engineering by citing newspaper articles.
It's the sort of thing that wide eyed 19 year old third tier freshmen at intellectual backwaters might believe of course, which is how but not what someone who's held a real job in the real world could take seriously.
You can always tell the level of education and understanding when you hear these sort of things.
The bottom line is that the
risk from this reactor is not comparable to the risk of 5 tons on sulfur dioxide, not even remotely comparable to the risk of global climate change.
One of the hallmarks of scientifically illiterate, as in
observationally bereft self admiring hacks, is to focus on what could be or what might be as opposed to what is.
Here is what
is happening: The climate is collapsing.
By the way, I'm dying to hear about the last metal fatigue problem, the most horrible environmental industrial event that ever occurred in the history of humankind, the tragic leaky pipe at Sellafield that completely depopulated all of Cumbria and will eventually kill everyone in Europe.
All the whining about metal fatigue in the world will not make Vermont Yankee as dangerous as a typical coal plant, any more than all of the crying and weeping over the disappeared oil and gas platforms has anything to do with environmentalism.
Most real environmentalists - as opposed to trust fund spoiled brats who have never ventured beyond the hallowed halls of their provincial institutions - know that the solution to the world's energy and environmental problems does not involve hysteric searches for the platforms or panicked worry about when and if they may return.
Vermont produced zero nitrogen oxides in generating electrical energy last year. Zero. None. Nada. This is very, very, very, very close to the
number of megawatt-hours of energy produced by solar scam fraud daydreams in Vermont. Vermont produced zero sulfur dioxides last year in generating it's electricity, as in zip, as in nothing at all.
Speaking of nothing at all, if I had spent 20 years of my life in rarefied isolation lecturing the credulous freshmen on solar magic, and someone called my bluff, I'd probably try talking about some other subject, like say cracks in a steam dryer, even if I had no fucking clue what a steam dryer is or what it does.
The United States has taken a sucker punch to its fossil fuel underpinnings and anyone with a milligram of sense - and we know what a milligram is, don't we, you know like in a microscopic quantity of uranium - knows that the sucker punch in particular was particularly exacerbated by global climate change. For all the decades posturing, egged on by the set of self-referential mostly illiterate faculty of the sort of closed institution where
nothing useful is done or discovered, for all the representations by lower tier college freshmen everywhere about how sexy, cool and positively
dreamy solar power is, solar power is completely
powerless to address the crisis.
As in zero.
As in useless.
As in capable of nothing.
One can imply, dream, wish for, work one's self into a frenzy, blah, blah, blah about the imagined risks of imagined failures of this nuclear facility or that nuclear facility, try to sound self serious with balderdash and blabber, but no nuclear power accident that has caused a single death has occurred anywhere on earth for almost twenty years. In fact the worst imaginable nuclear disaster, the loss of the vast bulk of the radioactive inventory of a reactor
at the end of a fuel cycle no less - an accident represented by one event in
the entire history of nuclear power - has caused less death and injury that the
normal operations of the fossil fuel powered plants in a typical month.
And let's be clear what the
spoiled rich brats who never grew up - because no one ever demanded they grow up - are selling. They are selling fossil fuels in general and more specifically coal. It's because they have no sense of industry.
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