...it would take a college level knowledge of chemistry, physics and mathematics, at bare minimum, maybe some graduate level courses, for you to understand any of it.
And clearly any attempt to provide that knowledge would be a waste of time.
Here's a differential equation that is relevant to the point:
Any idea what it means? It's called the Bateman equation, and it's relevant to the accumulation of fission products and actinides. What does the equation tell you about the rate of accumulation, and how does that rate differ from the rate of benzofurans, and polycyclic aromatics like PAH's that are in dangerous fossil fuel and dangerous biomass waste?
Never mind.
I gave at least two references in my previous post to papers from the primary scientific literature pointing to millions of deaths each year from air pollution, and you're, um, unimpressed.
Why am I not surprised?
I would note that you know zero about the Chernobyl "dead" zone (which, by the way, isn't "dead"
and your two hundred thousand dead number is just, well, for lack of a better term, stupid.
The matter was reviewed thousands of times in the primary scientific literature, which you clearly didn't read because you clearly don't read any scientific literature, and no serious person in that literature would give anything like that number as deaths attributable to Chernobyl.
The usual figure, culled from many hundreds of references from the primary scientific literature is roughly 4000 premature deaths, over a period of several decades.
UNSCEAR report The report contains hundreds of references, all from the primary scientific literature.
Intellectual Lilliputians do however throw around numbers like 200,000 because they are, well, living for rumors that tell them what they want to hear; usually they just make it up without providing any scientific references for these claims. They pull them out of thin air, or off of websites put together by people who also know nothing, a great circle of ignorance and fear.
But, understanding that you don't give a rat's ass about 7 million deaths per year, each year, every year, and not just 1986, from air pollution, let's assume that your silly figure was in fact correct, and that Chernobyl killed 200,000 people. This means that 1) the disaster would have killed about the same amount of people as the Banqiao dam disaster in China killed in 1975 - not that you care about that disaster at all - except those people died within two or three weeks, and not your fanciful "ten years." You couldn't care less about Banqiao at all, if you even got off your ass to find out what it was.
But what's more telling is this:
At seven million air pollution deaths per year, your fanciful number, 200,000 deaths from Chernobyl would mean Chernobyl would barely exceed 10 days worth of air pollution deaths.
Ten days. Can you understand that? TEN DAYS! Ten days!!!!!
Now listen hear, that ten days will be followed - without action and with a stupid stumbling further into the status quo - by another 10 days exactly the same, and ten days after that, and ten more after that, for hundreds of periods of ten days.
Let me tell you something. Nuclear energy, which was discovered and developed by some of the best minds this planet has ever seen, doesn't need to be perfect, it doesn't need to be without risk, to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.
Let me know, by the way, when you can find something like 7 million deaths per year from so called "nuclear waste," about which you in fact, clearly know nothing but pretend to care so much about.
This kind of contempt for numbers is exactly why there is no hope for future generations. One of the very disturbing things about the politics in this country, left and right, is the magnitude and vicious immorality of the contempt for science.
You know, my whole life I've been a Democrat, an Eleanor Roosevelt Democrat, who believed in justice, equal opportunity, help for the poor, the down trodden, and now, as my life draws to a close in a spasm of disgust, I find that my party has become the champion of Birkenstock wearing, Tesla car driving, Sierra Club calendar hanging consumers, prattling on about stupid old men from Vermont as the messiah while living in a bourgeois dream world that is literally sucking the future dry.
I give up.
The charges to be brought will be brought by future generations, our children, our grandchildren, and their grandchildren, should humanity survive climate change - which it is increasingly unlikely to do. History, should it survive, will not forgive our generation, nor should it. We were too stupid to breathe, which is why our breath, literally the air we breathe, is irreversibly filled with toxic particles and metals. Maybe it was all that mercury fuming from the coal we burn while we wait, like D'Estragnon waiting for Godot, for our silly "renewable" fantasies to come true: Maybe that mercury that we've been breathing and drinking that destroyed our brains and made us too stupid to open a science book and understand nuclear energy.
It is neither ethical, or just, or intelligent to oppose nuclear energy. I stand my contention that it is nothing less than contempt for science, for engineering and contempt for future generations to chant this rote anti-nuke nonsense year after year after year while the dead pile up. (By the way, not that you give a shit, according the the World Health Organization, the majority of the deaths from air pollution involve children under the age of 5, and most of them are poor, dirt poor. So much for economic justice...)
Jesus Christ! Good luck to Bernie Sanders and the rest of the big, big, big, big fans of fracking the shit out of the continental crust in order to feel all "renewable."
Have a happy New Year. I won't. I know what's happening. I've just spent the last thirty years with my head buried in the primary scientific literature relating to the environment. I give up. It's too damn late.
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