Published: January 21st, 2012 at 12:57 pm ET
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Title: Facts contradict comments opposing nuclear power
Source: Syracuse.com
Author: Thomas J. Csermely is a professor emeritus at the L. C. Smith College of Engineering at Syracuse University.
Date: Jan 20, 2012
[...] The four units at Chernobyl had an exemplary operating record prior to the accident. [...]
[I]n the case of a catastrophic nuclear accident in the United States, the taxpaying public is liable to cover the cost. So far it has not happened, and most likely it never will. Contrast that, however, with the hundreds of billions of dollars that the government spends year after year on wind, solar and biofuel plants that are commercially not viable without subsidies [...]
One final word: the third generation of nuclear reactors, such as the Westinghouse AP-1000, are inherently safe. They use passive controls, natural circulation in case of a loss-of-coolant, which can keep the core cooled for days. The number of valves is also reduced and the containment structure is considerably improved. China is planning to build 56 nuclear reactors, mostly of the AP-1000 variety. India is following China’s example.
Read the report here
Some reading for Prof. Csermely (Add your links below):
- Billions of Dollars in Subsidies for the Nuclear Power Industry Will Shift Financial Risks to Taxpayers
- Nuclear subsidies put taxpayers at risk – The Boston Globe
- BBC News – UK ‘subsidising nuclear power unlawfully’
- Subsidizing nuclear plants in Florida runs counter to capitalism – Tampa Bay Times
- Nuclear Fantasy | Foreign Policy
- Government warned off secret nuclear subsidies – The Independent
- Study: 90% higher incidence of childhood leukemia around nuclear plants -- Authors call for investigation -International Journal of Cancer
Published: January 21st, 2012 at 12:57 pm ET
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Ever since the new millenium, we have witnessed a crisis of credibility. All the supposedly highly intelligent and “top” institutions all around the world, have shown their true colors. We have medical studies being created by pharma and signed off by paid “top” doctors from Harvard and the like. In the New England Journal of Medicine, there have been several studies proven to be lies and created by pharma with paid doctors signing their names for $20,000. The entire medical field is brainwashed by pharma because the learning institutions are all bought and operated by pharma.
This same pattern repeats itself over and over. In top nuclear sciences schools, professors write articles at the behest of the nuclear lobby for money. They can get more grants and even get paid directly by lying to the public. “Experts” are often thrust into the spotlight by media to tell us just how safe and caring company x,y,z is.
People are realizing that the elite institutions in this country are, in reality, skeletons of what they once were and often are espousing false information and even outright lying due to monetary self interest.
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Bones, you’re right on the money… we have a complete, total, abject failure of institutions. Everything is for sale now. These institutions used to be the bulwark of civilization… civilization itself is now falling apart due to lies and greed, not to mention radiation.
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ALERT! Go ask Moyers to cover Fukushima. He just might! http://billmoyers.com/episode/crony-capitalism/#disqus_thread
My comment: “Bill, as usual great show. I was wondering if you plan any future shows on Fukushima Japan? Our MSM has failed completely on reporting the ramifications of the STILL very critical Daiichi Reactors. Still spewing Radiation, poisoning the planet. Hope you are paying attention to that!
Thank for all you do.
Wish I did wrote it better…oh well.
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BBL need another break.
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Bill, please consider covering Fukushima, a tragedy, a cover up, still spewing radiation. A rancher would not treat his cattle so poorly.
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So true…
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I agree with Bones’ comments above. There are other oddities about this particular piece.
1. Csermely is yet another professor emeritus – in other words he is retired. For some reason, we keep seeing pro-nuke pieces by retired academics, accompanied by silence from most practicing academics. It’s odd.
http://www.syr.edu/directories/emeritus.html
2. I can find nothing online to suggest that Csermely has any expertise in any matters related to nuclear technology. Nothing at all. As far as I can tell, he is (was) a medical man, so I don’t understand the affiliation with an engineering school.
http://atvb.ahajournals.org/content/3/3/local/back-matter.pdf
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Atoooms is retired. He has kids just home from College (he told us so I’m not going over my boundaries here). Wonder if they’ll be CHICKEN HAWKS like him, ummmmmm?
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I’m not sure atoms has a single persona. Sometimes he brags about his (unspecified) higher education. Other times, especially when he’s in a hurry, he slips into the jargon and slang taunts of an adolescent online gamer. Maybe he lets his kids work the night shift in the shill-shop.
Takes all kinds.
Admin, may we pleeeeeese have an “Ignore Poster” button for the atoms kind?
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I’ve seen those buttons at other Sites. Good Idea AIG!
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Yes. seconded on the the “ignore poster” button. Please, please please Admin!
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I recall “son of a nuclear plant manager” from way back, said whom seemed also to have more than one mental voice from his posts.
Good to keep a watch out for “one name, many voices” which is an extension of the paid shill hasting to get his paid rebuttal in.
Cheers
M
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Majia..I believe this is current poster jdotg
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I know someone couldn’t resist.
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hehe knew -___ -
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Verb tenses—present, past’ future, past subjunctive, future pluperfect and so many more…the truth is the truth in any tense.
Hello jdotg, long time no see (what tnese is this?)
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…jdot…and what typos can you find besides the imperfect verb tenses? And: Does it matter?
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It would need to be up to admin to spend time on this, of course.
I would be happy to delegate to admin the judgement of diverting posts which in his judgement were of the hostile (etc) kind. Maybe add a thread which could be called something like
“Receptacle for posts tagged by several regular contributors as suspected troll material”
+ a bit of light editing of the poster’s tag might prevent the trollpay auditing program from including the post in his remuneration.
OK this is a bit over the top, I post only as a suggestion.
Don’t forget, we do SOMETIMES get a shaky start and I have misjudged some of these, hence the attempted safeguards alluded to above.
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The “t” in jdot is for troll. Let’s all figure out what the “j” and the “o” and the “g’ stand for.
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Pretty please, with flour and sugar?
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Goodness, I took at bath right, looked in the mirror just now and I have a broken blood vessel in my right eye. Red on the white. Just wondering where in the hell that came from since I dont go outside.
I BLAME JAPAN!!
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Daiichi I mean.
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From Cindy earlier thread:
Michael Shermer: Baloney Detection Kit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eUB4j0n2UDU#!
Thank you Cindy! IT FITS PERFECTLY WITH PRO-NUKES!!
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FUSION BALONEY!!
CHEAP TO METER!
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BILL MOYERS BBL! http://billmoyers.com/episode/crony-capitalism/#disqus_thread
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Probability math stats on this please:
Yes dharmasyd, you’ve flagged one important error in his position. To paraphrase his argument, it is something like “the landmine has never exploded near me yet, and it never will.”
There is at least one other flaw, namely that the severity of the catastrophic event should also be considered, not just its likelihood.
This kind of thing is well explored in Taleb’s book “The Black Swan”. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/imbeciles.htm
Taleb’s position was vindicated in the financial meltdown of 2008, which he correctly predicted in the face of much opposition by “experts” who offered similar arguments to those attributed to Csermely (above).
I have a sense of deja vu, that you and I tag-teamed these same two points here the last time some previously-unknown retired professor trotted out the false arguments about low probability events. Bears repeating, I guess – if the pro-nukes keep making the same flawed arguments, then we have to produce the same logical rebuttals. Boring, but it’s a high-stakes game they’ve drawn us into.
I wish we could set up a lab-world on some distant planet. Toss a coin, pro-nukes go to one planet, and anti-nukes to the other. See which culture thrives and which one dies out. I love empirical tests.
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Love the idea!
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Hahaha It can only make you laugh! He clearly has alzheimer’s because we have had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of catastrophic nuclear accidents in the U.S. Does he not think leaking GIANT nuclear waste sites destroying humanity’s genome counts? Does he not think Three Mile Island melting down, a partial meltdown is STILL A MELTDOWN, releasing a giant plume of radioactive gases onto the unevacuated public who was lied to consistently by the government and media counts? Does he not remember the Santa Susana Field Lab melting down and also releasing large plumes of radioactive gene destroying gases into little childrens lungs and pregnant mothers?
Did he forget the hundreds, maybe a thousand even, nuclear bombs being detonated in the U.S. contaminating people, land, animals, water, air, children, and the food supply; Killing tens of thousands with cancer caused by these “tests.” The cancers will keep killing thousands more each year for a hundred years, at the same rate of extra cancers from radionuclides in the fallout of atomic bombs. (Those cancers don’t count because the government says the extra deaths from cancer are small.) Perhaps, the prisoners from South America who were brought here by agencies of the government and put in close proximity to the blast of atomic bombs, so that “scientists” can study the effects on humans of radiation. Do they count as catastrophic “accidents?” From that example, we can see the calibre of nuclear scientists. What man of morals, would allow or even partake in such a “study?” That is the type of man a nuclear scientist is, and the workers are even worse.
What about the Bikini Atoll islands that were bombed while people still lived there? What about Paragon in Russia? What about the accidents we don’t even know about?
This list can go on to infinity and that is without even mentioning Fukushima.
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Here’s an amazing admission from his pro-nuke piece. No kidding:
“Olanoff is correct that in the case of a catastrophic nuclear accident in the United States, the taxpaying public is liable to cover the cost.”
That alone is enough to shut the industry down!
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Thanks Bones. Right on!
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I wonder if this qualifies as a catastrophic nuclear accident?
‘Three Mile Island: Exposing the Government’s Cover Up of Our Most Infamous Nuclear Accident’
http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/3076809
These same old tactics of coverup, denial, minimization, and confusion apply to Fukushima.
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Very little has changed since Chernobyl blew up and radiated everyone, except that many more nuclear accidents and releases happened, plus way more radioactive substances are now in the air, on the ground and in the ocean as well as inside all of us.
What kinds of things are inside of us you ask?
How about a little bit of 93 different long lived radioactive elements lasting anywhere from 17,000 years to BILLIONS of years in total decay life, plus maybe some more that do not last as long?
http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/3069680
This is what you can tell your kids that you left for them to clean up, once you are gone.
The Egyptian pyramids are only 5,000 years old, and the Bible is about 2,000 years old.
How much sense does it make to heat water for only 30 years with radioactive ‘fuel’ that blows up and melts down (creating huge non livable zones for 50,000 – 5 Million years?
Do we really want our future generations of kids and grandkids to have to deal with the radioactive leftovers from the spent fuel, laying around for billions of years, just so we can have hot water TODAY?
Do we REALLY want our kids and grandkids for infinite future generations to pay for the storage and guarding of these dangerous, terrorist inviting waste products?
More details on just 13 of the above long half life radioactive elements;
Part I http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/3047473 Elements 1-9
Part II http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/3048444 Elements 10-13…………………………………………………………………………………………..
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chernobyl 3 had several accidents, one in which 40 workers were irradiated some of them seriously. this professor is talking ‘balls’.
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And Hitler built some really nifty buildings before he destroyed Germany.
Somehow, once the evil overtops the relative ‘good’ by about 15 meters, it’s too much. TMI-2 had a great operating record. It was brand new, on its first-ever core, and managed to run just fine for almost 3 whole months before it melted, exploded and spewed! [/snark]
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not only that the whole RBMK series of reactors (chernobyl type) had an appauling safety history, along with the CANDU reactors all the BWR types, the PWR types, the AGCR types and the Magnox reactors in the UK. Not
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to mention all the accidents that have happened at experimental reactors and at military weapons production reactors and reprocessing sites and weapon component production facilities. does this professor claim that all these facilities have been run completely safely.
I have never heard so much bullshit in my life.
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As of Jan 21:
Csermely + professor + “Smith College” –doesn’t Google
Csermely + professor -enenews -Péter -Peter –doesn’t Google up any reference to any such person at any U.S. campus, save for that syracuse.com posting.
Craig
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Hi Craig-123. Glad to see you’re digging around.
See the link in my post from 1:24 repeated here: http://www.syr.edu/directories/emeritus.html
Like you, I’ve been digging further. I ploughed through the Syracuse University site, thinking it might be obviously pro-nuke like, say, Texas A&M. Not so – my first impression was that it was fairly techie (which I like) and relatively green (which I like).
On an impulse I eventually Googled “syracuse university engineering nuclear” and things suddenly looked rather different.
http://coursecatalog.syr.edu/search.aspx?cx=018015479555068583987:sr97mistwjc&cof=FORID:10&cat=2011&q=NUC+site%3acoursecatalog.syr.edu%2f2011%2f&rst=c
No sign of Csermely in the faculty lists (even emeritus list) at the L. C. Smith college within the university though, so the plot thickens.
I even wondered at one point whether the pro-nuke people might just grab names out of thin air when writing letters to blogs. Who would bother to check, most of the time?
The game is afoot, Holmes!
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One other minor oddity: the link I posted earlier purports to be for all the emeritus (retired) professors from Syracuse. It lists their home addresses and email addys.
Most use an address at the university. This is very common in academia – a retired prof gets to keep his email address. Sometimes they may not want one, of course, and perhaps that is the case with Csermely, since his address is listed at twcny (Time Warner Cable New York) at rr (Road Runner) dot com.
This may mean nothing whatsoever – it’s just a private address, of the kind you or I may choose.
Things are still a bit odd though. Still digging.
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Csermely
[REMOVED: No home addresses]
Syracuse NJ
csermely@twcny.rr.com
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I don’t think I’d choose to live on Humbert Ave., not after reading Nabokov anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita
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hehe
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I really don’t want to do an ad hominem attack on this guy, but I keep getting the impression that the story is some kind of prank. His arguments are so lightweight (and familiar), his trail is so fuzzy, his address is so goofy….
Looks like you’ll have to chat with him.
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Does this count as a smoking gun? It is from the Syracuse curriculum listings.
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NUC 540 Experiential Studies in Nuclear Technology
Crosslisted with: CEN 540
3 Credits – Offered upon sufficient student interest
Introduction to experimental methods, procedures and research techniques through projects at participating government facilities, industrial entities or Syracuse University.
PREREQ: NUC 201 AND NUC 510 OR NUC 520
—-
It establishes a clear link between nuke government/industry and the university, but I can find no mention of who teaches their nuke courses, who set up their NUC program, and so forth. I went through all the faculty research and teaching interest listings and found no mention of nuclear. Perhaps I just missed them, or maybe the faculty are just shy.
“Experiental Studies” is a new academic phrase to me. I think it means something like – pay tuition but stay away from campus to apprentice at the nuke plant, and when you graduate you can read the dials and push the buttons there without supervision.
In any case, I am much more wary of Csermely’s objectivity than I was a few hours ago.
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Here is another article by the same author, also promoting nuclear energy and saying that the future of nuclear power is very bright.
http://blog.syracuse.com/opinion/2012/01/facts_contradict_comments_oppo.html
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It’s the same article – perhaps you found it by a different path?
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@ aig, green road, Bones, Or-Well, Craig123,Johnnie, et al:
I think I will try to do a heavy pursuit on this one: I’ll email him, then I’ll write him, then I’ll write to the SU Nuc Engi Dept and ask some questions…mainly requesting supporting statistical probabilities.
Keep up the good work guys. We must end this madness or …the Black Swan will drag us all headlong into the Coronal Mass Emmissions!
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That’s great to see, dharmasyd. Keep us posted.
I’ve noticed two more false arguments in Csermely’s position. Since the pro-nukes tend to sing from the same songbook, it may be worth watching for these refrains elsewhere.
1. “China is planning to build 56 nuclear reactors, mostly of the AP-1000 variety. India is following China’s example.” Any parent probably recognizes this variant of the “all the other kids are doing it” juvenile argument. Multiple wrongs do not make a right.
2. He claims that newer reactors are “safe” rather than “safer” and says the latest models “… can keep the core cooled for days.” I am reminded of the once-proud brag that the Twin Towers were built to withstand impact from a small plane… an invitation to use large planes on the target, as things turned out. I imagine nature or humankind will find a way to knock out reactor core power for longer than “days”, sooner or later.
I am genuinely distressed to see these kinds of arguments from an alleged academic whose stock in trade should be clear thinking rather than propaganda. An academic who cannot think is like a mechanic who cannot use a wrench or a blind portrait painter. Some things just don’t mix well.
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I wonder how he would counter the months or years of the power being out after the Carrington Effect hits Earth?
(http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/194…)
The story goes on to explain:
“Several federal government studies suggest that this extreme solar activity and emissions may result in complete blackouts for years in some areas of the nation. Moreover, there may also be disruption of power supply for years, or even decades, as geomagnetic currents attracted by the storm could debilitate the transformers.”
So would this professor tell me how he plans on preventing all 400+ nuclear power plants from melting down and blowing up, after the power has been out for weeks or months?
Fukushima melted down within 8 hours of the power being out and exploded shortly afterwards.
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Yes, I’m agreeing with you. The sun has us in it’s sights everyday. One day, as in the past, there will be an event similar to or stronger than Mr. Carrington ever imagined could happen.
Let us be kind, one to another, for we are each of us together in our pain!
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His position appears to be that if it hasn’t happened yet, then it will not happen. He’s willing to bet our lives on it. Us, not so willing.
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I’m ready for a grid failure. I have my ol’ 4KW Onan prepped and ready, and 250 gallons of propane to run it on. I figure that’ll run my well pump and keep me warm and cookin’ untill the radiation from the meltdowns finally kills me.
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@aig…No reply so far from Cesmery. My email did not bounce back, but no reply yet. In a few days, if I still get nothing, I’ll write to the head of the department.
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Nice work dharma.
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The Chinese public better make some democracy (the U.S. is no example; I mean real democracy responsive and responsible to the greater public and the greater good)fast and this can only come about through direct action focused on directly disempowering those currently in power. Start controlling your leadership, this goes for any citizens of any nation with happy-go-lucky ongoing nuclear power as if the Fukushima Cataclysm never happened, or you’re going to be in the same position as the Japanese/United States citizenry–you’ll become cowards at just the moments in history you need to have courage and take out the filthy despots. There are an infinitesimal number in charge in China and there are more than one billion citizens. Not difficult to crush these status quo clowns. There is NO need for nuclear power. The above article is outrageously specious. The primary reason that alternative power options are not employed despite being long well known in a great diversity of technologies that is not becoming less proficient, but only more proficient a solution for many decades, has to do with fossil fuel, nuclear and toxic chemical profiteering billionaires preserving the value they’ve stolen (including our futures) from the rest of us. I’m pretty pissed off that whomever is moderating this site is posting this propaganda pushing the pro-nuclear perspective. There is a line between the balanced and diverse viewpoints presentation thesis and contributing to toxic brainwashing memes of the MSM and covert. Here, it has been crossed by the moderator of this site. I’ve been very patient for the past 10 months in the hopes that this site was not somehow being manipulated by the pro-nuke crazies charged with pushing nuke everything. There are almost too many other examples and I’m not the only one whose noticed, obviously. Unfortunately, articles like this above tend to point in the direction that our moderator has an agent provocateur or misinformation basal modus.
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To me, the article jumped out as ‘spin’ with the first line. Hogwash to emphasize any kind of safety record before a catastrophic meltdown, the magnitude of the ruin of a meltdown is too great to compare with any number of years of ‘safe’ operation.
So that made the rest of the text read as a little lesson on other slop we’re likely to be thrown from pro-nuke marketers. Don’t lose faith in enenews!
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