The publication, by two European ethicists, is here: Ethics of Nuclear Energy in Times of Climate Change: Escaping the Collective Action Problem
I came across it while searching citations of this paper from Lancet: Electricity generation and health, a paper I often cite in response to rote chanting.
The ethics paper is free, open sourced. Anyone who wants to be educated about "ethics" and energy can read it. Anyone who wants to simply mouth platitudes is, of course, exempt, but certainly not worthy of making statements about the subject of ethics.
The claim is that nuclear and only nuclear needs to be risk free in order to be acceptable, that no other risk matters; all other forms of energy can kill at will.
Anyone making this claim does not really have much of an ethical standing from my perspective.
Nuclear energy need not be perfect to be vastly superior to everything else, including but hardly limited to the category applying to ethics, to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.
The gas and coal plants that are swept under the rug by people who don't think particularly clearly, or who are abysmally misinformed or don't bother to look, do not fit on the roofs of bourgeois home owners either, not that they give a rat's ass about these. Yet the solar industry would not survive without access to gas and coal plants, which the horror now underway in Germany demonstrates.
Of course, one could argue - and I do - that a subsidy paid to homeowners is a subsidy for the relatively wealthy at the expense of the poor. People working three jobs to feed their kids in a one bedroom or studio apartment are not eligible for this subsidy.
I'm not much into "I got mine" libertarian bullshit, the cowboy approach to energy, "every person (who can afford it) for himself, herself or themselves."
Nor are the people who will have to clean up the electronic waste that every solar cell on this planet will become in 25 years. This is a subsidy for the living to be paid by future generations.
Let's be clear. The solar and wind fantasies was never about replacing dangerous fossil fuels; it was about replacing nuclear energy. The recent add on about climate change is nonsense. The expenditure of trillions of dollars on solar and wind in this century has led to the acceleration of climate change, and has contributed nothing to arresting it.
Today 18,000 people will die from air pollution. I remind anyone who thinks that all one has to do is to install solar cells and do away with gas and coal plants is not paying attention.
When confronted, as I often am by rote recitation of "conventional wisdom" whether it comes from my end of the political spectrum, the left, or elsewhere (so called "moderates" and right wingers) I produce the following text, in which I have added the bold for clarity, including a reference:
The reference 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).
The climate scientist, Jim Hansen, in a famous paper coauthored by a colleague at Columbia, picked up on this
reality to show that nuclear energy
saves 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)
Unfortunately, sloganeering has substituted for clear thinking. I wish I could say that this is only true on the right, but we have more of our share of it on the left.
I have been tracking the weekly readings for carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Website for around 2 decades. At the beginning of this century, the 12 month running average of week to week comparators of readings compared with ten years earlier was 15.10 ppm/10 years in August of 2000, or 1.51ppm/year. Last week the same reading was 24.46 ppm/10 years, 2.45 ppm/year.
For this whole century people have been bad-mouthing nuclear energy and praising so called "renewable energy." Having considered the issue in significant detail, I regard as an attack on the
world's poorest citizens.
The solar and wind fantasy is doing
nothing, zero, zip, nada, rien, to address climate change. It has merely soaked up money that could be better spent in a thousand better places, less prominent in "pop" culture perhaps, but very real.
In another context, Abraham Lincoln said this:
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
If we substitute the word "world" for "country" the quote would certainly apply to the present, in particular to the realities of energy. The present is
literally stormy, except where it doesn't rain at all, where crops fail, where water supplies vanish, where vast stretches of continents burn, and people literally drop dead from excessive heat.
It does seem the biggest "difficulty" "piled high" is that people would rather offer smug chants than "think anew." This intellectual and moral laziness is killing the future, and indeed the present.
Have a nice weekend.
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