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Post by trag on Oct 4, 2012 1:19:03 GMT 9.5
Perhaps foolishly, I have gotten into a comments match at this article in which C.T. Whitman advocates nuclear power. www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-todd-whitman/nuclear-energy_b_1924124.htmlThere's a joker, who also appears to be a favorite commenter claiming that nuclear power has killed 6 million people. I placed the burden of proof on her/him, but I expect there will be a return comment by tomorrow quoting some paper from the likes of Lovins or Sturm or some such, and I am rubbish at remembering the details of how those papers have been discredited. Anyone want to take a look and help me out. I'm posting under Jeff Walther. The crazy, deceptive or greatly mislead person is "Genders". Perhaps few people read the comments and it doesn't matter. I'm hoping that making the arguments for nuclear power in a more liberal forum might bring some of the folks around. |
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Post by grlcowan on Oct 4, 2012 3:30:30 GMT 9.5
The story is dated September 28. As with global warming denial trolls, you don't want to be down in the mud, with the pig, without an audience. That said, I hit the recommend button on a few comments. |
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Post by quokka on Oct 4, 2012 8:52:20 GMT 9.5
Claims that nuclear power has killed X million people always are are based on extending LNT to populations with very low radiation dose by the notion of "collective dose". UNSCEAR and ICRP (and others) explicitly reject this as a valid methodology.
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Post by trag on Oct 5, 2012 4:02:50 GMT 9.5
Thanks, guys. I should probably drop it. The pigs and mud argument is convincing. But I posted one more time. Here's what I said, in part, about LNT:
Oops. Just realized I have a three orders of magnitude error in that. And there's no way to edit at Huffington Post. Sigh. Oh, well. With any luck they're too innumerate to notice, but it does ruin the pithy point.
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Post by trag on Oct 11, 2012 7:13:46 GMT 9.5
Well, so far, no one has noticed my factor of 1000 error. Which simply reinforces the suspicion that the anti-nuclear folks are both innumerate and not paying real attention to any argument which challenges their views.
Which implies that it is a waste of time trying to educate them. Sigh.
One of them claimed that hidden in the USA DOE's budget is a $500 million subsidy per nuclear power plant. I pointed out that this would be a $52 billion subsidy which is larger than DOE's less than $30 billion budget.
Why don't people do this sort of simple fact checking for themselves before internalizing an opinion?
I noticed that atomicrod posted a few responses to other postings in the comments.
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Post by lighttraveller on Oct 12, 2012 3:44:17 GMT 9.5
Not only innumerate, but apparently rather illiterate as well -- or at least bad at typing. I waded through page 1, but find your detractors very hard to read. You're making an heroic effort in there, Jeff. It's good to see educated commentary on the subject. I am a progressive who strongly supports nuclear progress, and wish more of my similarly progressive colleagues would get on board with that. I have my work cut out for me!
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Post by lighttraveller on Oct 12, 2012 6:43:39 GMT 9.5
Thinking about this further, I would suggest that the real benefit you provided was not to the bozos arguing with you in the thread, but to the other people were silent, persuadable folks who were there to read the article and consider the responses. People like me about 18 months ago, just after Fukushima. (That's when I found BNC and others, and really started educating myself.) They got into the comments and saw you and Michael Mann, writing coherent sentences and paragraphs, as well as offering *citations*, and then they saw "Genders" and "professor" who couldn't be bothered to use a shift-key or correctly spell "lie", let alone cite sources or even present anything resembling a fact. (I'm sure we agree that "bs" is not a fact.) Who would you find more credible, if you had been the lurker?
I think you probably did a lot more good than you might realize. :-)
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Post by trag on Oct 12, 2012 7:33:39 GMT 9.5
I think you probably did a lot more good than you might realize. :-) Thank you for the encouragement. I appreciate it. I hope you are right. Now if only my city's City Council weren't insane....or crazy like a fox. One or the other. Our previous anti-nuclear (really, he was an activist in the 70s when we purchased a share of STNP) head of the city utility admitted that about half the people in the city are for nuclear and about half against. Yet, the last two heads of the utility (him and the new guy) have both been rabidly anti-nuclear. The City Council clearly isn't picking heads for the utility who represent the opinions or the best interests of the city. But the local media hasn't noticed. |
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