Environment & Energy

...for my fat fingers on a cell phone keyboard, which led me to delete rather than edit the post as intended.

Thank you for preserving a key part of it, which reflects my actual experience. It's better that I write a response at my home computer, which is where I keep my scientific and pat responses to antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes.

So thanks again for this:

You see, every once in a while the rivers in France get really hot and antinukes - and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes - point out to me, as if the this made nuclear energy unreliable, a criteria that they never apply to the thing they push relentlessly, so called "renewable energy" during month (or longer) episodes of Dunkelflaute when they happily burn coal and gas in antinuke heaven, Germany.

That was the complaint registered by antinukes years ago, that nuclear energy was unreliable, to go with nuclear energy is "too expensive" and other delusional claptrap.

(Germany, antinuke heaven! Don't worry; be happy, someday there'll be a hydrogen nirvana; one can build gas plants at will in Germany if you claim that someday they'll run on hydrogen "by 2040." This is amazing, if you think about it, in the country where Ludwig Boltzmann once lived and rationalized the laws of thermodynamics.)

Sigh...

Ah, the good ole, "Strawman" complaint from an "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke. I love it. Once upon a time here there was an antinuke around here, I mean an "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke who I claimed - antinukes are rather witless and don't understand sarcasm unless it comes with one of those internet thingies people seem to need - was more concerned that a radioactive atom would tunnel into his little brain than he was with the collapse of the planetary atmosphere. This concerned the collapse of an old railroad tunnel at the Hanford Reservation containing some old Purex or Bismuth chemical reactors for the extraction of plutonium stored on forgotten rail cars.

In response to complaints about this being a strawman, I set out, at first as a mocking joke, to figure out exactly how many radioactive atoms actually might end up in the brain of an "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke, but I got carried away with it, because the subject of how a radioactive atom might actually travel to an antinuke's brain turned out to be fascinating, at least for me. The post, to which I still sometimes refer was this one:

828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

Anyway, I did want to reify my feeling about a "Renewables will save us" type complaining about the state rivers.

I repeat the part in unintentionally deleted post about the Sierra Club, founded by John Muir to fight the destruction of the Tuolumne River and the Hetch Hetchy valley for so called "renewable energy" - a fight to preserve wilderness that he lost - and the difference involved with the modern Sierra Club, which if I paraphrase my original accidentally deleted post, where the modern membership never sees a wilderness that it doesn't want to transform into an industrial park for solar and wind powerplants, none of which are as reliable as destroying a river with dams, although, there's some question whether the Glen Canyon dam, built when "environmentalist" David Brower traded the Glen Canyon for the Grand Canyon, as if either belonged to him.

I often hear from antinukes that so called "renewable energy" is surging, because the IEA defines strip mining forests for biomass, and hydroelectricity as "renewable energy." I, of course, love to post the data table, from the latest World Energy Outlook, where biomass combustion and hydro are defined as "renewable" to make this point, while crediting the data but not the soothsaying:

World Energy Outlook 2025:



Page 420.

We are running out of rivers to kill however, and the ones we've already killed are drying out - just wait until the Himalayan glaciers are gone - as noted in Nature:

Grill, G., Lehner, B., Thieme, M. et al. Mapping the world’s free-flowing rivers. Nature 569, 215–221 (2019).

From the abstract:



A map from the full text:

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The caption:



To me, an antinuke or an "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke complaining about riverine or riparian ecology is rather like a MAGAT complaining about racism, but that's just me, I guess.

I apologize, again, for my fat fingers and my self deleted post, but am grateful for the opportunity to improve on it.

Thanks again for the little lecture on the use of logical fallacies, and I apologize again, for not taking the complaint seriously. Maybe someone could talk to the "hydrogen will save us" fool about the "guilt by association" and "poisoning the well" fallacies, but um, I'm too lazy or too busy - pick your choice - to do it myself.

Have a nice evening.