We've been recognizing
Earth Day all day long here
on all of our social media platforms, but I wanted to share one image that warmed my heart today like no other. If you pop over to the home page at
Reddit, the link that's currently ranked #1 is a story that originally appeared at
Scientific American on
James Hansen's conclusion that the use of nuclear energy has saved millions of lives all around the world.
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| Click to enlarge. |
For those of you who haven't read the paper from
NASA's Godard Institute, here's the nut graph:
The authors come up with the striking figure of 1.8 million as the number of lives saved by replacing fossil fuel sources with nuclear.
They also estimate the saving of up to 7 million lives in the next four decades, along with substantial reductions in carbon emissions, were nuclear power to replace fossil fuel usage on a large scale.
Impressive. It's indeed a happy Earth Day.
Comments
James Greenidge
Queens NY
Thanks for listening
If the fuel storage facility was damaged, there likely would have been little impact beyond the facility site. Fuel storage pools have no active fission, and relatively low heat load compared to operating reactors. Spent fuel is often used by anti-nukes as a boogeyman. Once you understand what spent fuel is and the issues associated with managing it, the boogeyman vanishes.
That's rich, given that they never use that criticism when an author is critical of the nuclear power industry. If one must be a radiation or nuclear engineering specialist for one's praise to be valid, then surely one must be such a specialist in order for one's criticism to be valid as well.
Feel free to send a letter to your local editors pointing out the double standard. Of course, it sounds like they won't print it....