...I was for anything that wasn't fossil fuels, including solar and wind. I now find this to be as embarrassing as I find my opposition to Shoreham - opposition which helped to kill people - back then.

(At the "waste to energy" "garbage incinerators" LILCO plant in East Northport, billed as "renewable energy" the ash would fall on cars and damage the paint irreversibly; one had to be sure to wash one's car after going to the beach at Eaton's Neck to avoid this. Imagine what that ash did to lungs.)

However, post-Chornobyl, which revealed the worst case for nuclear energy in undeniable terms, I was increasingly pronuclear by the late 1980's.

At that time, my access to the scientific literature was not electronic, since one had to pay quite a bit for electronic access. I lived and breathed paper journals and abstracts, which were very laborious to use, and all of the time that I was in libraries I was devoted to my professional life which has nothing to do with energy issues.

What I realized when I came to DU was that - this is still true today - was that most advocates of solar and wind had zero interest in addressing fossil fuels; mostly they claimed it made nuclear energy unnecessary. The rhetoric at that time was - and it had become absurd on a scale that bogles the imagination - that if only we spent as much money on on solar and wind nuclear as we spent on nuclear, a nirvana would break out. Any opposition to fossil fuels was an afterthought, although after Al Gore's 2000 campaign lip service to eliminating fossil fuels with solar and wind was paid.

It was just that, and still is, lip service.

Today the money spent on mass and land intensive so called "renewable energy" dwarfs that spent on nuclear energy, and here we are, with a collapsing atmosphere.

When University libraries went electronic, my literature searches became far more facile, and I began to research the claims of "solar will save us" and "wind will save us" types here and at Daily Kos, until I was banned at the latter site, for citing, repeatedly, and my most harsh terms, the famous Kharecha and Hansen paper I still cite here:

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)

Now mind you, the antinuke assholes at DailyKos, which included the autocratic owner of that site, loved to wax romantic about how much they admired the "science" of Jim Hansen because they were "pro-science" until he said something they didn't like, where suddenly Hansen was persona non grata. I compare them to antivaxxers, if you must know. Where "science" is concerned, they only hear what they want to hear. They switched allegiance to the moron Joe Romm, and I was banned at Kos for making the simple, and quite accurate true statement that "If Jim Hansen's paper is right, opposing nuclear energy is murder." It was a true statement in 2013; it's true 13 years later in 2026.

When I was banned at DailyKos in 2013 the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide - the yearly average - was 396.74 ppm.

For April, 2026:

April 2026: 431.12 ppm
April 2025: 429.64 ppm
Last updated: May 05, 2026

Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2

Heckuva job antinukes, Heckuva job!

After being banned at DailyKos, I focused more and more at DU, which has a jury system and MIRT to judge who can and cannot stay. The site's owners loosely control access via the trusted membership. It's why DU is the best liberal website in the United States, perhaps anywhere. I often get in trouble here for my corrosive wit, my anger - and often my inability to control it - at the degradation of the planetary atmosphere which is accelerating, a result I lay at the feet of antinukes, but I've survived at DU, even as the planet is in danger of not surviving.

I did what I could, very little, largely here and it's hardly enough. At least I raised a nuclear engineer, so there's that.

Anyway...

The more I heard antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes praise solar and wind garbage, and the more I looked into their claims relying on published literature in the primary scientific literature, the more I came to reject so called "renewable energy." Mind you, the solar and wind advocates were then and still today were directed almost solely at criticizing nuclear energy. My view, continuously reinforced every time they open their mouths, is that they couldn't care less about fossil fuels. The more I poked around, the more realized that solar and wind are not sustainable, not "green," not clean in any of the senses that would matter to, say, John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, who believed, as solar and wind advocates do not, but I do, that wilderness should be preserved rather than industrialized. I am pro-wilderness, just as Muir was. When I moved to California I visited Yosemite many times, and I can imagine what the Hetch Hetchy valley was, and weep that now it is an industrial plant for producing electricity.

By the way, the antinuke mythology was largely born on Long Island, since LILCO proposed three nuclear plants but only built only one, that at Shoreham. The other two were proposed at Jamesport, on the North Fork, and, most importantly, in the extremely wealthy Lloyd's Neck area. The wealthy people living in Lloyd's Neck certainly didn't want cement trucks passing through their neighborhoods during plant construction, commuters to the construction site, and ultimately commuters to the plant itself along with power lines potentially ruining their million dollar views. Afterall, the plant would have only served middle class and lower middle class (the class to which I belonged when growing up) and even poor people. They couldn't give a fuck about their electricity source, as long as it came from, was generated, in areas where poor people lived. They were rich, had connections, and began assembling all of the specious arguments about radiation and so called "nuclear waste" and accidents, blah, blah, blah, using their connections at Newsday to whip up an antinuke hysterical storm that then outgrew Long Island and prevails all over the world today.

It didn't help that LILCO's engineers were not nuclear engineers really. They acted like they were building a coal plant or garbage incineration plant, and kept discovering details indicating that a nuclear plant was something quite different, cleaner, safer, more reliable, but different. Hence they kept needing to retrofit this and that at high cost in delays and money.

Shoreham did involve incompetence in the execution of its construction, which, to repeat, didn't help, but the plant should have opened and saved lives on Long Island and elsewhere. Long Island, and the world is paying the price for it not opening. It's become a touchstone for ignorant antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes.

However, the successful anti-Shoreham effort is mostly the result of the efforts initiated by rich people in Lloyd's Neck to whip up irrational fear and ignorance that now affects the whole planet which is burning as a result.

I have some sympathy for "eat the rich."

Do I make myself clear?

I trust you're having a wonderful Memorial Day weekend.