VIDEO-Call to action might be more effective if Bill Nye would stop denying the usefulness of nuclear energy - Atomic Insights

National Geographic Explorer — now part of the Rupert Murdock media empire — published the below clips of Bill Nye, the bow-tied science guy, beseeching “deniers” to stop denying so that we can all get to work.

He calls for an immediate halt to the use of fossil fuels and their replacement with “renewable energy” which helps to illustrate his lack of contact with reality.

Nye is a nuclear energy skeptic whose skepticism often borders on denial of the utility of nuclear energy as a tool for substantially reducing — not eliminating — fossil fuel consumption for a host of important reasons. Among those reasons is the fact that nuclear fission produces heat without releasing CO2.

Even when the full life cycle is taken into account, using our current primitive once-through fuel cycle, nuclear power plants produce about as much CO2 per unit of useful power as windmills and several times less than solar PV systems.

Nye’s call for people to “quit denying and get to work” would have more impact on the total use of fossil fuels, improve the world’s economic standard of living, and mitigate the effects of climate change if he would stop denying that nuclear energy is a proven, abundant, effective way to reduce fossil fuel consumption.

Nuclear energy’s proven capability to reduce fossil fuel consumption is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons that it isn’t very popular yet. Fossil fuel producers — long-time masters of politics, advertising and propaganda techniques — have many reasons to discourage solutions that would reduce their product sales.

Since the ad-supported media is one of the main financial beneficiaries of the fossil fuel industry’s continuing, long-running marketing campaign to promote its own products while discouraging competitive products this is a line of argument that you will not hear very often.

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