I'm melting, I'm melting
For
as long as I remember, Finland used to have four nuclear power plants
to generate electricity for its five million people. There was a
constant and eternal tug-of-war for building the fifth one, the
industry and political right wing wanting one while the leftists and
greens naturally opposed it. Then, less than a year ago or so, I read a
small piece of news that the fifth nuclear plant is finally being
built. I was surprised that the news article was so small, after all
that commotion. I actually had to contact some people back home to
verify that the decision to build the fifth nuclear plant had actually
happened and that I didn't just dream it.
Of course in reality, there always used to be a fifth and even the sixth nuclear plant --- these plants just used to be located across the border in Russia, pumping some of their electricity to Finland. Never heard the leftists or greens say a peep about these "peace plants", though, especially during the cold winter spells!
The fight for the fifth nuclear plant sometimes got pretty hilarious, especially when the angry leftist and green young women decided that they will go on a "strike not to have children" until the plans for the fifth nuclear plant are forever buried. What made this strike so hilarious is that it was blatantly obvious that none of these women had any intention whatsoever of having any children at all for any time in near future. Even so, when the fifth plant was rejected in a vote in the Finnish parliament (by law, they have to approve each nuclear plant), these women happily pranced around of how they made a difference, and actually took credit of the demographic turn of decreasing births. Watching this farce taught me a good lesson about leftism and the green ideology in general.
I am happy about the decision to build more nuclear energy, since I am ideologically in the lines of James Kunstler in this whole issue, and also pretty much accept the arguments presented in "Frequently Asked Questions About Nuclear Energy" by the technological progress optimist John McCarthy. The future can't be built on burning hydrocarbons, but something like 2000 watts of nuclear energy per person would be about right for Western industrial nations. The Chinese have the right idea, as was explained in the article "Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom". And so have of course the French, with their massive nuclear energy capacity per capita. Now there's truly an ideological issue in which the American conservatives really ought to try to be a lot more like the French!
The risks of nuclear power are totally insignificant compared to the risks of burning various hydrocarbons, which are actually not even risks but perfectly known certainties. Imagine the gnashing of teeth and howling if the nuclear power caused even one tenth of accidents, cancers and other illnesses that all the coal-burning currently causes. But the nuclear power just doesn't seem to be that dangerous. Even the most serious nuclear accidents in Three Mile Island and Chernobyl directly and indirectly killed fewer people than, say, malaria or TB probably kills every single hour, even though these nuclear accidents were supposed to end all human life on Earth. At least that's what the greens liked to imply. But somehow we all just seem to continue existing here as if nothing happened, with ever-increasing average lifespans.
Few things have the same staying power in ridiculousness as the typical opponent of nuclear power, who will happily explain to you that nuclear energy causes cancer and oppresses the third world, while a cigarette hangs from his mouth all this time, its smoker totally impervious to his own hypocrisy. In the hysterical arguments of the nuclear energy opponents, a nuclear accident will melt everyone into goo, radiation makes people glow in the dark, the nuclear plant can and will blow up like an atomic bomb in a mushroom cloud, the cooling water will make the oceans boil etc. The article "Nuclear Pseudoscience" by Steve Dutch ridicules many of these "concerns" of the concerned progressive community. The opponents of nuclear energy tout that nuclear energy is unsafe since thousands of "accidents" and "dangerous situations" have happened, not bothering to mention that using their criteria of "accident", stopping your car at a red light would also be an "accident".
Of course, the real problem of nuclear power and the core reason why the greens hysterically oppose it is that it generates energy and therefore makes life and other things better. Remember, the greens oppose energy generation itself since once you have lots of energy, solving other problems is just a question of arrangement and therefore moves humanity away from nature towards artificiality, which is always better.
But don't just believe me, go on, freaking ask the greens! They will tell you that even if somebody invented a perfectly safe and zero-cost way of producing energy, they would sternly oppose it since such an invention would be a disaster for humanity because of all the things that we will do with the energy. For greens, energy itself is bad. Everything they pile on top of this is just smokescreen and distraction: for all their gum flapping about the solar energy and other such cutesy-poo technological dead-ends, they will never accept any energy source that has an actual potential to generate lots of energy. You can mark my words on that.
Hindering the progress of nuclear energy has always been the number one crime that greens have committed against humanity. Even all their other idiotic stuff put together doesn't even come close. Perhaps fifty years in the future they will have to answer for this crime against humanity the same way nazis and communists had to answer for their crimes. What makes this green hostility towards energy even funnier is that their other societal goals have any theoretical possibility of being achieved only in a very high-energy and high-technology society. For example, the concept of women's equality, or the word "homophobia" being a bad word or even existing in the first place. (Think of how absurd and surreal this word would have sounded even fifty years ago.)
The nuclear power is simply such a superior way of generating electricity that its opponents need to make up stuff to make it look bad. Think of every comparison of energy production techniques that you have ever read. These comparisons often feel a lot like the comparisons of countries which put something like "doesn't allow gays to marry" in the column of a Western nation, and puts "doesn't allow gays to live" in the column of a third world nation, and then concludes that both nations are equally bad since both got the same number of bad items. The exact same technique is constantly used to denigrate nuclear energy.
Another reason why the atomic energy is widely opposed is probably philosophical. Atomic energy pretty much by definition validates the atomistic worldview, and for this reason it is evil. People often tend to be hostile towards things that by their very existence demonstrate their worldview and its underlying assumptions to be false.
How could nuclear energy then be better sold to the marching morons? I actually had a good idea about this once, but I have to explain the background a little first. We are all familiar with the infamous book "The Bell Curve" by Murray and Herrnstein, and the massive negative reaction it received for claiming that there is this thing called IQ which is really important and predictive and in fact highly determines everybody's place in society. A few years after that, there was another book "Emotional Intelligence" that introduced a very similar concept called EQ, which is really important and predictive and in fact highly determines everybody's place in society. Heck, the book even goes on to explicitly say in its freaking title that EQ predicts success a lot better than IQ! So surely the leftists and progressives would have have even bigger hissy fit and been even more hostile towards this book than they ever were towards The Bell Curve, right? Nope. In fact, I don't recall ever reading even one of them opposing the fundamentally unfair idea of EQ and denouncing everyone who uses this term to talk about people as racists and bigots.
Apparently it is perfectly OK to claim that humans differ greatly by some important inherent attribute which predicts and almost determines how well they will succeed in society, as long as you use the word "emotional" and avoid any mathematics or any real-world statistical data as much as possible. This double standard doesn't make any sense until you remember that women (and the leftist men who think like women) always approve of ideas that confirm their inherent moral and mental superiority as emotionally proficient equalists, after which it makes perfect sense.
In a form of verbal ju-jitsu, I therefore propose that some new design of nuclear plant should be named "emotion power" or "affirmative power". It would be hilarious to watch the leftists and greens try to wrap their brains around that and how they would go on to oppose these plants. The supporters of IQ could also take a hint here and change the terminology here: instead of using cold and nasty terms such as "intelligence" and "psychometrics", perhaps you could talk about "positive ability" to mean the exact same thing.
Of course in reality, there always used to be a fifth and even the sixth nuclear plant --- these plants just used to be located across the border in Russia, pumping some of their electricity to Finland. Never heard the leftists or greens say a peep about these "peace plants", though, especially during the cold winter spells!
The fight for the fifth nuclear plant sometimes got pretty hilarious, especially when the angry leftist and green young women decided that they will go on a "strike not to have children" until the plans for the fifth nuclear plant are forever buried. What made this strike so hilarious is that it was blatantly obvious that none of these women had any intention whatsoever of having any children at all for any time in near future. Even so, when the fifth plant was rejected in a vote in the Finnish parliament (by law, they have to approve each nuclear plant), these women happily pranced around of how they made a difference, and actually took credit of the demographic turn of decreasing births. Watching this farce taught me a good lesson about leftism and the green ideology in general.
I am happy about the decision to build more nuclear energy, since I am ideologically in the lines of James Kunstler in this whole issue, and also pretty much accept the arguments presented in "Frequently Asked Questions About Nuclear Energy" by the technological progress optimist John McCarthy. The future can't be built on burning hydrocarbons, but something like 2000 watts of nuclear energy per person would be about right for Western industrial nations. The Chinese have the right idea, as was explained in the article "Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom". And so have of course the French, with their massive nuclear energy capacity per capita. Now there's truly an ideological issue in which the American conservatives really ought to try to be a lot more like the French!
The risks of nuclear power are totally insignificant compared to the risks of burning various hydrocarbons, which are actually not even risks but perfectly known certainties. Imagine the gnashing of teeth and howling if the nuclear power caused even one tenth of accidents, cancers and other illnesses that all the coal-burning currently causes. But the nuclear power just doesn't seem to be that dangerous. Even the most serious nuclear accidents in Three Mile Island and Chernobyl directly and indirectly killed fewer people than, say, malaria or TB probably kills every single hour, even though these nuclear accidents were supposed to end all human life on Earth. At least that's what the greens liked to imply. But somehow we all just seem to continue existing here as if nothing happened, with ever-increasing average lifespans.
Few things have the same staying power in ridiculousness as the typical opponent of nuclear power, who will happily explain to you that nuclear energy causes cancer and oppresses the third world, while a cigarette hangs from his mouth all this time, its smoker totally impervious to his own hypocrisy. In the hysterical arguments of the nuclear energy opponents, a nuclear accident will melt everyone into goo, radiation makes people glow in the dark, the nuclear plant can and will blow up like an atomic bomb in a mushroom cloud, the cooling water will make the oceans boil etc. The article "Nuclear Pseudoscience" by Steve Dutch ridicules many of these "concerns" of the concerned progressive community. The opponents of nuclear energy tout that nuclear energy is unsafe since thousands of "accidents" and "dangerous situations" have happened, not bothering to mention that using their criteria of "accident", stopping your car at a red light would also be an "accident".
Of course, the real problem of nuclear power and the core reason why the greens hysterically oppose it is that it generates energy and therefore makes life and other things better. Remember, the greens oppose energy generation itself since once you have lots of energy, solving other problems is just a question of arrangement and therefore moves humanity away from nature towards artificiality, which is always better.
But don't just believe me, go on, freaking ask the greens! They will tell you that even if somebody invented a perfectly safe and zero-cost way of producing energy, they would sternly oppose it since such an invention would be a disaster for humanity because of all the things that we will do with the energy. For greens, energy itself is bad. Everything they pile on top of this is just smokescreen and distraction: for all their gum flapping about the solar energy and other such cutesy-poo technological dead-ends, they will never accept any energy source that has an actual potential to generate lots of energy. You can mark my words on that.
Hindering the progress of nuclear energy has always been the number one crime that greens have committed against humanity. Even all their other idiotic stuff put together doesn't even come close. Perhaps fifty years in the future they will have to answer for this crime against humanity the same way nazis and communists had to answer for their crimes. What makes this green hostility towards energy even funnier is that their other societal goals have any theoretical possibility of being achieved only in a very high-energy and high-technology society. For example, the concept of women's equality, or the word "homophobia" being a bad word or even existing in the first place. (Think of how absurd and surreal this word would have sounded even fifty years ago.)
The nuclear power is simply such a superior way of generating electricity that its opponents need to make up stuff to make it look bad. Think of every comparison of energy production techniques that you have ever read. These comparisons often feel a lot like the comparisons of countries which put something like "doesn't allow gays to marry" in the column of a Western nation, and puts "doesn't allow gays to live" in the column of a third world nation, and then concludes that both nations are equally bad since both got the same number of bad items. The exact same technique is constantly used to denigrate nuclear energy.
Another reason why the atomic energy is widely opposed is probably philosophical. Atomic energy pretty much by definition validates the atomistic worldview, and for this reason it is evil. People often tend to be hostile towards things that by their very existence demonstrate their worldview and its underlying assumptions to be false.
How could nuclear energy then be better sold to the marching morons? I actually had a good idea about this once, but I have to explain the background a little first. We are all familiar with the infamous book "The Bell Curve" by Murray and Herrnstein, and the massive negative reaction it received for claiming that there is this thing called IQ which is really important and predictive and in fact highly determines everybody's place in society. A few years after that, there was another book "Emotional Intelligence" that introduced a very similar concept called EQ, which is really important and predictive and in fact highly determines everybody's place in society. Heck, the book even goes on to explicitly say in its freaking title that EQ predicts success a lot better than IQ! So surely the leftists and progressives would have have even bigger hissy fit and been even more hostile towards this book than they ever were towards The Bell Curve, right? Nope. In fact, I don't recall ever reading even one of them opposing the fundamentally unfair idea of EQ and denouncing everyone who uses this term to talk about people as racists and bigots.
Apparently it is perfectly OK to claim that humans differ greatly by some important inherent attribute which predicts and almost determines how well they will succeed in society, as long as you use the word "emotional" and avoid any mathematics or any real-world statistical data as much as possible. This double standard doesn't make any sense until you remember that women (and the leftist men who think like women) always approve of ideas that confirm their inherent moral and mental superiority as emotionally proficient equalists, after which it makes perfect sense.
In a form of verbal ju-jitsu, I therefore propose that some new design of nuclear plant should be named "emotion power" or "affirmative power". It would be hilarious to watch the leftists and greens try to wrap their brains around that and how they would go on to oppose these plants. The supporters of IQ could also take a hint here and change the terminology here: instead of using cold and nasty terms such as "intelligence" and "psychometrics", perhaps you could talk about "positive ability" to mean the exact same thing.
On the whole an excellent post.
You're right about the opinion of greens about energy. It may have been Amory Lovins who said something to the effect that giving mankind a cheap, inexhaustible, safe and environmentally harmless source of energy would be equivalent to giving a machine gun to an idiot child.
However, I doubt the practicality of changing the name of nuclear power. At least it would be necessary to find some sound justification for the new name. (There has already been one name change: it used to be called atomic power, but in this case the new name is technically more correct.)
Posted by Frej Wasastjerna | 8:22 AM
Building the fifth nuclear power plant (the largest in the world at 1600MW!) was probably the best decision that the finnish politicians have recently made. The rest of Europe is also gradually starting to warm to the idea of more nuclear power, after realizing their overdependence on Russian gas.
Perhaps new technological developments in nuclear power would offer a logical chance for a name change. They should hire some trendy marketing people to come up with nicer names before breeder, fusion and other types of new reactors are actually implemented.
Posted by KTM | 9:24 AM
"translated in English" should read "into English".
Posted by Anonymous | 4:49 PM