Reply #115: I really have had a hard time understanding leftist disdain for nuclear

[NNadir]

energy, even though when I was young, I held this disdain myself.

Looking back at my own experience, I suspect that the main reasons for it involved confusion between nuclear weapons and commercial nuclear energy. Those of us who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis certainly developed a very healthy fear of radiation that went hand in hand for contempt for war. When we add the real fears associated with continuous atmospheric nuclear testing, I think leftists were lead to reject all things nuclear.

Eventually the opposition developed from this weak, but real, association between nuclear energy and weapons research (and some early power reactors were designed for dual weapons/power use) acquired a certain momentum and became an idee fixe, so that people were uncomfortable even questioning the notion that nuclear energy could be anything but anti-environmental and anti-peace. I know that when I first realized that nuclear energy was about the best energy and environmental option available to the human race, I always felt uncomfortable raising the point among long term friends and associates.

I also note that many of the early nuclear scientists were leftists, with the notable exception of the detestable Edward Teller. I think the Faustian bargain that was made in the Manhattan project left many feeling ambivalent about the entire experience of nuclear projects. Some, like Szilard, even left physics and many failed to raise their voices loud enough to clarify the technical issues, although many understood the realities all along. (There is an excellent book by Alvin Weinberg, a leftist and the inventor of the molten salt reactor, describing a luncheon he had with the seminal antinuclear moron, Ralph Nader.)

Another factor may have been the naive quasi-socialist "back to nature," notions that grew in leftist circles in the 1970's and the suspicion that anything that involved large was intrinsically evil and necessarily anti-environmental. This factor was certainly present in my own opposition.

Finally, back in the 1970's, when the anti-nuclear movement first came to prominence and first began having success, the technology was still unproven and there was very little experimental data with which to compare predictions. It was possible for anti-nuclear activists to make extraordinary claims about, for instance, the implications of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl that have proved to be completely absurd. There was much less experience with how reliable and cheap nuclear energy could actually be. Helped and egged on by a sensationalist news media that is composed by shit-for-brains "journalists" with extremely poor educations, especially with respect to science and technology, people were able to spin doomsday scenarios without any hope of having outright lies subject to correction. Most people, myself included, tended to believe until at least the mid-nineties that we had a reliable "free press." Only recently have we understood that our press is completely useless and distorted.

Also nuclear power is very high tech. The industry creates the kind of jobs that one would normally desire, those that require a strong educational background, are high paying, and which yield high productivity for investment, but these same factors make it very difficult for the ordinary Joe to understand. It is much easier to blithely fill your gas tank with blood mixed oil than it is to spend nights, as I do, thinking about very, very complex physical and mathematical concepts. It's pretty easy to feel noble with a solar cell on your roof, especially if nobody asks you to think about what went into making it.

One hopes that some of this will change, although I am less and less optimistic that there will be the time and resources to do what must be done if we are to prevent a tragedy of incredibly proportions. With nuclear energy, so called "peak oil" need not have any implications at all except a general improvement in the environment, but we seem to be backing ourselves into a corner in which all the consequences of our fondness for oil will have the worst possible effects.