People see that and they think what about the crazy people who have their hands on nuclear energy? And isn't it now pretty much run by the very rich?

Congratulations RobertEarl.

You are one of the reasons I now say anti-nuclear activism is just another flavor of climate change denial.

Weird, because I'm an autistic spectrum Luddite who loathes everything about our high energy industrial economy, including nuclear power. But nuclear power is not the worst. Fossil fuels suck more. "Natural" gas ain't natural, it's Coal's nastier little brother. Coal will bludgeon you in a dark alley, maybe to death, but you'll see him coming. Little brother Gas will slit your throat while you sleep.

I reckon the Gorgon gas project and its sisters are among the Worst Things In this World. It sounds like a Japanese movie monster, doesn't it? Guess what, it's worse than Fukushima. Worse than Godzilla.

In my utopia people vaccinate their kids, use birth control, and don't have any reason to buy automobiles or guns.

I lived through chicken pox with many scars, and mumps fucked me up in the land down under. My mom went through some shingles of the worst sort, a knife in the eye.

Hell yes, I enthusiastically vaccinated my children, comforted in the knowledge my family has a long history of barely-to-much-less-than-functional autistic spectrum people long predating modern vaccination. It's likely a dominant gene. My autistic spectrum rocket scientist grandfather had siblings who were not functional in ordinary society. My grandfather wasn't much functional either, his personal life was always one flaming catastrophe after another. But he was a wizard with exotic metals and an engineer for the Apollo project. Landing men on the moon was his pride. He was also an Army Air Force officer in World War II but he never talked about that work. He fixed things. Many very ugly things is my impression. He could do the math.

Clearly, my university education as an evolutionary and environmental biologist has warped me.

Learning how to do the math changes a person.

So I guess I have to agree that science is terrible.

They manage to cope with traffic or mass transit both ways. When they get home, they care for their kids. On weekends, they catch up on chores and might even take a Sunday drive somewhere. They like to think they've got a pretty good handle on life.

And they do, until some egghead comes along and says their car is killing the planet.

That's why people mistrust science, that and most of them think it's just more doubletalk, like the stuff banks and insurance companies and politicians do to them all the time.

I have a great deal of sympathy for people who are afraid of what science is uncovering and none for boneheaded editors who sensationalize it in the news magazines and TV news. I also know these people have been doing a good job at reducing their carbon footprint over the years as their major appliances have gotten more efficient and maybe they've gone from an SUV to a sedan or even a compact. Being unable to buy incandescent bulbs has some of them very annoyed, but most have made the transition in spite of themselves. After all, they don't have to get up on the stepladder to change bulbs all the time if they're CFL or LED.

This is likely how things will be done and they will be done. You can't talk people out of SUVs and incandescent bulbs but you can price them out and make the products superior.

That's another aspect.... the science says that the world as we know it can't continue with the overuse of the resource. People deny that, as if they think the world is what they make of it and is nothing else. Ask people where milk comes from and they say 'The store'.

We can't talk people out of overuse, so the fallback is to price things where they have to cut back. That is a de facto denial of applying science.

as long as it keeps the food cold. Tell them the electric bill will go down and they'll care. This is how it's being done successfully.

My wife's not buying into the no fridge lifestyle.

She is, however, a vegetarian.

I'm still an opportunistic carnivore.

I could live without one if I had access to a daily open air market. I could live with a dorm fridge in an inner city center in Europe. In the US, with centralized supermarkets requiring some sort of vehicle to transport the goods and limiting trips to once a week (or more, in my case), I need a fridge. It's either that or an ice box and I'm old enough to remember ice boxes and no thanks.

Ours stopped working. (New one delivered yesterday.) What sucked was no milk or yogurt for my daughter. (She drinks a cup of milk a day and usually has yogurt for breakfast.)

And not having a freezer for ice (I prefer ICE ICE ICE cold drinks.) But, I realized in that time we could make do with a much smaller freezer. And we made it work. (Maybe a couple of meals of take out too many, though.) I did cook. I bought enough for meals and things that could be stored in the closet. But we have access to farmers markets twice a week, and there are three supermarkets in a one mile radius. Not everybody has that luxury.

and used that in the food compartment to keep things cool enough that my yogurt wouldn't rot and my lettuce wouldn't wilt (much). It worked. I don't know what happened the next day but something did and I gave the fridge a solid kick and it worked again for two days until the new one was delivered. Still, it would have sucked getting ice every day and dealing with the melt water.

I live in a somewhat inconvenient location so daily shopping runs aren't practical, plus I have chickens who lay more eggs than we can eat at once. We do have a smaller, highly efficient refrigerator though.

The thing that really bothered me was the size of the average oven, where an enormous cavern is being heated to cook a loaf of bread or a normal-size dinner entree. My range has four small ovens, big enough to cook almost anything (yes, even a turkey as I'm often asked) that aren't giant wasteful boxes. One is a convection oven, and I have no idea how I lived so long without one. And it's much easier to clean a small oven!

and it's a small item I don't want to haul the solar oven out for. I treated myself to a convection toaster oven that's big enough to do a small chicken and haven't used the big gas oven since. I have a big kitchen with no counter space. My dream kitchen is a cubby with maximum counterspace, an apartment sized (22 inch) stove, a deep double sink, and lots of open shelving.

Was take out the divided kitchen sink and replace it with a deep, wide, undivided one. After a lifetime of those crappy divided sinks that nothing fits into, it's so nice to be able to wash my cookware without drama.

My range is dual-fuel; gas cooktop and electric ovens. Works out well with our frequent power outages or "Crap! The tank's empty again!" (We're out of range of gas lines, so we've got a huge propane tank, like everyone else up here ... but we don't have a landline, so the tank can't call in when it's getting low.)

that duplicates the 1946 sink the place was built with. I hate those shallow little stainless sinks, they're good for nothing.

What I'd really like is a refurbished sink from the 20s or 30s. One side of those was a foot and a half deep, enough to accomodate laundry every day when that's how inner city people managed it. I've had a couple of those and I've loved them both.

We found most of the still in the false wall.

I still have the original range that I'm sure that's been here as long as the house; its dual-fuel, too: propane and wood! People keep offering to "take it off my hands" as though I don't know what it's worth

That's what makes science superior. It's open to debate and experimentation. That's the essence of learning and growing.