When I was a younger lad, absorbing counter arguments to the Environmentalist movement such as Dr. Petr Beckman's The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear (in original red cover) I tended to view the 70s Environmentalist movement as an ideological offshoot of the 60s New Left, itself an ideological development tracing back to the Reds of the 30s, etc. In other words, as the organic evolution of bad, anti-human ideas. Later I tapped into the reality that environmentalism was a deliberate creation of the Club of Rome. The penny dropped when I realized that the Club of Rome was not some fringe group of far left idealists who somehow gained traction in academia and later public consciousness, but was a planning subcommittee of some of the world's most powerful men. Looking back I have come to suspect that all those anti-Nuke protests - reactors or warheads, take your pick - were as grassroots as today's No Kings protests. At the time they received very heavy coverage on TV, in magazines, and newspapers.
In the 90s the Environmentalist movement put itself in a position of facing a deep reckoning. Global Warming and CO2 emissions was declared existential threat number one. Granting the premise for sake of argument, nuclear fission energy was the obvious solution. Yet being anti-nuclear was the founding DNA of the movement. A few honest leaders such as Patrick Moore resolved the contraction by stepping out. But the fact that the majority plowed on undeterred proved a lot about the nature of their agenda, and their nature as a movement.
Shifting topics a bit, you kind of make me want to study nuclear engineering as a retirement hobby, or at least pick up a couple books. Intuitively I always felt that neutron bombardment should solve the radioactive waste problem. There's got to be decay pathways that can turn the stuff into nice happy little isotopes.
P.S. I'm with you that the "free energy" promotional material of Col. Thomas Bearden is not just nonsense, but has all the classic hallmarks of the writings of a crank. A lot of people on GAW fall for that kind of crap, and it saddens me.
Hear, hear, brother! There's no question that radioactive "waste" can be reduced to stable isotopes by intense neutron irradiation. It only takes the willingness to build the fast-flux reactors necessary for that processing. (They should also be able to burn U-238 without moderators, thus no enrichment required. But they are a bit challenging.)
When I was a younger lad, absorbing counter arguments to the Environmentalist movement such as Dr. Petr Beckman's The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear (in original red cover) I tended to view the 70s Environmentalist movement as an ideological offshoot of the 60s New Left, itself an ideological development tracing back to the Reds of the 30s, etc. In other words, as the organic evolution of bad, anti-human ideas. Later I tapped into the reality that environmentalism was a deliberate creation of the Club of Rome. The penny dropped when I realized that the Club of Rome was not some fringe group of far left idealists who somehow gained traction in academia and later public consciousness, but was a planning subcommittee of some of the world's most powerful men. Looking back I have come to suspect that all those anti-Nuke protests - reactors or warheads, take your pick - were as grassroots as today's No Kings protests. At the time they received very heavy coverage on TV, in magazines, and newspapers.
In the 90s the Environmentalist movement put itself in a position of facing a deep reckoning. Global Warming and CO2 emissions was declared existential threat number one. Granting the premise for sake of argument, nuclear fission energy was the obvious solution. Yet being anti-nuclear was the founding DNA of the movement. A few honest leaders such as Patrick Moore resolved the contraction by stepping out. But the fact that the majority plowed on undeterred proved a lot about the nature of their agenda, and their nature as a movement.
Shifting topics a bit, you kind of make me want to study nuclear engineering as a retirement hobby, or at least pick up a couple books. Intuitively I always felt that neutron bombardment should solve the radioactive waste problem. There's got to be decay pathways that can turn the stuff into nice happy little isotopes.
P.S. I'm with you that the "free energy" promotional material of Col. Thomas Bearden is not just nonsense, but has all the classic hallmarks of the writings of a crank. A lot of people on GAW fall for that kind of crap, and it saddens me.
Hear, hear, brother! There's no question that radioactive "waste" can be reduced to stable isotopes by intense neutron irradiation. It only takes the willingness to build the fast-flux reactors necessary for that processing. (They should also be able to burn U-238 without moderators, thus no enrichment required. But they are a bit challenging.)