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Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Nuclear: The American Energy Solution

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Litmus test: don’t take seriously any CO2-cutback idea not prioritizing nuclear. If the goal is CO2-free emissions with smallest footprint, while respecting science, math, and reason, modern nuclear tech isn’t just an option, it’s the highest priority.

In a post over six years ago mostly about unrelated issues, energy reliability and sourcing came up, and I wrote the following. In this era of greater load demand from AI data centers, bitcoin mining, battery charging (including EVs) and growing population, it rings ever truer:

    An environmentalist makes a powerful case for nuclear and against so-called “renewables” to supply energy at big scale. There’s a decades-long tradition of unscientific, mathematically ignorant, irrational fear-mongering around nuclear. Never mind that nuclear is (by orders of magnitude!) the most energy-dense fuel source, with the lowest carbon emission, the safest record of all U.S. energy sources (fewest human and wildlife casualties), the least land area used for the amount of energy generated, continual and reliable (unlike solar and wind), has the lowest lifetime total waste volume compared to all fossils/wind/solar, and so on. Truly, nuclear is the greenest of green energy. And the technology to generate more energy with still less waste on an even smaller footprint has improved hugely since currently operating plants were erected in the ’60s through ’80s. Even if the Utopia of fusion isn’t realized soon, nuclear still is the safest, most efficient steady energy source for us all. Only ignorant, petty NIMBY bullcrap, science illiteracy, anti-scientific and illogical fear-mongering, and massive bureaucratic red tape are stopping us from becoming truly energy independent, with the lowest carbon production per capita among all nations. The way there is nuclear. If it were announced tomorrow that a nuclear plant would be built right behind my property, I’d welcome it with bells on. Just tap me into the juice, nuke-man.

To do this issue justice, I should elaborate more. Open your mind, and don’t let some stupid 1970s scare movies influence your thinking. Instead and again, use math, logic, reason, technology, and true history. Be objective, not emotional. Be Spock. Then see the (nuclear-powered, non-dimming) light.

Unlike renewables and fossils, nuclear is the most energy-dense source (by orders of magnitude), but the safest. In the U.S. and western Europe, even on outdated ’60s-’80s tech, its documented human death toll is zero. It results in the smallest waste volume of any non-hydroelectric source, has the lowest land plus water usage footprint of any energy source per kilowatt hour, emits zero CO2, and is continuous: day or night, wind or calm, drought or flood. Its bird and bat toll: zero. A parcel of property used for a nuclear plant (including security apparatus and onsite waste storage for decades) produces multiple orders of magnitude more energy per unit time than the same land cover of solar, all day, all night, cloudy, clear, windy, or calm. No gigatons of turbine blades to landfills. No toxic chemicals leaching from used photovoltaic panels in other landfills. No noxious petrochemical fumes from the stacks either, just water steam!

It’s about math, science, reason…and safety.

Read this, in full, then continue.

Before you ask: “But, but, but…the waste!!!!”

What about the waste? What’s the problem? Turns out, it’s not a problem.

Store the waste onsite. Think about it: it’s already sealed in tons of concrete, at a highly secured facility, essentially impossible to access, transport or use by bad guys, and can fit safely and securely in a reinforced building the size of a Wal-Mart or smaller for many decades. For more (ignore the melodramatic headline):

Read this, in full, then continue.

Before you ask: “But, but. but…Chernobyl!!!! Fukushima!!!!”

That’s why we don’t site reactors stupidly like Fukushima, nor build and manage them with the jaw-droppingly appalling incompetence of the Soviets. It was like putting the Three Stooges (“Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard!”) in charge of planning and performing your brain surgery.

Reactor tech also has improved hugely since ‘70s, such that more of what used to become waste is now used and reused in the process. If anything, Fukushima leads to a great argument for nuclear safety! You read that right…

Read this, in full, then continue.

Before you ask: “But…but…but…nuclear is like icky or something, like, radiation and stuff, very bad!”

A fiction movie in the ’70s called China Syndrome put “nuclear—->horrible” into the culture, with no basis in (here I go again, am I making my point clear?) logic, reason nor mathematics. In other words, irrational, unscientific horse crap. The damage from the fictional threat of nuclear energy has been slow to unravel, even as damage from real nuclear energy has remained absent in the United States for decades. Fortunately, the tide has been turning in public opinion, albeit with a lot of ignorant and irrationally influenced public still to go…

Read this, in full, then continue.

Furthermore, support for nuclear energy is growing even among environmentalists, most (not all) of whom are not scientists, and whose prior generations watched a little too much China Syndrome and used too little math and reason.

Read this, in full, then continue.

In order for the U.S. to function powerfully and efficiently through the remainder of this century, with ever-increasing demand for electricity to power everything that will need it, while emitting no CO2, nuclear is not just an option, but far and away, and it’s not even close, the best option.

To do so, and to lower cost without compromising standards, we must streamline regulatory barriers, make them speedy but not corner-cutting, so that not just traditional big plants, but small- to medium-scale facilities (again, on or under which an ever-decreasing amount of waste per input volume can be stored) would be built in months, not years to decades. Regulating 2020s tech in a 1960s bureaucratic process is absolutely asinine. It can and should be done much faster per facility, with no loss of safety. All the while, for those who are fixated on such things, you’d get exactly what you want: America’s CO2 emissions under majority-nuclear power sourcing would plummet massively. We would achieve every “climate goal” ever devised for that point forward. CO2 problem? Solved.

Nuclear now, massively and for good!

Charlie Kirk’s Murder, Response and Legacy

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As somebody who was born four floors above and four years after JFK’s murdered body was rushed into the ER in futility, who was immersed in knowledge of his assassination throughout childhood, and who has studied it extensively, along with the killings of RFK and MLK, I know a bit about political violence. We seem to be back into that sort of terrible era again with two attempts on Trump, a couple of state-legislator killings by a sicko in Minnesota, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk last month. [This occurred on my flight to Hawaii for Kilauea Episode 33…more on that later.]

Charlie leaves behind a lovely young widow, Erika, and their two little kids, all because some deranged radical didn’t like his ideals. Must it be this way?

Political violence is evil, absolutely intolerable, and has no place in civil society. Disagreements and grievances should be aired through rational debate and discussion, with logic, reason, facts, and the humility that comes with not having all the answers. That is a nonpartisan statement.

So far, I’ve seen posts from men, women, people of different faiths, nationalities, backgrounds and appearances, mourning the loss of Charlie Kirk. Let their voices ring truest—none I’ve read yet more well-written under intense personal grief than Dennis Prager’s (below), who knew Charlie as a brilliant mind, faithful servant of God, and also, husband and father to a young family.

As an American, as a Jew, and as Dennis, I am devastated at the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The truth is, as I write these words, I can’t believe I am writing them. I am in the denial stage of mourning. As an American, we have lost the most articulate spokesman for America and its unique value system—a country founded to be free, based on Jerusalem and Athens, the Judeo-Christian value system and the Greek emphasis on logic and reason. Charlie was a uniquely gifted individual who, in his teens, created the largest movement of young Americans committed to preserving and growing America and its ideals. He tirelessly went from campus to campus, from Oxford to Utah, dialoging with any student who wished to debate him. Using his vast reservoir of facts and his exceptionally speedy and articulate mind, he gave them what seemed to be unlimited amounts of time, and then calmly eviscerated all their anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Judeo-Christian positions. I watched an inordinate number of these exchanges and thanked God that Charlie Kirk was there to do this work. America’s youth in particular have lost a moral and intellectual leader, one who would, perhaps, have one day become their president. As a committed Jew, I thank God regularly that a non-Jew, a committed Christian, became one of the few great public spokesmen on behalf of Israel and the Jewish communities outside of Israel. Few Jews could match Charlie’s knowledge and eloquent arguments on behalf of those two entities.

As Dennis, I have lost a very close friend. Charlie repeatedly visited me in the various hospitals that I have been in since November 12 of last year, when I suffered a catastrophic fall which has left me paralyzed. When members of the nursing staff heard that Charlie Kirk was visiting me, my room became the most popular one in the hospital. Charlie brought me the manuscript of his forthcoming book arguing that everyone—Christians as well as Jews—should observe Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, just as he and his family had begun to do from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. It is a measure of our close relationship that he dedicated the book to me. His brilliant exposition of these arguments provide clear evidence for the non-necessity of a college education for most young Americans.

My heart breaks for his young widow, Erika, and for his two children, who have lost as great a man and a father as children can have. And for Charlie, who did not live to see them grow up. For one of the first times in my 20 years with my wife, Sue, I have seen her sob uncontrollably. The Prager home is in deep mourning, as are the homes of countless Americans. The loss to us personally and to the country generally is immeasurable.

Commentator Ivyonna Corrine had a brilliant post too, which I’ll also reproduce below, corrected for punctuation and grammar:

It’s wild to me how quick people are to slap labels on Charlie Kirk without actually knowing what he stands for. He’s been called racist…but where is the evidence? Go back through his years of speaking at college campuses, podcasts, interviews, debates, you won’t find him using racial slurs, degrading a race, or promoting hate. Not once. What you will find is him debating issues like immigration, education, the economy… and culture. Those are policy discussions, NOT racism.

Calling him racist because you don’t like his politics is lazy. It waters down the meaning of the word and takes away from the fight against actual racism. If someone truly believed he was racist they would be able to show proof. But they can’t, because it doesn’t exist. All they have is name calling.

He’s had thousands of open conversations on college campuses with people of every background, and guess what? The majority of those exchanges end with respect, even if they disagree. He’s been called sexist, but why? Because he’s pro life? Because he believes men and women are different? Having a conviction about protecting unborn children or recognizing biological differences doesn’t make you sexist. It means you are willing to stand for life and truth even when it’s unpopular.

He’s been called homophobic/transphobic, but again, where’s the proof? Saying “men can’t become women” is not hate on his part. It’s biology. Protecting kids from being pushed into irreversible decisions isn’t hate. It’s compassion. He has debated LGBTQ+ issues face to face without name calling, without hate, with facts.

He’s been called a fascist/Nazi, which is honestly laughable. Fascism silences speech. Charlie has spent his entire career defending free speech. Nazis took away rights, and Charlie advocates every day for the protection of rights in the Constitution. The comparison doesn’t even make sense.

He’s been called a bigot or accused of spreading hate, but what is hateful about encouraging young people to think critically, question government, and protect their freedoms? If you actually listen, he debates respectfully, and even when people scream at him he holds himself fully. That’s not hate, that’s self control.

And he’s been accused of spreading misinformation, but here’s the thing: every time people try to “fact check” him, the debates usually end with the person walking away because they can’t answer his questions. He brings data, statistics and constitutional backing. That’s not misinformation, that’s inconvenient truth.

At the end of the day, Charlie Kirk was not racist. He was not sexist. He was not hateful. He was bold. He was outspoken. And he was unafraid to say the things that needed to be said in a world where people get canceled for speaking how WE FEEL and the truth. He’s allowed his thoughts, just as in America you are too. So if you’re going to label him at least label him correctly: unapologetically American.

Let voices like these drown out those demonic cackles of celebration sprinkled over social media. The overtly diabolical celebrators are obvious. Block and move on if it helps, but do pray for the expulsion of their demons.

Perhaps more insidious are the passive-aggressive folks—some even labeling themselves as fellow Christians—who assigned Charlie such wholly unfounded labels as Ivyonna covered, based on weak and out-of-context interpretations and assumptions, but not actual hard evidence, who haven’t read his literature nor seen multiples of his videos, who talk often about tolerance, love, kindness and empathy without showing those qualities toward Christian conservatives, and who are showing two faces.

When people reveal themselves from behind the mask of virtue signaling and faux tolerance and “empathy”, pay attention. Observe, be watchful, and pray for them. A mask of kindness and empathy, hiding a mindset of the very opposite, reveals itself in such times as these. Charlie wasn’t perfect. None of us are free of sin. That includes me. I certainly recognize sin when I see it, and I see a lot of stones being cast Charlie’s way from behind those “kindness and empathy” facades.

To all fellow conservatives/libertarians who are infuriated, feeling helpless in the face of this and other recent violence, tempted to lash out: I get it. This enrages me as well. But remember who Charlie followed: Jesus. And remember how Charlie both followed and set a great example in taking obvious risk to go into hostile atmospheres to engage through dialog and ideas. Never resort to true hate (not the same as the false equivalency of hate and disapproval continually posited by the left), destruction or retaliation in kind. Be better than those psychopathic ghouls and mouth-foaming zealots of the left who readily could be found celebrating or rationalizing evil, across social media in the days following the killing. They need urgent psychological treatment, and most of all, they need to find the Lord, who ultimately will be the final judge of all events and people.

Finally, for 50 years, I’ve read and watched great speeches by political figures from antiquity through the men on Mount Rushmore, to Churchill, Reagan and beyond. This, from Utah Governor Spencer Cox, has come out of nowhere to take its place among the very best, not only for the transcribable text, but for the raw and unvarnished sincerity plainly apparent behind the wise words. For context in posterity, I linked not just to the video, but a local news story containing it.

We all could do well to heed. As I’ve stated in some recent comment: Freedom of speech under threat of violence is not freedom at all.

Rest in Heaven, Charlie. We can honor his legacy, and that of other nonviolent agents of change like MLK and Jesus, by fighting bad ideas not with violence and destruction, but with better ideas.

Why Bad Ideas Spread

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Why would anybody take seriously an offhanded, poorly worded statement from Donald Trump (who makes offhanded, poorly worded statements by the hundreds per month…you should know this by now!) about ingesting bleach? I doubt the statement was malicious, or even serious, but it was badly phrased by a bumbling buffoon, and some people have been stupid enough to take it literally. Others have blown it out of proportion as validation for their own deep partisan biases.

Medicine doesn’t have many answers yet about the Wuhan coronavirus. Meteorology can’t tell you why the tornado hit this neighborhood and not the one across the road, nor which neighborhood could be flattened next week. Yet incredibly, people demand such answers, utterly ignorant of the limits of science, and of uncertainty.

When scientists cannot fill a knowledge gap, charlatans rush in to fill it for them, to provide counterfeit certainty. It’s how disgraced, false-teaching “Christian” televangelist Jim Bakker can allow a snake-oil hack to peddle some silver solution as a coronavirus cure. It’s how a weather company can offer specific 40-day temperature forecasts, when there is no demonstrated skill in that whatsoever. I’ve heard this said first-hand to another meteorologist, seriously: “You can’t tell me if it will rain at my sister’s wedding next month? Lame! What kind of idiot weather man are you anyway?”

A fundamental problem exists in common between this bleach-ingestion situation and making insanely unreasonable demands on meteorologists. That problem is failure to understand uncertainty, and it’s rooted in a deeper one in education. Much of the populace has little concept of, nor tolerance for, uncertainty. Too many people think everything is certain, black and white. That’s preposterous rubbish. Medicine is not as simple as that, or the coronavirus already would be exterminated. And if meteorology were that easy, we already could tell you where the tornadoes will track on May 22nd, to within mere feet.

Yet the opposite people, who declare from their high horse of “nuance” that “everything is shades of gray”, have it terribly wrong going the other way, too. They attach a damned error bar to situations that have straightforward answers, and mile-wide error bars to others that are far less complicated in reality. They declare that there are no absolutes. That is equally preposterous garbage. [Next time you see someone write, “There are no absolutes,” or “Everything is shades of gray,” please call them out on that obviously and literally self-contradictory nonsense!]

Black and white, unambiguous factual answers really do exist to a lot of things. The sun rises in the eastern sky. 2+2=4. I love Dr Pepper. Direct contact with bleach outside the body will kill this virus (and maim your insides, maybe fatally, if you drink or inhale it). Tornadoes are made of air. Male or female you were made, dear reader, by genetics, before birth, by biological fact of a chromosome pair still found in all your cells. Simple answers to complex questions and problems really do exist in some cases. Ministers of the “nuance” pulpit fail to see this, are utterly unfamiliar with Occam’s razor, and as such, will stay mired in gray ideological mud, missing out on a lot of clarity and vivid insight that truthful absolutes can offer.

“The best answers are found in the middle.” Preposterous rubbish too! I’m not advocating the middle ground is always right, either. Sometimes, indeed I dare say often, alternative and out-of-mainstream solutions end up working amazingly well, saving lives, bettering society. Sometimes, just sometimes, even the ideological extremes are onto something (despite that, more often than not, they’re shrill, annoying parasites sucking intellect out of an issue). If you’re always straddling the middle, trying to stay comfortable in rigid “balance”, avoiding all extremes, taking no risk, and not seeing the benefits that can arise from the unconventional thinking, you’ll miss out on so much accomplishment, discovery and innovation. Your life will be boring as hell, too. If nothing else, pay attention to the extremes, so you can understand how to combat the 90% or more of their crap that is…crap.

The key is knowing when the middle is right, when the conventional wisdom and tradition yield optimal results, when an alternative way is best, when even the extremes are right, when an issue is clear-cut, when it is gray. How? Reasoned, critical thinking — to determine when, how, and why each approach is appropriate, situationally. Situationally!

Much as the science of medicine has lots of uncertainties regarding this coronavirus — how to reverse its severe rampages in some people, how much immunity to mutations you have after you’ve had it, when there will be a vaccine and how effective it will be…so does my science. We get questions like this astoundingly often: “Will it rain on my sister’s outdoor wedding next September 10th at 4 p.m. in Aurora?” Or, “I’m driving my RV from Chicago to Miami on November 3rd. Where will I hit bad weather?” [No way to know, too much uncertainty!] Or, “Can you control tornadoes with hyper-voltage electromagnetic beams?” [No, but the questioner won’t take anything but his own pet theory for an answer.]

What insanely asinine questions those are for anyone who understands uncertainty or has half a microgram of critical-thinking skills! Yet we get them. It’s not necessarily tied to educational level, either. Some of the worst weather-control lunacy I’ve seen has come from engineers and physicists, and even one physician (not any who are personal friends of mine!). Some of the most outlandish conspiracy theories I’ve heard have been proposed by people with advanced degrees. Ph.D. can stand for Phenomenally Dumb, when outside one’s own area of expertise. There are people who are so specialized, as an old instructor of mine once stated, that they, “Learn more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.“

So why do far too many people, whether well-educated on paper or high-school dropouts, either blindly accept seeming authority without question, or reflexively reject it outright, or fail to grasp uncertainty, or think “alternative” must be bad, or think “alternative” must be best, or accept outlandish and thoroughly unreasonable crackpot ideas? Where is the ability in people to evaluate, to dissociate from emotion and other irrationalities, and to use facts, logic and reason to assess ideas and ideals independently and thoroughly?

I strongly believe it’s because critical, independent thinking skills have not been rigorously taught by both public schools and parents, as a whole, for at least 3 or 4 generations. My generation (X) is part of the problem, both on the receiving and teaching end. Parents and schools alike have failed here, miserably. Of course there are exceptions. I’m talking not about the exceptions, but the rule.

Critical thinking doesn’t lead to sucking down bleach, nor eating Tide Pods, nor snorting cocaine, nor partying with dozens of friends amidst a highly contagious pandemic, nor refusing vaccinations because some airheaded celebrity says it causes autism, nor taking essential oils to “cure” cancer, nor being a sucker to unscientific anti-GMO hysteria, nor thinking 5G makes coronavirus worse, nor HAARPing about “chemtrails”, nor sending money to that Nigerian prince who works for the IRS and Citibank and wants your credit-card number so you can pay what you owe and get rich quick.

Anybody with even the most basic critical-thinking skills would not take a verbally handicapped President’s offhanded bleach comment literally, nor a host of other dumb things said by celebrities and politicians of all stripes. Yet here we are.

Unfortunately the solution is hard: massively reform education away from the rote and toward understanding. Stop teaching to test. Don’t make students memorize; teach them how to think conceptually and critically. Stop teaching to feelings, “identity” and “self-esteem” — teach instead to logic and reason. Return to rigorous fundamentals of math, science, reading comprehension, history, and writing in education, including deep immersion in critical-thinking concepts in each of these basics. The results won’t bear fruit for another generation or two. But this is what’s needed. Until then, our society as as much at peril from a profusion of gullible suckers as from any disease.