Dave – blog@davemckay.ca

But what about Chernobyl?

A Peter thought he had a gottcha by crying out, “What about TMI, Fukishima, Chernobyl.” He did not. It is like the Peters think these PRATTs have not been addressed numerous times.

Fukushima killed no one. It was an expensive industrial accident. But Japan has moved on from that setback. On the other hand, the tsunami resulted in “19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured, and 2,553 people missing.” The principal contamination from the tsunami was hundreds of thousands of tonnes of urban waste, fuel, and debris that entered the ocean. The water released from Fukishima had radiation levels lower than the limit for drinking water. Which, because of radon, if you have ever been on a well, you were exposed to similar.

As for, “What about Chernobyl‽”

First, while initially it was thought that the accident would render the exclusion zone uninhabitable, what actually happened is that in the absence of human settlement the area has recovered a diverse ecosystem, with even large rare mammals finding sanctuary in the accidental nature preserve. The presence of human settlement was actually worse for the environment, than the disaster. Which is a real slap in the face.

In fact the undamaged reactors remained in operation for many years and, before the Russian invasion, the exclusion zone was a tourist attraction. But I advise you not to go near the elephant’s foot. Which you can’t anyway.

Secondly, while horrific, the increased mortality from the disaster is something between 4000 and 15,000 over a period of about 70 years. That number will be rapidly decreasing because the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing so many more deaths. If a Russian drone kills you today, you cannot get thyroid cancer in 20 years.

To put the 4–15 thousand in context, since long before 1986 air pollution from just German industry, primarily coal-fired electricity generation, has been killing ~75,000 Europeans every year. Five times the high-bound for increased mortality over a century from the accident.

While offshoring dirty industry to China has moved some of those deaths to Asia, the closure of the last two nuclear plants in 2022 was expected to INCREASE the annual deaths by ~1000 in Europe. That was four years ago. So, just those two Energiewende nuclear closures may have killed more people than Chernobyl ever will, already.

But there remain people who whatabout “Three Mile Island or Chernobyl or Fukushima,” to promote their own anti nuclear agenda and undermine the world’s energy supply. For instance, at its peak, before energiewende, Germany was getting 167.27 TWh from clean, safe, already paid for, nuclear that was running like a Swiss watch. In 2025 after a quarter century and what must be approaching €600 BILLION, wind only contributed 133 TWh and solar only contributed 89.62 TWh. For that kind of money Germany could have tripled their nuclear and been producing a 4.37 TWh SURPLUS of low carbon electricity in 2025. Instead they are still burning 204.73 TWh worth of fossil fuel. With the consequent air pollution and annual death toll far in excess of Chernobyl and the rest.

On the other hand, from 13 years ago, “NASA scientist Dr. Pushker Kharecha and Dr. James Hansen (the leading climate scientist in the US) recently authored a study which conservatively estimates nuclear power has saved 1.8 million lives, which otherwise would have been lost due to fossil fuel pollution and associated causes, since 1971.” That number is almost certainly well in excess of 2 million by now.

Pretending that nuclear is dangerous is the actual thing that is delaying our energy transition away from fossil fuels.

Stop referencing AI

Yesterday, I was listening to an episode of More Or Less (BBC) and they were talking about a stupid racist claim made by a UK Reich-wingnut about refugees and crime. It was nasty. It was wrong, in fact completely made up from nothing. The FOI police stats it was “based” on are imaginary.

But the nasty bigot who started the LIE, for nasty lie is what it was, made the excuse that she had gotten the racist misinformation from ChatGPT, so her hate-splaining was not her fault.

ChatGPT, because it is not any kind of intelligence, just made up the answer the “Conservative” stain had wanted to hear. Fabricated a reference to police data that was entirely a product of trying to satisfy the prompt, by making up a plausible sounding reference to data that, in fact, did not exist.

And it gets worse. People tried using Grok to “verify” the, and this is the important part, entirely fabricated, claims. And Grok did “verify” them. Hallucinating in a very convincing way the same non-existant FOI police data as ChatGPT because it was using the ChatGPT fabrication as reference data.

You cannot use the shit output from any large language model or “AI” as a reference. And unless you want to get led down the garden path into grave misconceptions, you need to stop using those, very suspect, platforms for “information.” Indeed, you should do everything you can to block all the AI you possibly can and stop using “devices” and platforms that have begun to depend on it.

Because it is not intelligent, and it has no accountability, and it is not compiling data, it is generating text and it is doing so in a way that only needs to “sound” plausible.

If we do not stop this now, we will accelerate toward the cliff after which it will be mostly impossible for lay-persons to distinguish between actual real data and disinformation. And that is a very powerful tool for bad actors, like Annunziata Rees-Mogg, to cynically use against us.

PhD

There will be people who dismiss the overwhelming data and research and peer-reviewed science showing that wind&solar are NOT solving our energy crisis, and won’t, but that nuclear can. And despite rejecting every bit of published evidence, some of those people will claim that their opinion must be respected, on account of having got a PhD. Maybe even in physics. But jumping through the hoops to get a graduate degree is not a guarantee of anything really, other than being a good student.

So I share this anecdote about a PhD in Geography, as an illustration of how, while you might expect such a person to really know their subject, or to be either educated or intelligent, sometimes you may be disappointed.

I have done a lot of map drawing in my career. Hundreds of maps. There is another illustrator in Toronto who has done most of the rest. We both know what we are doing.

Years ago, one of our educational publishing customers hired a “Senior Content Production Manager,” who had a PhD in Geography, because they wanted better geography products. This Doctor of Geography got in a whole thing with the other illustrator about maps they had drawn, putting the freelancer to something like 23 passes of changes, which is ridiculous. So the good Doctor, the presumed expert in Geography, which includes one might think maps, decided the solution was to only hire “approved” “cartographers” from then on.

There was a process for suppliers to run a map-drawing obstacle course to get approved. I was part of that process. I was not approved. But I found out pretty quickly why the PhD had so much trouble with the other illustrator. Dr Geo knew sfa about maps or illustration or the production process. Depending on what their thesis was, maybe little about grade-school Geography.

There were numerous facepalms. But I will leave this here so you can wonder, “Who the hell is giving these people PhD’s?”

When the project began I had some practical questions about the specifications for the artwork. Dr Geo, did not seem to have useful answers to these questions, except for one in particular. I asked, because publishers each have their own preferences, “What map projection would you like this test map to be?” Dr Geo’s angry answer? “I don’t want any kind of ‘map projection!’ I just want an ordinary map.”

They did not know what a map projection was, that all accurate maps are defined by a projection. Education is our best defence against stupid ignorance. But it is not fool-proof.

This is the map that failed the test.
itsamap

Cost of New Nuclear

Anti-nuclear activists often talk about nuclear being expensive. It is not. However if you are deliberately obstructing infrastructure investment, you can artificially balloon costs. Then pretend it is not your own fault.

Regulatory fees in the US, for example, dominate the upfront cost of building new nuclear, because the bureaucracy is deliberately obstructionist. But mismanaging financing creates the largest cost overruns.

Let’s say you take out a business loan for $20 billion. And the expectation is that you will complete your nuclear project and start grinding down the principal in 7 years. But then idiots delay the start of your project for five years. Then part way through they put a stop to the project for an additional three years for a bogus environmental assessment. And delays beget delays so that by the time you actually complete the project, your “costs” of servicing that loan have gone on for an extra decade. Compounded 5% interest on $20 billion over ten years is almost $13 billion. Just the inflated principal from interest during delays.

And that example does not even take into account inflation. Which typically could be 2% per year. Over ten years that compounds to a 22% increase in costs. It is the delays that mostly cause cost overruns.

Between the delays and inflation cited in the above examples, that $20 billion “ballooned” to over $40 billion. Nuclear provides one of the highest ROI of any energy technology. But if you let the anti-nuclear lobby pile on red tape and “fish discos” and impose delays, it can be no surprise that their are large cost overruns, because those are deliberate.

And even so, because wind and solar have such short lifespans, and appalling capacity factor and demand an almost equal investment in storage, which we do not actually have a technology for, even with the deliberate mismanagement, nuclear is still far far cheaper.

I wish Hinterland well…

There is a game called The Long Dark by a Canadian company called Hinterland. It is a wonderful game. Very beautiful. Very engaging. Single-player; winter survival. I highly recommend it.

But, for reasons, HTL has struggled to meet development targets for years and also struggled to support and fix existing content. Not game breaking, not critical, but worrying.

Meanwhile they have bitten off development of a new TLD2 (Blackfrost) to too-much-chew, without yet having completed the release of the content they committed to for the original TLD.

So, yesterday they laid-off a large number of people for a small studio, which is surely not gonna help with completing more work on time.

I would get a slap for posting this in the HTL forum, but this is exactly what I have been worrying about with the company and the game for a while. People insisting on bigger plans when what they needed, to avoid this crisis, was to focus on their core product.

And who knows, they may somehow pull a rabbit out of a hat and recover and thrive. But poor leadership and messed-up priorities are the likely cause of both the content release delays and the failure to just go through their prior work and clean up messes. Something I have a lot of experience doing in my own field.

Prioritizing instead of having flibbertigibbet sky-pie-eyes bigger than your stomach, can be important.

A Kind of Complicity

Stephen Harper sat as a back-bencher for months after the CPC’s humiliating defeat in 2015, likely because he had a reasonable concern that the incoming government might arrest him and charge him for any of the illegal corrupt things he and his government had done. But, because people have a really distorted idea of fairness, there were never any consequences for the crook.

We keep falling into this trap again and again. We tolerate forgive or pardon people actively involved in tearing down our society and pretend that we are being fair and tolerant. What we are being, is fools.

No one who doesn’t insist that corrupt criminal governments be prosecuted and duly punished should be at the table discussing how we survive this onslaught.

For instance, in unison, every Democrat in the US should be calling for every member of this obscene kakistocracy to be tried convicted and punished in proportion to their complicity.

Both-sidesism has to end. Because tolerance of the intolerable is also a kind of complicity.