Environment & Energy

Last edited Sat Aug 16, 2025, 09:40 PM - Edit history (1)

...and the radioactive thorium, a naturally occurring side product that is currently dumped for lanthanide mines like those at Baotou is a useless exercise, even more useless than the wind industry is in addressing the collapse of the planetary atmosphere, about which antinukes, again, couldn't care less. I have never met one with even a shred of scientific depth or education about the thing they hate, nuclear energy, through their rote sloganeering and chanting.

It is easy to show to a person educated say, in high school physics in a good high school, or in introductory college level physics course, that the energy density of a kg of plutonium is roughly 8.0 X 10¹³ Joules of recoverable energy, excluding neutrinos. (Note that I have used the unit of energy, the Joule, not the Watt, which supporters of the failed and useless fossil fuel dependent so called "renewable energy" scam use to obscure its lack of reliability. In order to calculate this energy value, one would need at least a high school science education - to convert the energy unit, the electron-volt, to the SI unit Joule, familiarity with the constants Avogadro's number and the charge on an electron, and the ability to do high school level calculations of atomic weight. One should not be confident that anti-science antinukes can grasp these simple calculations. Every time they open their mouths the demonstrate as much.)

I have recently wrote about the uranium found in used nuclear fuel which in the antinuke cults call "nuclear waste," since, just as they can't imagine the cost of destroying the planetary atmosphere with infinitely more dangerous fossil fuel waste, since the latter kills people and the former doesn't, they lack the imagination (education and scientific knowledge) to understand the value of used nuclear fuels.

Effects of reprocessed uranium multi-recycle on proliferation resistance of plutonium and uranium.

In the United States, we are blessed with having about 80,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel, a valuable resource for future generations that are not trammeled with the selective attention of antinukes.

About 95% of used nuclear fuel is unreacted uranium, with an excellent isotopic vector, as it contains the unnatural isotope ²³⁶U. Converted to plutonium, it follows - if one can do math, something antinukes at which are generally incapable - is that that .95 X 80,000 tons X 1000 kg/ton X 8 X 10¹³ Joules/kg = 60 EJ of energy, about 60% of the energy consumption of the United States in a year if subject, as it should be, to full fission.

In addition, the United States has an inventory of 770,000 metric tons of depleted uranium in the form of UF₆. In the fast neutron spectrum, this material (as a plutonium intermediate), it follows, from a similar calculation, has an energy value of 5600 EJ, enough to supply 100% of the United States' current energy demand for over 50 years, without a single fucking coal mine (about which antinukes couldn't care less), without a single fucking gas plant (about which antinukes couldn't care less), without tearing the shit out of thousands of square miles of wilderness for wind turbines, which, in California alone, is unable to produce as much energy as the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant produces on a 12 acre foot print.

It can be shown, and I have done this many times in many places, that the 4.5 billion tons of natural uranium found in seawater, part of the mantle based uranium cycle, means that uranium reserves can never be depleted, and trust me, there are people called "scientists" who know all about that and have written literally thousands of scientific papers on precisely this subject.

I would note that I have not included the energy value of the dumped radioactive thorium from lanthanide mines like those at Baotou, about which the antinuke assholes who want to tear the shit out of the planet couldn't care less.

It is clear to me that by the right application of knowledge, we could shut every damned energy mine on the planet for centuries with these considerations, using the uranium and thorium already mined.

You know, my son is approaching the end of his Ph.D graduate program in nuclear engineering, after which I assume he will do post docs and perhaps become an academic or industrial nuclear engineer. When he joined to program he chose, during the orientation, the faculty member in charge of the presentations being given, asked those students joining the program how many of them were there because of "climate change" (which I contend should be called "extreme global heating" given that it's already here). Three quarters of these fine young rising nuclear professionals raised their hands.

I assure you they are completely disinterested in the tiresome bullshit of the antinuke class, a bunch of malcontents picking lint out their navels and whining insipidly about things they are incompetent to understand while the planet burns. These fine young nuclear professionals are doing something other than chanting bullshit, which is precisely, and without question, what the antinuke class of remedial education does. They are doing the hard work, and they are here to save what is left to save, and perhaps restore that which can be restored. They don't give a rat's ass about antinukes and their poor educations. They have work to do.

Of course, again, antinukes are very bad at math and very bad at understanding the health consequences of opposing nuclear energy, which are enormous. Their lack of education, their paranoid fear of radiation, their contempt for mathematics and all of their insipid whining and moaning, kills people in vast numbers, as the fine young authors of the fine paper referenced in the OP have shown, convincingly in my view, about 2.3 million Americans since the Three Mile Island hoopla and ignorance fest.

Professionally, I work a great deal in molecular biology, and as such, I am educated enough to understand how supercilious badly educated idiots like Robert F. Kennedy Junior who claims to know something about vaccines without even a shred of education, without ever having passed a college level class in immunology, will be killing people, perhaps in the millions, by the application of pure ignorance.

From my perspective, antinukes are entirely and completely in the same class as that ass, RFK Jr., ignoramuses who by application of the Dunning-Kruger effect, manage to kill people out of sheer stupidity and a complete lack of education.

It is laughable, or would be laughable if their selective attention wasn't killing people, to hear members of such a set evoke the alleged "ignorance" of others, particularly since they clearly can't make a distinction between shit and shoe polish.

Have a wonderful weekend.