Vermont Is Part of the World: Guest Post by N Nadir

Reading Prong, in dark pink, from Wikipedia

The Prisoner's Dilemma

My American Nuclear Society blog post The Prisoner's Dilemma and New Types of Nuclear Energy Reactors was also posted at The Energy Collective.   In these posts  I compared the game theory example of "prisoner's dilemma" to the internecine fighting within the nuclear community.  I concluded that proponents of all types of reactors should communicate with each other. This would advance the good of nuclear energy as a whole.

Within my post, I said that I had no trouble in supporting Vermont Yankee and also supporting the development of new types of reactors, especially the LFTR.

The post immediately received a lengthy comment from a nuclear opponent, who objected very strongly to anyone supporting Vermont Yankee.  This man wrote that the people of Vermont don't want Vermont Yankee, they voted against Vermont Yankee, etc. etc. and so forth.

Blogger N Nadir replied to this comment about Vermont.  N Nadir has graciously allowed me to use his answer as a guest post.

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Guest Post by N Nadir

The people of South Carolina all once wanted slavery too; that didn't make it right.

Unfortunately, the decision of the people of Vermont to abandon climate change gas free energy does not effect only the people of Vermont, irrespective of their contempt for scientists.   It effects everyone on earth.

The great climate scientist Jim Hansen has calculated that nuclear power has saved the lives of more than 1.8 million people.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197

As it happens, much of the fracking that will be required to replace Vermont Yankee will take place on the Marcellus shale formation, overlying the Reading Prong.   This is a uranium formation in equilibrium with radon gas.   Unless the uranium is removed and fissioned it will leak radon for hundreds of millions of years, just so the citizens of Vermont, their pitchforks in hand, can avoid the paraoxyms of fear they had over a few atoms of tritium that, like the rest of the nuclear industry which has saved so many lives, has had no health effect.

One would find it amusing to compare the number of deaths from the use of nuclear power in Vermont with the number of deaths associated with the PAH's and PM10 particulates from burning wood in Vermont.

How many people have died because of Vermont Yankee?

There are some people who have some, um, concerns about so called "renewable" wood boilers in Vermont and they've written a rather long report about some of the issues:  http://www.4cleanair.org/OWB-NESCAUM-Report_March2006.pdf

Has so called "renewable" energy in Vermont been more safe or less safe than the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant that everyone loves to hate, despite the lives it's saved?

The World Health Organization, in fact, reports that about 2 million people die on this planet each year - half under the age of five - from biomass burning:   http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs313/en/index.html

For the entire 60 year history of nuclear power practiced all around the world, the loss of life from nuclear energy will not even remotely approach the loss of life from the burning of wood in New England next winter.

There are wrist watches that have more tritium in them than 20 tons of water around Vermont Yankee, not that this reality has prevented anyone from issuing hysterical demands that this life saving reactor be shut:

http://www.bluetritium.com/servlet/StoreFront

One would hope that no anti-nukes have tritium watch dials in Vermont, just as one hopes that they will be as upset with the millions of tons of carbon dioxide that they will soon be dumping out of fear of a few tritium atoms.

The planetary atmosphere is collapsing at the fastest rate ever observed.    When we hear things like how Vermonters hate their nuclear plant, one must admit that we deserve what we are going to get.

Vermont cannot stop the diffusion of its atmosphere outside its borders.

When an element in Vermont destroys, out of ignorance and fear, clean infrastructure, they are not doing so in isolation from the rest of humanity.   This is not a Vermont issue; it is a human issue.

....any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. -John Donne

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N Nadir is a well-known blogger about energy: for a long time, he blogged at Daily Kos.  A few years ago, Charles Barton of Nuclear Green described and listed many of his posts.