Zealots of the Atom: The Nuclear Cult

[NNadir]

6. In general, cults like to call other more reputable groups...

...(as in Nobel Laureate quality people) "cults."

Dr. Alvin Weinberg wrote the first Nuclear Engineering text with Eugene Wigner in 1956, at the dawn of the First Nuclear Era.

He was head of the Oak Ridge Laboratory and counted among his friends and associates, the Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg.

There is a famous photograph of Dr. Weinberg with the President of the United States during his tenure, Jack and Jackie Kennedy in the control room of the research reactor at Oak Ridge, accompanied by a guy named Al Gore, father to the 2000 Democratic nominee.

Mr. Gore, Mr. Kennedy, Mrs. Kennedy and Dr. Weinberg

Unremarked by the anti-nuke cult, is the fact that Eugene Wigner won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

It's unsurprising to hear the anti-nuke cults talking about alleged "nuclear cults."

This reminds me of my fundementalist sister in law, who says that Catholicism is a cult.

She believes the world was created in six days...

Well then...

As for the "nuclear priesthood," it's rather unnecessary. Nuclear energy is a mature technology and it utilized broadly around the world. It's strengths are well known, and despite much caviling by hysterics, it was recently shown that it was safer to be in a damaged nuclear powerplant - where no one died - than in any other kind of structure - where more than ten thousand people died - in a 9.0 earthquake and 15 meter tsunami.

All the name calling - and other chanting - by all the mindless anti-nukes as the rail against the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy will not change the common sense of the people of the world who are building 60 nuclear reactors.

World Reactors Under Construction

There's no mysticism involved in this construction, just hard engineering.

The new reactors are like adding another nuclear France. The reactors now being constructed will produce about 1.8 exajoules of pure electricity, and about 5 exajoules of primary energy.

Meanwhile they still talking in the so called "renewable cults" about getting that first exajoule, out of 520 exajoules used each year by humanity, in their expensive and wasteful solar toys. This talk's been going on for 50 years, with no important result.

So what, in fact, is "faith based" here?

In the last ten years, the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste - waste that kills 3.3 million people per year according to the World Health Organization - has risen from 373 ppm to 397 ppm, while the whole time the sun power and wind power cults in this space have railed against the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free primary energy.

Mauna Loa CO2 data, May 2012

Heckuva job, anti-nukes. You must be very proud.