Counter-Currents
2,580 words 
There has never been a public debate about climate change. Only dogma.
-Ian Plimer, The Science and Politics of Climate Change
You and your idiot brother
Waiting in the wings.
Which one holds up the other?
Which one pulls the strings?
-The Auteurs, “Idiot Brother”
***
The point has often been made that green politics are a replacement religion. At the beginning of Lent, however, one might have expected The Church of England at least to reassure its dwindling number of adherents that religion itself is still paramount to the nation’s belief system. Strange, then, to find no mention of the Lenten period whatsoever in the CofE’s announcements on the first day of this most Christian of observances. On their X account, the following can be found: “A new guide with practical tips to help churches on their journey towards net zero carbon has launched this week.”
A ten-point guide to the new Scriptures follows. Praise the Lord! This is not to say that there was no mention of religion made at the start of Lent, quite the reverse. It’s just that the religion in question happened to be Islam. A huge Ramadan feast at Windsor Castle, complete with the call to prayer, and the usual obsequious arse-kissing from Starmer and other British politicians, did not exactly drown out the Lenten wishes made by the British political class. You can’t really drown out silence.
But it is the green creed which dominates ecumenical affairs and those of many other British institutions in this year of our Lord, although this is not some new innovation, nor is it peculiar to Labour. What is relatively new is the buzz-phrase “net zero”. This refers to the governmental plan/pledge to cut carbon emissions completely by the year 2050. Four years ago, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote the following about his government’s net-zero program:
Our strategy for net zero is to lead the world in ending our contribution to climate change, while turning this mission into the greatest opportunity for jobs and prosperity for our country since the industrial revolution.
Perhaps economists can set me straight, but Johnson seems to be suggesting that green jobs created by the government will be an economic boon for the UK on a par with the greatest leap forward in industrialization mankind has ever made, and during which the government created no jobs at all, but rather left that to the private sector. As for “our contribution to climate change”, Britain accounts for 0.1%-0.2% of the world’s carbon emissions.
“Climate change” was the rebranding exercise when “global warming” started to unravel. By a strange, alchemical process, all “extreme weather events” can now be traced back to their fons et origo; climate change. Torrential rain? Climate change. LA fires? Climate change. Racism? Climate change. But the relation of this universal anti-panacea called climate change to the earth is of secondary importance. Its existence as a technocratic structure is what matters. It is a wealth distribution scheme intended to impose taxes or tax-like fiscal instruments on the public. Climate change, for the elites, is pure gold as a punitive brand, up there with racism and transgenderism.
We live in a time of committees, and it is only to be expected that the UK has a Climate Change Committee (CCC), established under the Climate Change Act of 2008 during the last Labour Government, headed by that dour Presbyterian socialist, Gordon Brown. The members are, of course, unelected, but that is an old-fashioned requirement for people who wish to take your money for projects for which you did not vote.
The CCC has submitted its latest budget, and guess who has to do the budgeting? You, if you are British. Among the suggestions are prohibitive tariffs on air travel, compulsory electric cars for all, and the removal of domestic boilers and their replacement with expensive heat-pumps. Oh, and restrictions on the consumption of meat and dairy are also suggested. Perhaps Klaus Schwab’s bugs will be back on the menu. No one said saving the planet would be easy – or particularly toothsome – for the peasantry, and it won’t be. It won’t be cheap, either. For the consumer, that is. The scheme itself has the begging-bowl out to the private sector, although it may stay empty. The CCC gives a costing for the impossible dream:
We estimate that the net costs of Net Zero will be around 0.2% of UK GDP per year on average in our pathway, with investment upfront leading to net savings during the Seventh Carbon Budget period. Much of this investment is expected to come from the private sector.
Really? I suspect you might find that combative companies in the private sector are a bit wiser in their investment decisions than their counterparts within the public weal, protected as they are from the squall of the markets. Britain is only technically not in recession because the last quarter showed minuscule growth, although less than expected over the Christmas quarter. By the way, don’t you love the “Seventh Carbon Budget”? It has a Biblical ring to it.
The aim of all this boondoggling is to achieve the UK’s “legal Net Zero target” by 2050. Quite why this is legally binding is not made clear, nor is it clear who exactly would take punitive action were it not met. Would it be a crime, for example, or a simple civil misdemeanor? Would the incumbent government have to go to jail if they miss the target? The great thing about long-term policies, if you are a short-term politician, is, well, fairly obvious.
There has been a growing chorus of informed dissent concerning net zero – outside of the MSM, that is, who will push any old uniparty line. The mood is summed up well in this piece in The Daily Skeptic:
Net Zero was only ever an elite luxury belief backed by 30 years of lies, fake science and constant climate scare forecasts that never happened. Removing all hydrocarbons from industrial societies will lead to economic and societal collapse.
And it is not just dissenters who are taking aim at net zero. The Bank of England admitted in January that net zero policies were driving up energy prices.
Britain already pays some of the highest energy bills in the world, despite Labour’s manifesto pledge to cut bills by up to £300 per household. UK tariffs are up to four times higher than those in the US, and the price cap – which always means the actual price for any British government – is set to rise again. For some elderly British people, the old winter heating allowance was taken away, leading some pensioners to “heat or eat.” Britain imports energy from France. In fact, Britain imports energy from just about everywhere. In short, Britain’s energy infrastructure is super-heating and becoming what diesel engineers call a “galloping engine”, one which is going to run like crazy and then explode. What is to be done? Who is in charge? Fear not. Cometh the hour, cometh the man…
Now, if there was one thing Stalin and his Soviet liked, it was a good long title for its officials. Ed Miliband – often snarkily referred to as “Red Ed” – has the following to fit on to his conference name-tag: Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change of the United Kingdom.
Apart from the fact that it isn’t even grammatically correct, it’s a hell of a moniker.
Miliband and his brother, David, are the sons of Ralph Miliband, a notorious champagne, Primrose Hill socialist (Londoners will get that allusion). The siblings faced off against one another in 2010 for leadership of the Labour Party, and Ed got the gig with much muttering about fratricide. David fled to America to lick his wounds and take the best part of a $2 million-dollar salary as CEO of something called International Rescue Committee. Thunderbirds are go. Victorious Ed took the reins of Labour in one of the most disastrous terms any political leader has ever had, quite possibly anywhere in Europe. And, although one hates the ad hominem approach, the man who was regularly compared with both Muppet lab-assistant Beaker, and Wallace from Wallace & Gromit has something of an image problem.
In an age in which politicians have inexplicably become the planet’s most-photographed people, some are defined by one particular shot. For Trump, it is a bloodied man on a podium, blood streaming down his head, fist raised in defiance (with his Marvel-comic mugshot coming in second). For Justin Trudeau, on the other hand, it is his unfortunate turn as Aladdin. For the Miliband brothers, it is food that they will be remembered for, pictorially speaking. David has the misfortune to look a little chimp-like to begin with, so a photo of him with a banana will haunt him. Ed, on the other hand, and his famous struggle with a bacon sandwich, will always look like a mental patient in the collective British mind’s eye.
Britain’s quasi-autistic Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has a lot of writing to read on a lot of walls, but even he has realized that Miliband’s Forrest Gump-like, sun-and-wind crusade is damaging his chances of retaining power until the next General Election. Miliband is tipped to be sacked in the next Cabinet reshuffle, and Chancellor Rachel Reeves – to deflect from her own portfolio of shortcomings – is briefing against Red Ed. Starmer, it is said, wishes to shift the focus from net zero and switch it to “growing the economy”. He seems to have twigged, not just that there are serious flaws in net zero policy, but that Miliband, in the opinion of the public (and doubtless many at Westminster), is a front-of-the-queue twat.
I want you to get an accurate picture of the man, in case you think I am picking on him in the manner of the old political cartoonists, who would cruelly emphasize large ears and noses. Let’s take a brief musical interlude. Make your own mind up; take a minute of your time to watch and listen to the music of Miliband here. Who signed that off? The ukulele, for Christ’s sake. Who signed off the ukulele? Check the local villages, I should. See which one is missing its idiot. That the public perceive Miliband as something of a freak is scarcely surprising, the budget the man commands is astonishing, and he will pour all of that budget down the green energy toilet.
To rehash the religious comparison, Miliband sees himself as a High Priest of Climate Change, when in fact he is more like one of those wild-eyed zealots alone in a cave in the desert, ranting and raving at the sands and seeing God and the Devil in every rock and bush. To go full English for an appropriate phrase, Miliband is proper mental. Look at him, for example, looking yearningly at Greta Thunberg doing her act. He either sees her as a latter-day saint, or he has sexual predilections of which we know nothing. But the lunatic who has temporarily taken over the environmental asylum may be about to be sedated by the staff.
Trump has taken a felling-axe to so much rotten lumber in the US it is easy to forget that one of his first Executive Orders was to get America out of the Paris climate agreement, becoming only the fourth country outside of this disastrous pact. The CCC won’t have forgotten that, although they know Starmer would never make Britain the fifth. But Starmer is starting to notice that net zero has something of The Ancient Mariner’s albatross about it. When net zero first arrived on the political horizon, it was as Coleridge describes the bird in the poem:
At length did cross an albatross:
Through the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.
Now, of course, the status of the bird has changed, as it did for the crew, and it hangs around the Mariner’s neck as a curse. The political climate has certainly changed, but then it never was a stable ecosystem to begin with.
The arena of climate change is, to say the least, crowded with debate, and one only has a certain amount of time in this era of information deluge. I read Bjørn Lomborg’s book The Skeptical Environmentalist 20 years ago, and what made the most profound impact on me was that Lomborg was as Left-wing as you would expect a Danish academic to be. An article came out debunking climate-change theory, and a disgruntled Lomborg tasked his class with what is now called fact-checking.
Expecting his students to return having debunked the debunkers, Lomborg was amazed. Everything in the article he had found so scientifically offensive was true. Like all good Protestants, he had questioned, and he had repented. And, as with many Protestant heretics, he was punished.
Lomborg began suggesting things such as abandoning the ruinous Kyoto project and diverting the money to something internationally doable. Potable water for the whole of Africa, for example. Well, file under Nazi, obviously. Lomborg became a pariah to the environmentalist movement, but continues his mild-mannered, eminently sensible work today. The book is statistically heavy, but the introduction is essential reading. I approach stats like I approach pickles; pick out the ones you know you will like.
Other than that, I read James Delingpole’s Watermelons, which concerns those who are “green on the outside but red on the inside”, who smuggle extreme socialism inside their wooden horse of environmentalism, as it was once called. So, my reading on climate change is fairly paltry, although I did take an interest in the case of Mark Steyn and climate change scientist Michael Mann. Indeed, it was a case, Mann v Steyn. settled last year, with Steyn having to pay $1 million to Mann. In his book on the case, A Disgrace to the Profession, Steyn is not just talking about the weather, he’s talking about skullduggery, dirty work at the climate change crossroads. Here, Steyn is referring to the infamous “hockey-stick curve”. This always threw me, because “hockey” in England means field hockey, but it is an ice-hockey stick which supplies the shape purportedly showing exponential global warming:
The hockey stick has nothing to do with reality but was the result of incorrect handling of proxy temperature records and incorrect statistical analysis.
Of course, one can’t sew together a few tatters from what one has chanced to read concerning climate change and present it as the truth, but you can color me skeptical. The science is far from settled outside of the fever dreams of men like David Miliband, the useful idiot brother (although ordinary people will keep paying in the meantime), and net zero is not even a utopian dream. It’s a utopian scam. It’s also hemispherically unilateralist in that it’s only the West that has to do the heavy lifting.
And yet it is possible that Miliband has done the country a favor. Voters always consider politicians as personalities, however PR-assembled and fake that personality might be. With Miliband, however, people get it. It’s not an act. He’s not faking it, like so many politicians. He really is an idiot. When he is sacked from the Cabinet, as seems likely in a Spring reshuffle, he will have fallen from grace both as leader of the Labour Party and its Energy Secretary, two jobs he really wanted. We can forgive David Miliband chuckling over his expensive salad in New York, thinking about his idiot brother and his ukulele. Who won, again?
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15 comments
“Britain accounts for 0.1%-0.2% of the world’s carbon emissions.” Well… does that include the emissions from overseas factories for all the outsourced manufacturing done at your request?
In a good mood, I’m all for reducing pollution and all that, but it seems that the pollution politicians really want to eliminate is us, so screw those guys. While they’re busy holding the border open, I’ll be off thawing out some undersea methane deposits.
Any carbon emission reduction advocates who are not wanting to start replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power are kidding themselves and not serious.
It might not be practical to replace oil, and especially natural gas, with Wind, Solar, and Nuclear, but certainly Coal could be done away with. Carbon Dioxide isn’t even the worst pollutant of the lot.
🙂
You’re right. Nuclear power is the safest and cleanest generation technology, in deaths per terawatt. When nuclear goes wrong, once every few decades, it kills thousands, but when coal goes right, it kills millions every year. And it releases more radiation, too. And nuclear wouldn’t go wrong if we weren’t running ancient reactor designs long past their intended life.
Yeah, I like my seafood without mercury. And that is the fault of coal-burning powerplants.
Also, there is big talk about electric cars, which might make sense for some applications ─ unless we are burning coal for the charging electricity.
If we started using compressed natural gas (CNG) for heavy transportation applications and used hydrogen fuel cells for lighter applications, that would take care of the acid rain and photochemical smog problem that kills people daily.
Hydrogen could be generated from off-peak nuclear power or the electrical power sent over distances with High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power lines (more efficient than Alternating Current because of standing waves) and then delivered to hydrogen production plants which have access to abundant fresh water or sea water.
Nowadays the technology exists to step DC voltages up or down without transformers, which only work with AC. And the long-distance HVDC can now be converted to standard AC house current at 50 or 60 Hertz.
The CANDU nuclear technologies are promising, but back in 1986 at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (my Dad was working for the contractor E.G.&G. then), they demonstrated proof of concept for the Integral Fast Breeder Reactor (IFR), which could shut itself down like a dead-man switch.
The Clintonistas and their mulatto Department of Energy Secretary, Hazel O’Leary shut the IFR project down just before its completion:
“The IFR project was canceled by the US Congress in 1994, three years before completion.[1]” Loc cit.
The Carter Administration had previously banned non-military plutonium production after the 1979 Three Mile Island core meltdown, which killed no one.
However, this IFR nuclear milestone quickly became swamped by the news of the Chernobyl fire. No commercial nuclear reactor in the United States has ever been built without a containment dome as Chernobyl was.
“On April 3, 1986, two tests demonstrated the safety of the IFR concept. These tests simulated accidents involving loss of coolant flow. Even with its normal shutdown devices disabled, the reactor shut itself down safely without overheating anywhere in the system.” Ibid.
The 2011 Fukushima explosion, which was caused by an earthquake and a tsunami and the backup cooling powerplants additionally going offline, thus melting down the core, is hugely overshadowed by the real death toll from the earthquake/tsunami itself, which is up to about 20 thousand. The provable death toll from the radiation of the actual reactor meltdown stands at about 1.
Modern reactors are far more advanced, and nobody uses graphite as a moderator anymore as at Chernobyl. The climate change idiots need to be lobbying for the licensing of a new nuclear reactor every year.
🙂
EDIT: my response to Oleg (March 14, 2025 at 10:44 pm) below is forthcoming soon.
The most impressive part of the IFR project, to me, was the ability to reprocess nuclear waste into new fuel, wringing more and more energy out of it, until over 95% (99%?) of the available energy had been extracted. This compared with only 0.6% of the energy extracted by the typical once-through design. The result was extremely depleted waste – much less radioactive – almost solving the nuclear waste problem while getting about 160x as much energy out of it.
That’s what I read, anyway. That was back in the 80s, but they shut the project down. Where could we be today…?
How would an additional nuclear reactor help Zuckerberg screw normal people and import refugees, or allow bureaucrats maintain their sinecures?
A lot of people are not attentive enough and don’t understand that “Net Zero” actually means “The establishment gives net zero ***** about you”. 🙂
Nuclear reactors are good, but there’s also a problem. Even if reactor is quite safe, it can be blown up nevertheless, for example, through a terror attack or during a war.
You’re also mistaken – there are a lot of graphite reactors, and there’s nothing wrong with graphite being used as decelerator per se.
Coal plants with appropriate purification are actually absolutely fine. And even if they are blown up, it’s not such a catastrophe.
Yes, it’s very funny when people who think that coal is bad charge their Teslas with power generated from a coal station. It’s not even riding a coal-powered vehicle, because there’s additional overhead from power transformation and transmission. 🙂
Oh, and there are funny rumours about a passenger car with nuclear engine allegedly built during the Soviet time (nuclear Volga). It doesn’t seem plausible, but, I think, a fellow technomaniac would appreciate the idea. 😉 In one of descriptions, radioactive gas in the cylinder goes supercritical during the compression stage and propels the piston in the opposite direction.
I think, there were also unimplemented projects in America, too.
I take your point, although climate change is a rabbit warren. You can always say “what about?” When I see a big Mack truck here belching out fumes, I can see the planet is, effectively, smoking 40 cigs a day. Save the environment! Do your bit! Just don’t let the effing government intrude on your well-intentioned life.
Oh, I’m not really disagreeing with you. I’m something of a hippie environmentalist, myself, but I have a hard time publicly allying for any purpose with people actively destroying the West. I want to say “Okay George Monbiot, I’ll work with you on the environment, but you’ve gotta stop pushing illegal immigration into the West.” But alas, I have no leverage. Also, if forced to choose between his beloved natural world and not being thought racist, which would he pick? It’s not clear to me…
I think your problem is a common one. Folk with good intentions about the planet we are on look around and see who they are allied with. Then they think, oh, you have to be effing kidding. I’m in league with these nutjobs? Oh, please.
It’s important to point out that these people who push net zero carbon are 100% on board with bulldozing every last forest, field and mountain to build ugly concrete structures to house billions of third worlders.
Europeans must see their own lands as their true Holy Land again and defend it against these monsters
Bingo. For all the love of nature professed around here, they sure are working overtime clear-cutting forests for our migrant friends.
I’m presuming the Milibands are Jewish. Jews can rarely rule directly in white countries. They are just not likable enough, too grotesque, too weird. Even in rigged elections they fall behind. They literally need the collapse of the state and a revolution in order to get on top, otherwise the populace rejects them.
OlegMarch 14, 2025 at 10:44 pm
>> How would an additional nuclear reactor help Zuckerberg screw normal people and import refugees, or allow bureaucrats maintain their sinecures? <<
I pretty much hate Faceberg and don’t use it. Lots of people posting pictures of their Waffelhut order so that people they don’t even know can see the corporate cuisine that they are consuming. Woo Hoo! I don’t get it and can’t understand why Zuckerface is a billionaire. He is no Steve Wozniak who built the first Apple computer on a workbench with new integrated circuit chips that were then being sold in hobby stores.
>> A lot of people are not attentive enough and don’t understand that “Net Zero” actually means “The establishment gives net zero ***** about you”. 🙂 <<
Yeah, it’s a scam. I agree that manmade CO2 pollution needs to be curbed, but so does other pollution like photochemical smog. Rich people buying Teslas isn’t going to cut it. And while I support wind turbines, the problem is that they really only make sense where the wind blows, such as the Midwest in the USA. The same is true of solar panels, which really only made sense in places like the Southwest where the sun shines about 300 days per year. And there is an impact on the environment from solar farms, even if you place them in the desert ecosystem. No panaceas here other than nuclear power as I see it. Fusion power has promise but it seems to always be another fifty years into the future.
>> Nuclear reactors are good, but there’s also a problem. Even if reactor is quite safe, it can be blown up nevertheless, for example, through a terror attack or during a war. <<
That is true of any kind of major infrastructure. Plus, the power grid is peppered with smaller natural gas poweplants that are used for load-leveling and emergencies such as freak Winter storms like the one in Texas a few years ago that knocked out some power lines. The power outtage disaster was blamed on Wind turbines by Republicans but the real reason was they had little or no redundancy in the regional power grid because redundancy that is seldom needed is the enemy of finance capital efficiency.
Also, the reinforced concrete domes of U.S. reactors have been tested against things like airliner crashes. And the passive failsafe system of modern nuclear designs pretty much makes meltdowns a thing of fiction.
My Dad was a reliability engineer for aerospace and nuclear applications and studied the hell out the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, loss-of-fluid testing (LOFT) and the Space Shuttle explosion in 1986. One of the mottos of NASA was “failure is not an option,” but the reality is that all things in life have risk, including getting up in the morning ─ or riding your bicycle home from work in my case.
Basically, at TMI if the Homer Simpsons at in the reactor control room had simply walked away nothing bad would have happened. As it was, the public was never in danger but the media and Consolidated Edison officials did not know how to respond and scared the bejesus out of the public. President Jimmy Carter who had been an officer in Admiral Rickover’s Nuclear Navy, and wife pranced about the TMI plant location in bright yellow rubber boots like Tin Tin and the Pirates. Carter favored nuclear disarmament and banned private firms from doing Plutonium chemical processing, which makes nuclear power hugely inefficient because fissile Uranium-235 is only 0.7 percent of natural Uranium.
Now, I can understand why Karen Silkwood should never have been working in a chemical plant of any kind, but most atomic workers are better personnel than Homer Simpson. All or most of the U.S. Navy’s chemplant reprocessing of the fuel for nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers is done at the National Reeactor Testing Station in Idaho, now called the Idaho National Laboratory. I knew a lot of the people out there because lots of family and neighbors worked out at the “Site,” and I worked out there occasionally when I had to service the nearby transmitter stations on the nearby buttes.
Anyway, what happened at Three Mile Island is that they got a coolant valve stuck shut with the faulty instrumentation saying that the valve was open. What the instrumentation actually said was that a signal had been given to open the valve, NOT that the valve was opened.
So the befuddled control operators got confused by the instrumentation, and thinking that they had a massive leak somewhere, shut off the cooling system and let the reactor melt down, which was contained, thus ruining it and requiring either a billion dollars in clean up or shuttering the plant in definitely.
This all happened about the time the China Syndrome movie came out with Hanoi Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon. People have a limited ability with numeracy and therefore an extraordinarily difficult time understanding something like radioactivity, and that a detectable presence is not the same thing as a viable danger.
Wild stories about the Chernobyl disaster have largely gone unchecked with some anti-Nuke groups claiming tens of thousands of deaths, when the provable number, in spite of everything, is closer to the number of 30 plant workers and firefighters who perished on site or soon thereafter from radiation poisoning than the tens of thousands as predicted by the activists after Chernobyl.
There was a cancer deaths uptick likely caused by exposure to Iodine-131, which has a half-life of 8 days, but it has been forty years already and the epidemiology studied to death without benefit of Soviet censorship. The Dr. Helen Caldicots were full of beans. Many folks probably died from those nasty Soviet cigarettes that they then consumed with abandon. Chernobyl does make a good case study in systems management.
Three Mile Island is a case study in how not to do instrumentation. If the operators there had just walked away, nothing bad would have happened and the reactor would have shut down automatically.
But modern designs are not merely designed to shut down but to passively fail safe. The Fukushima reactors were older designs from the 1970s, and they incorporated some basic issues with backup diesel power for core cooling considering that the plant was hit by an earthquake and a tsunami and. The coastal water table is also extremely high there.
The Palos Verde nuclear plant, which supplies the air conditioning for the the 5 million or so people from the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, is the most modern reactor commissioned in the Unites States, dating from the 1980s. It was designed to operate in the desert with minimal water needed for cooling. Most water in the state is used for agriculture, btw, and not golf courses and swining pools, contrary to popular belief.
No new nuclear powerplants have been commissioned in the U.S. since Palos Verde, or at least none have come on line, but that might be changing as the Jim Bridger coal plant in Wyoming is building a new nuclear powerplant, and so on. I am old enough to remember no air conditioning in Arizona and Las Vegas, but those Lefty artist types that flee California and settle in Arizona for some reason don’t mind having their nuclear-powered AC.
>> You’re also mistaken – there are a lot of graphite reactors, and there’s nothing wrong with graphite being used as decelerator per se. <<
I stand corrected. I did a quick search and it looks like about 20 percent of the nuclear reactors in the world are graphite moderated. I can only say that I hope that they all have concrete containment domes (unlike Chernobyl).
The Soviet RBMK graphite-moderated reactors weres a fairly recent design (1970s) but they just did not bother to build a concrete containment dome which has always been a requirement for U.S. commerical nuclear powerplants.
The Soviets also combined their nuclear weapons Plutonium production with utility power generation, and that was part of the problem with the accident that ultimately occurred.
The Americans learned their lesson on the containment domes in 1961 when a small research reactor using highly-enriched Uranium had a steam explosion in the Idaho desert and three Army personnel were killed. A radioactive cloud wafted across the desert, but there were no Science Fiction implications like giant cockroaches produced that I know of. I knew some of the engineers that were working at the Reactor Testing Station at the time of the SL-1 explosion.
>> Coal plants with appropriate purification are actually absolutely fine. And even if they are blown up, it’s not such a catastrophe. <<
I am not sure that I agree that it is “perfectly” fine; there are still mercury and significant radioactive emissions from coal powerplants. President Barack Hussein Obama used to often use the oxymoron phrase “clean coal,” but that was probably just to keep the Rockefeller folks happy. Big Democrat donors.
My Dad, who was visiting my sister in Northern Virginia found it absurd once that when somebody broke a mercury thermometer in his Grandkids’ elementary school, they shut down the whole school for a day and sent the kids home while they brought in a decontamination team. Dad chuckled that he had figures for how much mercury is emitted annually from the coal powerplant across the street, which had scrubbers, if I remember correctly.
>> Yes, it’s very funny when people who think that coal is bad charge their Teslas with power generated from a coal station. It’s not even riding a coal-powered vehicle, because there’s additional overhead from power transformation and transmission. 🙂 <<
True, although economics-of-scale applies here and niot just overhead, but the fact is that they are still charging their Teslas from the coal-fired grid. I think electrics have a place like in the Southwest where the climate is dry, so we have photochemical smog instead of acid rain. During the 2020 Covid 19 lockdowns, the famous Phoenix “brown cloud” actually went away because almost nobody were driving their cars. I see a lot of Teslas here but mostly it is rich Liberals who think they are saving the planet.
I think a better approach would be to transition most transportation to compressed natural gas (CNG). Methane burns quite clean, although it does emit CO2. And in addition, starting a Hydogen economy using hydrogen produced from water for fuel-cell vehicles. That would eliminiate the smog and acid rain and greatly reduce the Carbon Footprint.
Gasoline and diesel fuel packs a big punch as far as calories per mass or volume so it might not be entirely phased out, but if most commuter vehicles used either power from the grid or methane or hydrogen (produced from off-peak nuclear) then air pollution would nearly be a thing of the past ─ and it kills people daily. Friends who have visited Beijing say that the air is literally unbreathable, with smog so bad that it is like London at the peak of coal stoves.
Also, I have a lot of ancestors that were miners (gold, silver and uranium mostly in the Colorado Plateau, but also coal) and towns whose boom-or-bust economies that have always relied upon Rockefeller coal such as West Virginia have long had an “Appalachian” economic problem that could almost be described as dysgenic. I am in favor of the complete phasing out of Coal with Nuclear, and the sooner the better.
In the United States, coal provides about 16 percent of the power grid. Nuclear provides about 19 percent.
If we upgraded and doubled the existing nuclear capacity we would eliminate dirty coal, and we could also generate hydrogen from off-peak nuclear power.
Plus, modernizing the power grid would made Wind and Solar more viable than it is now, and generate lots of high-quality jobs that people will find it worthwhile to train for ─ unless Musk has his way with the H1-B visas and then all those jobs will go to Asians like the Pajeet doctors that now dominate the medical profession in the U.S.
>> Oh, and there are funny rumours about a passenger car with nuclear engine allegedly built during the Soviet time (nuclear Volga). It doesn’t seem plausible, but, I think, a fellow technomaniac would appreciate the idea. 😉 In one of descriptions, radioactive gas in the cylinder goes supercritical during the compression stage and propels the piston in the opposite direction.
>> I think, there were also unimplemented projects in America, too. <<
At the EBR-1 (Experimental Breeder Reactor) museum in the Idaho high desert there are two large nuclear reactor aircraft engines that were tested in the early 1960s as proof of concept.
Nuclear aircraft engines? The aircraft reactors are two large box structures in the left foreground next to the parking lot at the old EBR-1 historical site (LINK).
I guess the reactor was carried in the fuselage of a giant plane and supplied the hot gases necessary to run turbines on the wings (LINK). One of the biggest issues to overcome was the shielding necessary to protect the crew. Of course the idea was not practical, just a testing of the concept. There is no reason why nuclear engines cannot power the upper stages of deep space craft. Musk is crazy if he thinks that Mars colonization would be possible otherwise.
Decommissioned in 1964, the EBR-1 was the world’s first breeder reactor and the first test of nuclear-generated electricity (1951) and for a short time electrified the nearby town of Arco, Idaho.
🙂
You should consider writing a book, sir!
I think such a detailed answer merits a reply, but it would go off-topic. Can I contact you privately, Scott?
Sure, my e-mail address is: [email protected]
🙂
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