reactor failure. Having been so trained by the hollow slogans of antinukism, lacking a shred of critical thinking at the time, being just as obtuse and dumb as any antinuke here now, I assumed that there would be millions of deaths from radiation, and certainly the depopulation of the nearby city of Kiev.

Um, Kiev is still there, and millions of people, now under attack as an outgrowth of antinuke cults still live there, suffering not from radiation exposure but from fossil fuel weapons of mass destruction:

It is now nearly 40 years after the Chernobyl failure. Deaths in Kiev we observe today are the result of German antinukes having funded the neofascist imperialist Vladimir Putin by buying his dangerous fossil fuels as a result of shutting their nuclear plants, which were saving 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)

On a scale represented by the collapse of the planetary atmosphere, Chernobyl is a trivial event, of some limited scientific interest, but hardly on the scale of say, much of Canada's forests in flames, along with the thousands of other examples of the collapse of the planetary atmosphere.

Having understood the consequences of the worst nuclear accident conceivable, I had enough moral and intellectual strength to change my mind and to stop being a mindless, technically incompetent, morally vapid antinuke.

I note that along with the moral failure of antinukes, which is appalling since it kills people since nuclear energy saves lives, there is the failure of the fossil fuel system which antinukes coddle with studied indifference. The planet is in flames as a result.

They. Couldn't. Care. Less.

I repeat, not that I have any hope of appealing to the ethical, technical and environmental vacuous mentality of the antinuke community, a dogmatic cult leading to planetary scale destruction:

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

Have a wonderful and pleasant weekend.