Margaret Mead famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”  And ever since, this has been the rallying cry of every small group of thoughtful, committed citizens united in their effort to change the world.  But there area few things Margaret forgot to mention.

1. There are a lot of thoughtless, aimless citizens who are keen to keep the world just the way it is.
2. Some of them have a lot of power; others have a lot of money.
3. They can unite in common cause too.
4. Unity sometimes demands the suspension of skepticism for the sake of consensus.

Of these, the last one worries me most.  For instance:

The diverse category of “Progressives” is mostly united in their convictions about civil rights, democracy, justice and decency, although they may differ in their understandings of each of these topics.  They are also mostly united in the opinion that anthropic global climate change (AGCC) is largely due to humans’ carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels for energy.  As a consequence of the latter, they are mostly enthusiastic about the replacement of fossil fuels with “renewable” energy sources like solar panels and windmills — so much so that they are happy to ignore the relative puniness of such sources, their intermittent availability and the long-term costs of their maintenance and replacement.  Anyone who raises these issues is immediately suspected of working for the fossil fuel industry and is apt to be summarily disowned by Progressives everywhere, who must maintain consensus if they are going to change the world.

Another opinion every good Progressive is required to hold is that even a tiny amount of radioactive material is certain to cause countless horrible deaths, and therefore no nuclear fission power plants (NPP) should ever be allowed to replace the fossil fuel power plants (FFPP).  Unfortunately, this opinion is utter nonsense.

“Aha!” you say, “another lobbyist for the nuclear power industry!”   Nope.  I just pay attention to the science and the data.  Radiation is, as the Earth is described in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “mostly harmless.”  We are all exposed to it constantly, from our own bones if nothing else, and whatever damage it does to our DNA is usually healed within minutes by the repair mechanisms we had to evolve in order to stay alive with an oxygen metabolism in the first place.  People who live in places like the Ramsar province of Iran or the Kerala Coast in India have been shown to suffer less from cancer and other radiation-associated diseases than the population at large.  (Don’t believe me; look it up!)

But in the last quarter of the 20th Century it became a mandatory conviction of any good Progressive that anything with the word “nuclear” in it was the work of Satan.  Considering the psychological trauma of the Cold War years, this attitude was understandable — if indefensible, since it conflated nuclear power with nuclear weapons.  The actual relationship between those two things is complex, like the actual biological effects of radiation; so it was simpler to just attack anything with the N-word in it.  This was so successful that regulatory agencies like the NRC and the IAEA adopted ludicrous policies like Linear, No Threshold (LNT) model of radiation risk and the concomitant ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) criterion for radioactivity releases from a reactor, which has since been used to make NPP too expensive and difficult to build, even though they were cheap and reliable in the 1970s and we have since learned how to make them much better for less.

So today I face expulsion from my own natural alliance — Progressives — for espousing the one course of action — nuclear power — that could save civilization from AGCC without just turning off the electrical power needed to keep us alive and facilitate restoration of Nature.  But I won’t say things that are patently false just to retain my Progressive credentials.

For more detail, see https://jick.net/nukes