I like seeing collaborative non-social-media apps built on nostr. nostr:npub1g53mukxnjkcmr94fhryzkqutdz2ukq4ks0gvy5af25rgmwsl4ngq43drvk let me know if you want a deeper look into https://github.com/citadel-network/knowstr


Running Knowstr


In some cases, the tradeoff for going through extremely costfully maintenance must be extremely rewarding; i.e. the power of having access to the maintained thing is important. See also maintaining self-custody on bitcoin.


Because military advantage is so big?


Why build nuclear powered naval vessels if it’s more expensive?


it makes sense that as being cost-only the military is so risk averse in times of peace that there is less radiation than anyone would expect


“Despite the earthquake hazard, my family and I didn’t rush to move away from
Pasadena—the weather, the community, and Caltech were powerful attractions.
However, like millions of others in Southern California, we did take
precautions. We bolted our house to its foundation and the shelves to the
walls, we carried earthquake insurance, we stored a few days of food and
water, we drilled our children in earthquake safety, and we formulated
emergency contact and travel plans. Our family’s steps complemented those of
the larger society, where building codes, first-responder preparation, and,
now, a warning system help minimize quake damage. In short, we all adapted,
individually and as communities—shaping our infrastructure and behavior to
thrive where we chose to live.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 245)


“while we might be planting trees now, forest growth takes decades; that’s
much too slow to be a response to the kind of “climate emergency” that would
trigger SRM geoengineering, though it would remove CO2 longer term. And we’ve
yet to understand just how much CO2 forests could absorb or what the
ecological impacts of vast areas of new growth would be. […] it should be
possible to genetically alter plants to better capture and store carbon […].
There is, however, money to be made if the cost to remove a ton of CO2 from
the atmosphere could be brought below the going price of carbon. As is often
the case in the climate/energy business, it would then be possible to do well
financially without actually doing much good.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 244)


“Every year the world as a whole uses about 4.5 Gt of oil and 8 Gt of coal, so
removing even 10 Gt of CO2 per year (about one-third of current emissions)
would require a comparable infrastructure just to capture and handle the
material. […] it would cost upward of $100 to capture and compress one ton of
CO2, meaning a cost of at least one trillion dollars to remove 10 Gt of CO2
per year. […] The world today uses only 0.2 Gt of CO2 each year - about 0.13
Gt to produce urea (fertilizer) and 0.08 Gt to enhance oil production (pumping
CO2 into oil fields through “injection wells” helps move the oil underground
toward “production wells”). Those current uses of CO2 are one hundred times
too small to accommodate what would need to be taken out of the air.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to imagine significant new uses. The largest
global material flows after fuels are cement (less than 3 Gt each year) and
plastics (about 0.5 Gt per year). And since CO2 is the product of burning
fuels to produce energy, it would take more energy (presumably “clean”) to
turn it back into a fuel. In short, the best thing to do with CO2 removed from
the atmosphere is to sequester it, either underground or in the ocean.
Needless to say, this would be an enormous undertaking at the scale required.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 243)


“It’s not difficult to design a chemical plant that would capture CO2 directly
from the atmosphere. […] the real questions are about scale and cost.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 242)


“It is well within the capabilities of current technology to create a
stratospheric haze via any of a number of methods, including additives to jet
fuel or artillery shells that disperse the gas hydrogen sulfide (H2S, which
smells like rotten eggs) at high altitude. This would not be a onetime
exercise: the haze would have to be refreshed constantly, as the particles
settle out over a year or two. The amount of sulfur that would have to be
added to the stratosphere each year would be only about one-tenth of that
humans currently emit at much lower altitudes, so direct health impacts would
be minimal. And projected costs are low enough that a small nation or even a
single wealthy individual could carry out the entire project themselves. As
far as I know, the notion that “chemtrails” are evidence of covert
geoengineering is entirely unfounded. But Solar Radiation Management has
several significant downsides. First, if the haze were not sustained, the
global temperature would rebound rapidly when the cooling influence was lost
(it would be like suddenly closing your parasol in the bright sunlight).
Second, increasing the albedo doesn’t exactly cancel out greenhouse
warming—greenhouse gases warm all of the time over all of the globe, while
albedo modification cools only when and where the sunshine it reflects is
significant; it’s ineffective at night and less effective during the winter,
particularly at high latitudes. Climate models also suggest that SRM would
cause small changes in precipitation and other aspects of the climate system,
although these would be different from those caused by greenhouse gases alone,
and would differ from place to place based on local conditions. In short,
there are likely collateral effects that, at least for some, could be worse
than the warming we’re trying to counteract. […] there is also the possibility
of rogue SRM.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 241)


“One of my first calculations upon joining BP in 2004 had to do with that
aerosol cooling. The company was embarking on a campaign to brand natural gas
as “a bridge to a low-carbon future,” as it produces only half as much carbon
dioxide per unit of energy as coal. However, I quickly estimated, literally on
the back of an envelope, that a sizable portion of that CO2 reduction would be
negated by the loss of aerosol cooling from the coal. BP management was not
pleased when I pointed that out. There are many ways we might further enhance
the albedo, including brightening the land surface with “white roofs” on
buildings, engineering crops to be more reflective, brightening the ocean with
microbubbles on the surface, and putting up giant reflectors in space, to name
a handful. However, creating aerosols in the stratosphere might be the most
plausible way to make a significant global impact.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 240)


“make the earth a bit more reflective (increase its albedo), so that it
absorbs a bit less energy from the sun. This strategy is termed Solar
Radiation Management, or SRM, and would be appropriate whether the warming is
natural or the result of human influences. Alternatively, we could pursue
Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) […].” (Koonin, 2021, p. 240)


“2009. John Holdren, the president’s science adviser, had ignited a media
firestorm in April of that year merely by mentioning the concept publicly, and
he was forced to backtrack soon after. Administration higher-ups subsequently
discouraged my own efforts to fund an exploratory research program […]. The UK
Royal Society, commendably frank and forward-looking, broke the ice with a
study issued in September 2009, and the US National Academies issued reports
on two separate approaches to “Climate Intervention”—the geoengineering
strategies we’re about to discuss—in 2015.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 239)


“I soon discovered that any mention of geoengineering to governments or NGOs
was met with tight-lipped silence, if not actual hostility. The focus was on
reducing emissions, and any distraction from that goal, especially one that
could allow the world to continue to use fossil fuels, was not to be
contemplated.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 239)


“In the 1830s, James Pollard Espy, the US government’s first official
meteorologist—who was known as “The Storm King”—proposed inducing rain by
setting “great fires” in the Appalachian forests to create clouds. Needless to
say, neither Congress nor the public had much enthusiasm for that idea. […] in
1974, the Soviet climatologist Mikhail Budyko proposed that if warming ever
became a pressing problem, a haze in the stratosphere could be created to cool
the planet, as happens naturally after major volcanic eruptions.” (Koonin,
2021, p. 238)


“creating an emissions-free energy system will be broadly disruptive—both
economically and behaviorally.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 235)


“There are several reasons I believe that electricity will fuel the passenger
vehicles of the future, but one of them is that the existing electrical grid
is a good start on the fueling infrastructure. If a widespread transition to
plug-in electric cars does come about, systems thinking will be even more
important as the electrical and transportation systems would have to work
together to accommodate charging millions of vehicles.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 233)


“coal fueled about one-quarter of US electricity in 2019, and each metric ton
of that coal was sold for about $39.7 A carbon price of $40 for each ton of
CO2 emitted would effectively double that cost to power plant operators and so
be a strong inducement for them to forswear coal. In contrast, that same
carbon price would increase the effective price of crude oil by only about 40
percent above $60 per barrel. […] reductions in emissions from power (and, as
it turns out, heat) are much easier to encourage than reductions from
transportation, fundamentally because oil packs a lot more energy per carbon
atom than does coal.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 232)


“Japan was on track to meet its pledge of a 15 percent reduction by 2030, but
it’s building more coal-fired power plants following the Fukushima nuclear
power disaster.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 223)


“Combined, the drivers of population and development are expected to grow
energy demand by about 50 percent through 2050.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 217)


“many analyses suggest that a warming of less than 2ºC is likely to have a
small net positive economic impact […]. The Yale economist William Nordhaus
first articulated the notion of a “guardrail” of about 2ºC warming in the
1970s, work for which he would later be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.
But it is Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a physicist turned climate scientist, who
is known as “the father of the 2 degrees limit” for his unceasing promotion of
that idea, especially across Europe. Some dozen years before 1.5ºC became
fashionable, I had a chat with Schellnhuber during which I asked him, “Why 2ºC
and not 1.5 or 2.5 or whatever?” His response was something like “2ºC is about
right, and it’s an easy number for politicians to remember.” Evidently,
politicians’ memories have improved during the last decade. Each of the
assumptions in the Obama White House statement is dubious, if not just plain
wrong […].” (Koonin, 2021, p. 215)


“even stabilizing human influences was so difficult as to be essentially
impossible. Saying that directly and publicly while I was working for BP (and
later the Obama Department of Energy) would probably have gotten me fired. But
I was able to reconcile my organizational responsibilities with my scientific
integrity by simply organizing and presenting the data and letting others
follow the arrows for themselves. I finally published the essence of my 2005
analysis as a New York Times Op-Ed in November 2015, about a month before the
Paris meeting where the world’s countries were to pledge to reduce their
emissions through 2030. The main points are quite simple: • According to the
IPCC, just stabilizing human influences on the climate would require global
annual per capita emissions of CO2 to fall to less than one ton by 2075, a
level comparable to today’s emissions from such countries as Haiti, Yemen, and
Malawi. For comparison, 2015 annual per capita emissions from the United
States, Europe, and China were, respectively, about 17, 7, and 6 tons. •
Energy demand increases strongly and universally with rising economic activity
and quality of life; global demand is expected to grow by about 50 percent
through midcentury as most of the world’s people improve their lot. • Fossil
fuels supply 80 percent of the world’s energy today and remain the most
reliable and convenient means of meeting growing energy demand. • The energy-
supply infrastructure of electric generating plants, transmission lines,
refineries, and pipelines changes slowly for unavoidable structural reasons. •
Developed countries would certainly have to reduce their emissions, but even
if those were to halve, and per capita emissions of the developing world grew
only to those of today’s lower-emitting developed countries, annual global
emissions would still increase by midcentury. • The tension between emissions
reductions and economic development is complicated by uncertainties in how the
climate will change under human and natural influences and how those changes
will affect natural and human systems. All else being equal, it might be a
good thing to eliminate, or even just reduce, CO2 emissions. But all else
isn’t equal, so decisions must balance the cost and efficacy of mitigation
measures against the certainties and uncertainties in climate science. And
where your interests come out in that balancing act will depend in part upon
what country you’re in, how wealthy you are, and how much you care about (or
whether you’re a member of) the forty percent of humanity that doesn’t have
access to adequate energy.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 214)


“• Keeping human influences on the climate below levels deemed prudent by the
UN and many governments would require that global carbon dioxide emissions,
which have been rising for decades, vanish sometime in the latter half of this
century. • Emissions reductions would have to take place in the face of
strongly growing energy demand driven by demographics and development, the
dominance of fossil fuels, and the current drawbacks of low-emissions
technologies. • These barriers, combined with the uncertainty and vague nature
of future climate impacts, mean that the most likely societal response will be
to adapt to a changing climate, and that adaptation will very likely be
effective.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 210)


“Anyone referring to a scientist with the pejoratives “denier” or “alarmist”
is engaging in politics or propaganda. And using the term “climate change”
without distinguishing between natural and human causes signals a (perhaps
deliberate) sloppiness in thinking. Many an article that purports to be about
how humans have broken the climate (or how we must reduce our emissions to
“fix” it) is nevertheless filled with examples of climate trends that are not
attributable to (or fixable by) humans. Any appeal to the alleged “97 percent
consensus” among scientists is another red flag. The study that produced that
number has been convincingly debunked. And in any event, nobody has ever
specified exactly what those 97 percent of scientists are supposed to be
agreed upon. That the climate is changing? Sure, count me in! That humans are
influencing the climate? Absolutely, I’m there! That we’re already seeing
disastrous weather impacts and face an even more catastrophic future? Not at
all obvious […].” (Koonin, 2021, p. 203)


“As administration interest in a Red Team review continued through mid-2019,
there were further objections from non-scientist politicians who have been
misled into believing that the science is settled. On March 7, 2019, Senator
Schumer (together with Senators Carper, Reed, Van Hollen, Whitehouse, Markey,
Schatz, Smith, Blumenthal, Shaheen, Booker, Stabenow, Klobuchar, Hassan,
Merkley, and Feinstein) introduced Senate bill S.729 ‘... to prohibit the use
of funds to Federal agencies to establish a panel, task force, advisory
committee, or other effort to challenge the scientific consensus on climate
change, and for other purposes.’ Although the bill never went anywhere, and it
certainly wasn’t the first time Congress has attempted to stop an
administration from doing something, I confess to being shocked—an “effort to
challenge the scientific consensus” could easily include many climate science
research studies, and enshrining a certain scientific viewpoint as an
inviolable consensus is hardly the role of government (at least in a
democracy). I can’t imagine Congress trying to do such a thing for any other
important field of research, say COVID-19 therapies. And as a student of
history, I found the bill uncomfortably reminiscent of a 1546 decree by the
Council of Trent that attempted to suppress challenges to Church doctrine.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 202)


“while the research contained in them might indeed be subject to the type of
peer review the public expects of scientific findings, the reports’ summaries
and conclusions are not, and the hurricane example was only one of many report
errors and misrepresentations […].” (Koonin, 2021, p. 201)


“Two days before the March for Science, the Wall Street Journal published an
opinion piece in which I advocated for a Red Team review of climate science
assessments. I used NCA2014’s misleadingly alarming description of hurricane
data to illustrate the need for such a review, and outlined how it could be
carried out. My opinion piece drew almost 750 online comments from readers,
the great majority of them supportive. Some in the Trump administration also
took notice, and given the administration’s reluctance to publicly accept even
the basics of climate understanding, their interest in a climate science Red
Team engendered some very strong objections to the proposal. Most prominent
were pieces published in late July 2017 by John Holdren (the Obama
administration’s science adviser who had been the sponsor of the CSSR), and
one published the following week by Eric Davidson (president of the American
Geophysical Union) and Marcia McNutt (president of the National Academy of
Sciences). Their essential point was that a Red Team exercise was superfluous
since climate research, and the assessment reports, were already peer
reviewed.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 201)


“peer review can improve a paper’s presentation and will usually catch major
errors, but it is far from perfect, and in no sense guarantees the correctness
of what gets published. Independent reproduction or refutation of the results
by other researchers conducting their own studies is a much stronger guarantee
of correctness. […] But an assessment report is not a research article—in
fact, it’s a very different sort of document with a very different purpose.
Journal papers are focused presentations written by experts for experts. In
contrast, assessment authors must judge the validity and importance of many
diverse research papers, and then synthesize them into a set of high-level
statements meant to inform non-experts. So an assessment report’s “story”
really matters, as does the language used to tell it—especially for something
as important as climate. […] Government officials from scientific and
environmental agencies (who might themselves have a point of view) nominate or
choose the authors, who are not subject to conflict of interest constraints.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 199)


“A Red Team review of a climate assessment report could bolster confidence in
the assessment, as well as demonstrate the robustness (or lack thereof) of its
conclusions.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 198)


“I was increasingly convinced that The Science needed a Red Team exercise, a
concept I’d already been refining for a few years. In such an exercise, a
group of scientists (the “Red Team”) would be charged with rigorously
questioning one of the assessment reports, trying to identify and evaluate its
weak spots. In essence, a qualified adversarial group would be asked “What’s
wrong with this argument?” And, of course, the “Blue Team” (presumably the
report’s authors) would have the opportunity to rebut the Red Team’s findings.
Red Team exercises are commonly used to inform high-consequence decisions such
as testing national intelligence findings or validating complex engineering
projects like aircraft or spacecraft; they’re also common in cybersecurity.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 198)


“Michael Crichton, the bestselling author of The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic
Park, lived near Caltech and was a prominent member of Pasadena’s extended
intellectual community until his death in 2008. Crichton, who was a physician
before he became a writer, was an outspoken advocate for scientific integrity,
and he looked askance at the public presentation of climate science (his 2004
novel State of Fear deals with that subject). Crichton’s conversations with
Caltech professor Murray Gell-Mann (the Nobel prize–winning physicist who was
one of the first researchers to hypothesize quarks) led him to describe the
“Gell-Mann Amnesia” effect: ‘You open the newspaper to an article on some
subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business ...
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a
story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read
as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than
the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.’”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 195)


“For academics, there is pressure to generate press and to secure funding
through grants. There’s also the matter of promotion and tenure. And there is
peer pressure: more than a few climate contrarians have suffered public
opprobrium and diminished career prospects for publicizing data that doesn’t
support the “broken climate” meme. Carl Wunsch, a prominent oceanographer from
MIT who has long urged scientists to be realistic in their portrayal of the
science, has written about the pressures on climate scientists to produce
splashy results: ‘The central problem of climate science is to ask what you do
and say when your data are, by almost any standard, inadequate? If I spend
three years analyzing my data, and the only defensible inference is that “the
data are inadequate to answer the question,” how do you publish? How do you
get your grant renewed? A common answer is to distort the calculation of the
uncertainty, or ignore it all together, and proclaim an exciting story that
the New York Times will pick up. A lot of this is somewhat like what goes on
in the medical business: Small, poorly controlled studies are used to proclaim
the efficacy of some new drug or treatment. How many such stories have been
withdrawn years later when enough adequate data became available?’” (Koonin,
2021, p. 192)


“even the official assessment reports indicate that significant human-induced
climate change would have negligible net economic impact […].” (Koonin, 2021,
p. 183)


“a warming of 5°C, which according to NCA2018 would produce a slightly delayed
growth curve, 4 percent less in 2090 than it would be otherwise. Finally,
there’s the curve for a warming of 7.2°C (13°F)—a level of warming well beyond
what’s projected under even the most extreme IPCC scenario. According to
NCA2018, this would result in a 10 percent hit between now and 2090, which
still amounts to only a five-year delay in growth seventy years from now.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 181)


“the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide has been a significant factor
in yield improvements, as it boosts the rate of photosynthesis and alters
plant physiology to use water more efficiently. Increasing CO2 in the
atmosphere has also fertilized the natural world.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 173)


“A 2019 article in Foreign Affairs by the Director-General of the World Health
Organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, was entitled “Climate Change Is Already
Killing Us.” […] the article conflates deaths due to ambient and household air
pollution (which cause an estimated 100 per 100,000 premature deaths each
year, or about one-eighth of total deaths from all causes) with deaths due to
human-induced climate change. […] brazen misinformation by the WHO’s
leadership […].” (Koonin, 2021, p. 171)


“According to his own model, under the far more plausible RCP4.5 scenario, the
average death rate shrinks sixfold from 85 to 14, with a very wide probable
range between −45 and 63. In other words, under that mid-range scenario
there’s a good chance that deaths would actually decrease.” (Koonin, 2021, p.
171)


“It turns out that the 85 deaths per 100,000 in 2100 quoted with great
confidence in Greenstone’s 2019 testimony is actually the average value under
the implausibly high emissions scenario […].” (Koonin, 2021, p. 170)


“The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) within the
Université catholique de Louvain maintains an Emergency Events database
covering over 22,000 mass disasters globally, starting from 1900. Data on
deaths due to natural disasters are easily downloaded from that site and can
be separated into those that are weather related (droughts, floods, storms,
wildfires, and extreme temperatures) and others that are not (earthquakes,
tsunamis, and volcanoes). […] weather-related death rates fell dramatically
during the past one hundred years even as the globe warmed 1.2°C (2.2°F);
they’re about 80 times less frequent today than they were a century ago.
That’s largely due to better tracking of storms, better flood control, better
medical care, and improved resilience as countries have developed. A recent UN
report confirms the trend over the past two decades. A second point is that in
the most recent decade, extreme temperatures caused 0.16 deaths per 100,000
each year, about five hundred times smaller than Greenstone’s projection for
2100.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 169)


“In 2018, all infectious diseases globally accounted for about 75 deaths per
100,000—about one tenth of total deaths from any cause, which have an annual
rate of 770 per 100,000. Since the global population is about eight billion,
that amounts to six million deaths each year from infectious diseases.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 168)


“ceased all emissions tomorrow, global sea level would continue to rise.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 166)


“the Global Mean Sea Level […] was rising at the end of the nineteenth
century—well before there were significant human influences on the climate—and
since 1880 risen by some 250 mm (10 inches), for an average rate of 1.8 mm
(0.07 inches) per year. The average rate of rise over shorter periods has
fluctuated; for the past three decades it’s been about 3 mm (0.12 inches) per
year. In the context of the earth’s hydrological cycle, these are small
numbers—3 mm of sea level rise per year is roughly 0.3 percent of the planet’s
annual precipitation—so it’s not surprising that there are variations from
decade to decade.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 154)


“unlike with temperature, there is no easy way to combine precipitation data
from scattered weather stations to get at the bigger picture. […]
precipitation anomalies (deviations from the average) over land have increased
at an average rate of 0.2 percent per decade since 1901. But this isn’t a very
robust statement because of the high variability of precipitation, sparse
data, and the smallness of the change […].” (Koonin, 2021, p. 131)


“the number of significant tornadoes hasn’t changed much at all, but the
strongest storms have become less frequent.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 123)


“Today, weather radar can detect even very weak tornadoes from distances of
more than 160 km (100 miles). Before radar was widely deployed, however, weak
tornadoes didn’t always make it into the record.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 122)


“It seems unlikely that the Academies panel ever saw that figure after it was
added—they surely would have commented if they had, and I doubt it would have
then survived to publication. The figure’s problems were evidently not flagged
(or were ignored) in the subsequent internal government reviews. […] The false
notion of more frequent US high temperature records is likely to pollute
subsequent assessment reports, which invariably cite prior reports.” (Koonin,
2021, p. 109)


“The federal official then in charge of the CSSR (Michael Kuperberg, then
executive director of the US Global Change Research Program) responded to the
Academies’ review of Chapter 6 by noting: ‘Almost every recommendation from
the NAS was incorporated [in the final version] … and a new figure was added
on changes in record high and low temperatures.’” (Koonin, 2021, p. 108)


“How could a report that proclaims itself “designed to be an authoritative
assessment of the science of climate change” so mischaracterize the data?
After all, the CSSR was subject to multiple reviews, including one by an
expert panel convened by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and
Medicine (NASEM). When I dug a bit further, I found that in fact the National
Academies’ expert review panel had criticized the discussion of temperature
extremes in a late draft of the CSSR.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 108)


“temperature extremes in the contiguous US have become less common and
somewhat milder since the late nineteenth century. Yet the Executive Summary
of the CSSR [Climate Science Special Report] prominently features the faulty
ratio graph (our Figure 5.1) with the legend “Record warm daily temperatures
are occurring more often.” Even if you charitably argue that the authors
“forgot” to add “... compared to record cold temperatures,” there is no
arguing that it is shockingly misleading, especially when taken along with the
rest of the report’s material on temperature extremes.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 107)


“For a given station on a given day of the year, a “running record” high
temperature occurs in any year where the maximum temperature exceeds that of
all the years before it. So there are many of these records over a period of
observation […]. there’s a big problem with running records—they tend to
become less frequent as the years go on because each new record “raises the
bar” and makes it more difficult to achieve a subsequent record.” (Koonin,
2021, p. 104)


“it sure seemed possible that the ratio of record highs to record lows shown
in Figure 5.1 goes up not because record highs are becoming more common, but
because as the coldest temperatures warm, the ratio’s denominator (number of
daily record colds) is getting smaller, while its numerator (number of daily
record warms) has hardly changed in recent decades.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 103)


“the average coldest temperature of the year has clearly increased since 1900,
while the average warmest temperature has hardly changed over the last sixty
years and is about the same today as it was in 1900.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 102)


“A hallmark of science is that conclusions get tested against observations.
But that’s virtually impossible for weather attribution studies. It’s like a
spiritual adviser who claims her influence helped you win the lottery—after
you’ve already won it.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 99)


“The World Meteorological Organization goes even further, saying: ‘... any
single event, such as a severe tropical cyclone [hurricane or typhoon], cannot
be attributed to human-induced climate change, given the current status of
scientific understanding.’” (Koonin, 2021, p. 99)


“Observations extending back over a century indicate that most types of
extreme weather events don’t show any significant change—and some such events
have actually become less common or severe—even as human influences on the
climate grow.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 97)


“Because of this large but uncertain cooling by aerosols, a model with high
sensitivities to both aerosols and greenhouse gases could describe the
historical record about as well as one with much lower sensitivities. As the
influence of greenhouse gases grows and becomes dominant in the coming decades
(aerosols are a significant source of local air pollution and reducing them is
a priority everywhere), ECS estimates could become more precise.” (Koonin,
2021, p. 94)


“Greenhouse gases alone caused a warming of 1.5ºC (2.7ºF) from 1900, which is
partially offset by a cooling of about 0.6ºC (1.1ºF) from human-caused
aerosols (solar variation and volcanic aerosols don’t have much long-term
effect).” (Koonin, 2021, p. 94)


“the researchers tuned their model to make its sensitivity to greenhouse gases
what they thought it should be. Talk about cooking the books. One of the
reasons the climate sensitivity is so uncertain is that aerosols currently
exert a cooling influence that partially offsets (or masks) the greenhouse gas
warming.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 93)


“the observed early twentieth-century warming is comparable to the observed
late twentieth-century warming, which the assessment reports attribute with
“high confidence” to human influences.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 89)


“The fact that the spread in their results is increasing is as good evidence
as any that the science is far from settled. […] the ensembles fail to
reproduce the strong warming observed from 1910 to 1940. On average, the
models give a warming rate over that period of about half what was actually
observed.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 88)


“the simulated global average surface temperature (not the anomaly) varies
among models by about 3ºC (5.6ºF), three times greater than the observed value
of the twentieth-century warming they’re purporting to describe and explain.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 87)


“the assessment reports average results from an “ensemble” made up of a few
dozen different models from research groups around the world. The Coupled
Model Intercomparison Project—otherwise known as CMIP—compiles the ensembles.
[…] on the scales required to measure the climate’s response to human
influences, model results differ dramatically both from each other and from
observations. But you wouldn’t know that unless you read deep into the IPCC
report.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 86)


“A paper laying out the details of one of the most esteemed models, that of
Germany’s Max Planck Institute, tells of tuning a subgrid parameter (related
to convection in the atmosphere) by a factor of ten because the originally
chosen value resulted in twice as much warming as had been observed.” (Koonin,
2021, p. 86)


“As University of Wisconsin statistician George Box said famously in 1978:
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”” (Koonin, 2021, p. 77)


“most methane emissions arise from enteric fermentation (digestion in
cattle—mostly emitted from the front of the animal, not the back) and other
agricultural activities, particularly rice cultivation; the decay of material
in landfills is also significant.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 70)


“every additional methane molecule in the atmosphere is thirty times more
potent in warming than a molecule of carbon dioxide. […] the 300 million tons
of methane humans emit each year is only 0.8 percent of the 36 gigatons of CO2
emitted by burning fossil fuels. But as shown in Figure 3.2, that methane has
a disproportionate warming influence, equivalent to ten gigatons of CO2.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 69)


“CO2 is not like smog, which disappears a few days after you stop emissions;
it takes centuries for the excess carbon dioxide to vanish from the
atmosphere. So modest reductions in CO2 emissions would only slow the increase
in concentration but not prevent it. Just to stabilize the CO2 concentration,
and hence its warming influence, global emissions would have to vanish. […]
methane concentrations are much lower (2,000 parts per billion, which is about
1/200th that of CO2’s 400 parts per million). Another difference is that a
methane molecule lasts in the atmosphere for only about twelve years—though
after that, chemical reactions covert it to CO2.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 68)


“If the longer-term trend were to continue, emissions in 2075 would be twice
as large as they are today. Nearly all of the increase in emissions has been
due to CO2 from fossil fuel use […]. I don’t know of any expert who disputes
that the rise in CO2 concentration over the past 150 years is almost entirely
due to human activities, since there are five independent lines of evidence
supporting that conclusion.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 65)


“The roughly 850 Gt of carbon in the atmosphere, almost all in the form of
carbon dioxide, is equal to about 25 percent of the carbon at or near the
earth’s surface (in the soils, plants, and shallow ocean) but is only 2
percent of the total carbon in the oceans.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 64)


“The fact that human influences currently amount to only 1 percent of the
energy that flows through the climate system has important implications, and
means there’s a lot to understand. To usefully measure them and their effects,
we have to observe and understand the larger parts of the climate system (the
other 99 percent) with a precision better than 1 percent. Small natural
influences must also be understood to that same precision […].” (Koonin, 2021,
p. 58)


“While the warming effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are known to
within 20 percent, the uncertainty in the cooling influence of human-caused
aerosols is much larger, making the total human-caused forcing uncertain by 50
percent—that is, the best we can say is that the net human influence today is
very likely to be between 1.1 and 3.3 W/m2.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 57)


“cancels about half of the warming influence of human-caused greenhouse gases.
[…] the earth was about 0.6ºC cooler during the fifteen months that followed
the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in June 1991. […] The sunlight energy absorbed by
the earth (and hence the heat energy radiated by the earth) amounts to an
average of 239 W/m2. […] Human influences today amount to just over 2 W/m2, or
slightly less than 1 percent of that natural flow (about the same influence as
half a cucumber on the daily human diet).” (Koonin, 2021, p. 56)


“Aerosols are fine particles in the atmosphere such as those produced by the
burning of low-quality coal. They cause severe health problems, contributing
to millions of deaths per year. But they also make the globe more reflective
both by directly reflecting sunlight and by inducing the formation of
reflective clouds.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 55)


“So on the scales that matter to us, the climate system is quite sensitive—the
few-degree changes in average surface temperature we’ve seen over the past few
centuries (and could see in this one) correspond to physically small (about 1
percent) influences. […] Understanding how the climate system responds to
human influences is, unfortunately, a lot like trying to understand the
connection between human nutrition and weight loss, a subject famously
unsettled to this day. Imagine an experiment where we fed someone an extra
half cucumber each day. That would be about an extra twenty calories, a 1
percent increase to the average 2,000-calorie daily adult diet. We’d let that
go on for a year and see how much weight they gained.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 55)


“The IPCC’s climate models predict that doubling the CO2 concentration from
preindustrial levels—causing the 1 percent change in heat intercepting we’ve
discussed—would increase the average surface temperature by about 3ºC (5.5ºF).
Since we’ve said the globe’s average surface temperature is 15ºC (59ºF), a
rise of 3ºC would represent a 20 percent increase in temperature (3ºC out of
15ºC). But on the Fahrenheit scale, this same temperature change is 5.5ºF from
the average of 59ºF: a 10 percent rise. Why should the rise depend upon which
temperature scale we use? And, in any event, either of these numbers, whether
20 percent or 10 percent, seems too large. How could a 1 percent change in the
atmosphere’s heat interception produce such an outsized effect?” (Koonin,
2021, p. 54)


“an increase of fewer than three molecules of CO2 out of every 10,000
molecules of air […].” (Koonin, 2021, p. 52)


“The next most significant greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), is different
from water vapor in that its concentration in the atmosphere is much the same
all over the globe. CO2 currently accounts for about 7 percent of the
atmosphere’s ability to intercept heat. It’s also different in that human
activities have affected its concentration […] continues to go up 2.3 ppm
every year. Although most of today’s CO2 is natural, there is no doubt that
this rise is, and has been, due to human activities, primarily the burning of
fossil fuels. […] the CO2 added from 1750 until today increases the fraction
of heat intercepted from 82.1 percent to 82.7 percent.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 51)


“amounts to only about 0.4 percent of the molecules in the atmosphere. Even
so, it accounts for more than 90 percent of the atmosphere’s ability to
intercept heat.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 51)


“The most common of the gases making up the earth’s atmosphere are nitrogen
(78 percent) and oxygen (21 percent). Combined, then, these two account for 99
percent of the dry atmosphere, and because of the peculiarities of molecular
structure, heat passes through them easily. The largest part of the remaining
1 percent is the inert gas argon. But while even less abundant, some of the
other gases—most significantly water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous
oxide, and ozone—intercept, on average, about 83 percent of the heat emitted
by the earth’s surface. So the earth does indeed emit energy equivalent to
what it absorbs from the sun, but instead of directly flowing off into space,
cooling our planet to a chilly average of 0ºF, much of that energy is
intercepted by the atmosphere blanketing us. Water vapor is the most important
of the greenhouse gases.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 50)


“centuries of warmer temperatures gave way gradually around the year 1000,
leading up to the Little Ice Age, an unusually cold period that ran from about
1450 to 1850. This was followed by more rapid warming that has continued until
today. […] only low confidence that the global warming of the past thirty
years has exceeded the range of reconstructed temperatures. […] medium
confidence that the last thirty years were likely (a two-out-of-three chance)
the warmest thirty-year period of the last fourteen hundred years for the
Northern Hemisphere.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 42)


“The ice on the Arctic Ocean and in mountain glaciers has been in decline, and
growing seasons have been lengthening slightly. Satellite observations show
that the lower atmosphere is warming as well.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 40)


“the growing ocean heat content is the surest indication that the planet has
indeed been warming in recent decades.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 40)


“In 2000, an international program called Argo began setting a fleet of
robotic floats adrift on the oceans to record their properties. The Argo float
system first achieved worldwide coverage in 2005, and there are now more than
3,900 of those drifters covering the world’s oceans. The floats usually drift
at a depth of 1 km (3,300 feet), but every ten days, they descend to more than
2 km (6,600 feet) and measure the temperature and salinity profile through the
water column during a six-hour ascent to the surface, where they transmit
their results via satellite before returning to 1 km depth. […] some 60
percent of the ocean is now being sampled at least yearly to a depth of 2 km.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 38)


“The world’s oceans are both the most important and the most problematic piece
of the earth’s climate system. They hold more than 90 percent of the climate’s
heat and are its long-term memory.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 38)


“the land is warming more rapidly than the ocean surface, and the high
latitudes near the poles are warming faster than the lower latitudes near the
equator. […] the coldest temperatures (at night, during the winter, and so on)
are rising more rapidly than the warmest temperatures—the climate is getting
milder as the globe is getting warmer.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 36)


“human influences on the climate were negligible prior to 1900. […] 1950, when
they were less than one-quarter of what they are today. […] the earth actually
cooled a bit between 1940 and 1980 even as warming human influences grew.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 36)


“The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change defines “climate change” as:
‘... a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human
activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in
addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods
…’ That definition explicitly excludes changes due to natural causes, which
differs from the plain-language meaning of the term. […] articles about
changes due to multiple or unknown causes get “climate change” headlines, and
calls to ‘fight climate change!’ make it sound as if reducing human influences
would keep the climate from changing.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 35)


“carbon dioxide—the most important human-influenced greenhouse gas—exists in
the atmosphere at roughly the same concentration all over the globe.” (Koonin,
2021, p. 33)


“the rate of rise was twice as large as our 0.09ºC/decade long-term average
during the forty years from 1980 to 2020 (0.20ºC/decade), while it was
negative during the forty years from 1940 to 1980 (–0.05ºC/decade). And for
the thirty years before that, from 1910 to 1940, the rate of rise was again
nearly twice the 0.09ºC/decade average (about 0.17ºC/decade).” (Koonin, 2021,
p. 31)


“the global temperature anomaly graph in Figure 1.1 starts at about –0.3ºC in
1900 and ends at about +0.8ºC in 2020, thus showing a rise of 1.1ºC over 120
years (twelve decades), or 0.09ºC per decade.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 31)


“The earth has warmed during the past century, partly because of natural
phenomena and partly in response to growing human influences. These human
influences (most importantly the accumulation of CO2 from burning fossil
fuels) exert a physically small effect on the complex climate system.
Unfortunately, our limited observations and understanding are insufficient to
usefully quantify either how the climate will respond to human influences or
how it varies naturally. However, even as human influences have increased
almost fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe
weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future
climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 24)


“Thousands of researchers supported by billions of dollars work to observe the
climate, understand it, and project its future. They report their results in
scientific journal articles, publishing more than ten thousand each year. […]
Because the answers to its core questions are so important, with huge
potential impact on human society, the United Nations and the US government
regularly convene large groups of researchers to prepare formal “assessment”
reports meant to provide “best answers” for non-experts, including scientists
in other fields, decision makers in government and the private sector, and the
public. Those reports, which run to many hundreds of pages each, review and
summarize recent research and interpret its findings for non-scientists.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 21)


“I find it particularly abhorrent to have a call for open scientific
discussion equated with Holocaust denial, especially since the Nazis killed
more than two hundred of my relatives in Eastern Europe.” (Koonin, 2021, p.
16)


“my experience in energy technology and advising government and private-sector
decision makers on not only climate policy, but also other important national
matters, including the quality standards for the human genome project and
testimony to then senator Joe Biden’s Foreign Relations Committee on the
post-9/11 dangers of dirty bombs. […] My focus is on significant points where
the popular perception about climate and energy is very different from what
the science says. […] Not everything you’ve heard about climate science is
wrong […].” (Koonin, 2021, p. 15)


“Some will question my credentials, saying I’m not “a climate scientist.” In
other words, that I am not formally trained in the earth sciences, even though
I’ve published several papers in the field. In truth, climate science involves
many different scientific fields, encompassing the quantum physics of
molecules and the classical physics of moving air, water, and ice; the
chemical processes in the atmosphere and ocean; the geology of the solid
earth; and the biology of ecosystems. It also includes the technologies used
to “do” the science, including computer modeling on the world’s fastest
machines, remote sensing from satellites, paleoclimate analysis, and advanced
statistical methods. Then there are the related areas of policy, economics,
and the energy technologies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This
enormous swath of knowledge and methods makes the study of climate and energy
the ultimate multidisciplinary activity. No single researcher can be an expert
in more than two or three of its aspects […]. Like many other climate
researchers with a background in physics, including James Hansen and Michael
Mann […].” (Koonin, 2021, p. 14)


““[Inaction will cause] ... by the turn of the century [2000], an ecological
catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any
nuclear holocaust.” —Mostafa Tolba, former executive director of the United
Nations Environment Program, 1982 • “[Within a few years] winter snowfall [in
the UK] will become a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going
to know what snow is.” —David Viner, senior research scientist, 2000 •
“European cities will be plunged beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged
into a Siberian climate by 2020.” —Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, quoting a
Pentagon report in the Guardian, 2004.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 9)


““It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is
true.” —Paul Watson, cofounder of Greenpeace. • “We’ve got to ride this global
warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing
the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.” —Timothy
Wirth, president of the UN Foundation. • “Some colleagues who share some of my
doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten
people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all
right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my
belief in open and honest assessment is naïve.” —Daniel Botkin, former chair
of Environmental Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.”
(Koonin, 2021, p. 8)


“As the chair of a highly respected university earth sciences department told
me privately, “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I don’t dare
say that in public.” Many scientific colleagues, some of them my friends for
decades, were outraged that I’d highlight problems with The Science and thus,
as one of them said, “give ammunition to the deniers.” Another said it would
have been okay to publish my essay in some obscure scientific journal but
reproached me for doing so in a forum with so many readers. And a prominent
defender of the idea that The Science is settled enough published a response
to my Op-Ed that began by calling for New York University to reconsider my
employment, went on to misrepresent many of the things I had written, but
then, bafflingly, acknowledged that most of the uncertainties I’d mentioned
were well known and much discussed among experts. It seems that by
highlighting those uncertainties so plainly and publicly, I had inadvertently
broken some code of silence, like the Mafia’s omerta. More than six years of
study since the APS workshop have left me increasingly dismayed at the public
discussions of climate and energy. Climate alarmism has come to dominate US
politics, especially among Democrats, where I have otherwise long felt most
comfortable politically. The 2020 Democratic presidential primary saw each
candidate trying to outdo the other with over-the-top statements about
“climate emergency” and “climate crisis” increasingly divorced from the
science. The election run-up also witnessed increasingly sweeping policy
proposals like the Green New Deal that would “fight climate change” with
government interventions and subsidies.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 5)


“I came away from the APS workshop not only surprised, but shaken by the
realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed.
Here’s what I discovered: • Humans exert a growing, but physically small,
warming influence on the climate. The deficiencies of climate data challenge
our ability to untangle the response to human influences from poorly
understood natural changes. • The results from the multitude of climate models
disagree with, or even contradict, each other and many kinds of observations.
A vague “expert judgment” was sometimes applied to adjust model results and
obfuscate shortcomings. • Government and UN press releases and summaries do
not accurately reflect the reports themselves. There was a consensus at the
meeting on some important issues, but not at all the strong consensus the
media promulgates. Distinguished climate experts (including report authors
themselves) are embarrassed by some media portrayals of the science. This was
somewhat shocking. • In short, the science is insufficient to make useful
projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much
less what effect our actions will have on it.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 4)


“Early in my career, I had great fun doing this for esoteric phenomena in the
realm of atoms and nuclei using high-performance computer modeling (which is
also an important tool for much of climate science). But beginning in 2004, I
spent about a decade turning those same methods to the subject of climate and
its implications for energy technologies. I did this first as chief scientist
for the oil company BP, where I focused on advancing renewable energy, and
then as undersecretary for science in the Obama administration’s Department of
Energy, where I helped guide the government’s investments in energy
technologies and climate science. I found great satisfaction in these roles,
helping to define and catalyze actions that would reduce carbon dioxide
emissions, the agreed-upon imperative that would “save the planet.” But then
the doubts began.  […] in January 2014 I convened a workshop with a specific
objective—to “stress test” the state of climate science. In ordinary terms,
that meant analyzing, critiquing, and summarizing humanity’s accumulated
knowledge about the past, present, and future of the earth’s climate. Six
leading climate experts and six leading physicists, myself included, spent a
day scrutinizing exactly what we know about the climate system and how
confidently we can project its future. To focus the conversation, we
physicists had spent the prior two months preparing a framing document based
on the UN assessment report that had just been released.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 3)


“Most of the disconnect comes from the long game of telephone that starts with
the research literature and runs through the assessment reports to the
summaries of the assessment reports and on to the media coverage.” (Koonin,
2021, p. 2)


“• Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century. •
Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was
eighty years ago. • The net economic impact of human-induced climate change
will be minimal through at least the end of this century.” (Koonin, 2021, p.
2)


Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, Inc, 2021).


“On October 19, 2006, researchers from Indiana University Bloomington
announced the discovery of a previously unknown type of bacteria, living a
mile below the Earth’s surface. These microbes, of the division firmicutes,
have an unusual habit. They live only on or adjacent to uranium in the
subsurface rocks. This is unusual not just because they live in a radioactive
environment, it is because they live because of the radioactivity. They eat
it.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 292)


“On September 25, 2007, the first application for a new nuclear power plant
construction and operating license in 30 years was received by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. The South Texas Project is planning to install two new
reactors at an existing plant. BWRs are no longer made. The reactors will be
Advanced Boiling Water Reactors, or ABWRs, and they will not be built by GE
alone. It is now GE-Hitachi. The ball has started moving, if not rolling. In
October 2007 the Tennessee Valley Authority and NuStart filed for a license to
build two Westinghouse AP1000s in Hollywood, Alabama, and in April 2008 the
Southern Company signed an engineering and procurement contract with
Westinghouse for another two AP1000s to be added to the Vogtle Nuclear Plant
in Georgia. This was the first new nuclear power plant construction contract
in the United States since 1978. On August 26, 2008, it was announced that
Westinghouse will construct a factory at Lake Charles, Louisiana, to build
AP1000 components, and on October 23, 2008, Northrop Grumman revealed plans to
build a nuclear reactor factory in Newport News, Virginia. Finally, on January
5, 2008, the Heavens opened and Progress Energy Florida announced plans to
shut down two of its coal-fired power plants and replace them with two
Westinghouse AP1000s. As of November 2008, construction licenses have been
filed for twelve AP1000s. The nuclear power industry has rolled over in its
sleep, and it has accepted a push from the United States Government. The
Energy Policy Act of 2005 authorizes loan guarantees for advanced nuclear
reactor designs, cost-overrun support for up to six new nuclear plants, a
large nuclear energy production tax credit, and, of supreme interest to those
who toil in the industry, it allows nuclear plant employees to carry firearms.
Furthermore, the Nuclear Power 2010 Program, unveiled by the Secretary of
Energy on February 14, 2002, is a joint government and industry cost-sharing
effort to identify new nuclear power plant sites and develop and market
advanced reactor designs. Three nuclear industry consortia responded to the
program and were awarded matching funds.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 283)


“The manufacturing base of Western Civilization seemed to move to China as the
need for electrical power gradually increased. Individual electrical devices
from refrigerators to television sets became more efficient and less power-
hungry, but the number of needed devices grew faster than the efficiency
movement. We poured on the coal. The environmental movement, started in
England after the killer coal-fog in 1952, gained national prominence, a Nobel
Peace Prize, and a motion picture Academy Award. The new term for atmospheric
pollution is now “global warming,” and there is a suggestion for how it can be
curtailed.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 282)


“To be fair, it must be noted that 171,000 people died in China in 1975 when
the Banqiao Dam failed, 18,000 people died in Bhopal, India, in 1984 when a
valve was left open in a Union Carbide pesticides plant, and in London,
England, 12,000 people died in a frightfully thick fog from sulfurous coal
burning in 1952. […] There was basically nothing to change because of the
Chernobyl disaster, as the Soviet design practices were obsolete, except to
bump Windscale down on the list of the worst nuclear happenings. Graphite
reactors were not spoken of again in design circles, and the only graphite
power plant in the United States, the Fort St. Vrain, Colorado, General
Atomics plant, was shut down in 1989 and was quietly converted to a natural
gas plant.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 281)


“By 1978 plants in construction were cancelled, pending orders were stopped,
and no new reactors were bought. The last nuclear plants that were still under
construction were finished in the early 1980s, and that was that.” (Mahaffey,
2010, p. 276)


“The smallest working plant in the world is the KANUPP reactor in Pakistan,
producing 137 megawatts. The largest is the Zaporizhzhis Nuclear Power Plant
in the Ukraine, running at 5,700 megawatts. […] The United States still has
the largest number of active power reactors, at 104 units, but not the
greatest portion of its power produced by nuclear means, which is only at
about 20 percent. That record belongs to France, with the aforementioned 87.5
percent of its power being nuclear, from 59 power plants.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p.
275)


“There is, however, one example of a foreign terrorist attack on a nuclear
power plant. It was in France in 1982. […] There was no domestic source of
uranium, and it would be possible to isolate France internationally by cutting
off fuel shipments from outside. The solution to this loophole was the
installation of a plutonium economy. […] Design effort commenced on the
Superphoenix fast breeder reactor in 1968. Construction was approved in 1972
and work began in 1974 on the Rhône River at Creys-Malville, near the Swiss
border. It took 11 years to build the plant and power it up. The French also
take their anti-nuclear power seriously, and in July 1977 60,000 protesters
marched on the plant, intending to stop construction. Riot control
specialists, the Campagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, were brought in, and
there were over 100 serious injuries of protesters. One man, Vital Michalon,
was killed. There was continuous domestic protest and low-level sabotage, but
on the night of January 18, 1982, an anti-nuclear group from an adjacent
country fired five exploding warheads into the side of the containment
building using a Soviet rocket launcher, just missing the reactor core. The
leader of the attack, one Chaïm Nissim, had obtained the rockets from Carlos
the Jackal by way of the Belgian terrorist organization Cellules Communistes
Combattantes in the name of the Swiss Green Party.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 274)


“In 1977 President Jimmy Carter, who had run for the office on a promise to
shut down the nuclear industry, forbade the licensing of the Barnwell Nuclear
Fuel Reprocessing Plant, on the grounds that foreign terrorists could take
over the plant and use it for plutonium extraction. This seemed an odd
scenario, but the President’s veto remains in effect, mothballing the plant,
wrecking a half-billion-dollar private investment, increasing the mass of
nuclear plant waste by a factor of 33, and making the United States dependent
on Canada for medical isotopes. Nuclear fuel reprocessing is routine business
in France, the United Kingdom, India, Japan, and Russia, but not in America.
By blocking a privately funded fuel reprocessing plant, anti-nuclear forces
have made waste disposal more difficult than it needs to be and have made it
unwise for companies to invest in a process that must be licensed by the NRC.”
(Mahaffey, 2010, p. 273)


“In the case of processed spent fuel, if all the electrical power a person
used in a lifetime were produced by nuclear fission, the radioactive waste
product from all the power would fit in a Coke can and weigh about 2 pounds.
If that same power were produced by burning coal, the solid portion of the
waste product would be a small mountain.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 272)


“By weight or by volume, the waste material from nuclear fusion in a power
plant is largely composed of an inert material, uranium-238. It does not
fission in the process, but a small amount converts into plutonium-239. Add to
this the “unburned” portion of the fissile uranium-235 that is left over and
the oxygen with which the original metal was combined to form uranium oxide.
All debris left over from the fission of the uranium-235 is about 3 percent of
the mass of the spent fuel. It is a wide mix of highly radioactive isotopes,
each with a characteristic half-life or decay rate. Within 6 minutes of
fission most of the waste products have decayed away. The isotopes iodine-131
and barium-140 are gone after four months, or have gone through sufficient
half-lives to be considered not harmful. Cerium-141 and zirconium-95 take a
few years to disappear, and cerium-144, ruthenium-106, and promethium-147 stay
dangerous for over 10 years. Strontium-90 and cesium-137 cause the most
concern, with half-lives of about 30 years.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 271)


“The first such facility was in Germany at Schacht Asse II, an old salt mine
that was converted to a nuclear waste depository in 1965. […] After more than
20 years of international scientific study, public-outcry dampening,
regulatory wrestling, and construction, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or
WIPP, opened for business on March 6, 1999. It is located 2,150 feet
underground in a 3,000-feet-thick salt formation in an uninhabited place,
about 26 miles due east of Carlsbad, New Mexico. Salt formations are good
places to hide long-term radioactive refuse. The salt has not moved in 250
million years, and there has been no evidence of water dripping in the
formation. By 2006 the facility had already stored 5,000 shipments of waste,
and operation of the plant has been smooth and trouble free. There is a catch.
WIPP is a pilot plant, and is not intended for use by civilian power plants.
It is used only for the waste from nuclear weapons production and
experimentation sanctioned by the government.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 270)


“the antinuclear movement craftily turned to radioactive material disposal. If
nuclear power could be prevented from moving its spent fuel from temporary
storage in the reactor buildings to permanent facilities, then it would
eventually choke in its own waste and die. The challenge of nuclear waste
transportation and long-term storage was not as underdeveloped as it may have
appeared. Nuclear fuel has been shipped quietly back and forth across the
United States for decades, using trucks, trains, and boats, without a single
accident. The casual rail transport of some other industrial materials, such
as chlorine gas, has caused towns to be evacuated when trains derail and tanks
split open, but radioactive material is always given high attention. Since
1965, about 3,000 spent reactor fuel loads have been shipped, usually to
temporary storage at old Manhattan Project sites such as Hanford. […] A truck
carrying a shipping cask was hit by a freight train, two trucks collided head-
on with one carrying fuel, and so on. Nothing tried could puncture the
container and spread radioactivity. On July 18, 2001, a freight train carrying
hazardous, non-nuclear material derailed and caught fire in the Howard Street
Tunnel in downtown Baltimore, Maryland. The fire burned for three days, and it
reached 1,800° Fahrenheit. This was seen as a good example of a maximum-stress
accident for a spent fuel cask, and five years of study was conducted to
determine whether a nuclear cask would have survived the accident. It was
concluded that in this worst-case fire the internal temperature in the HI-STAR
100 spent fuel canister would not rupture the fuel cladding, and therefore no
radiation would escape.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 269)


“Any nuclear plant was able to store decades of burnt-out fuel in wet storage
off to the side in the containment building, but eventually all that stuff was
going to have to be put away somewhere safe.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 268)


“all above-ground bomb testing were shut down permanently by the Nuclear Test
Ban Treaty, signed by President Kennedy on October 7, 1963, in an effort to
halt weapons development by foreign powers, and the surface of Nevada and the
environment were spared further punishment. The atmospheric radiation content,
measured in remote Vermunt, Austria, peaked sharply in 1963 at the height of
the testing, and then started a long, exponential decay that continues to this
day. With nuclear experiment debris piled atop previous deposits, Nevada was
left in worse shape than Hiroshima, which had only one bomb detonated over it.
The single bomb had devastated the city on August 6, 1945, but most of the
bridges, roads, and rail lines were still usable. That changed 42 days later,
when Hiroshima was hit by the Makuazaki Typhoon. It was one of the most severe
typhoons in the long reign of Emperor Hirohito, and 3,000 people were killed
in the Hiroshima prefecture. What the bomb had not taken out, the typhoon did.
Half the remaining bridges, roads, and rails in the city were destroyed.
However, the gushing rainwater of the storm washed away the lingering
radioactive fallout in Hiroshima, down to the sea, where it disappeared into
the ocean floor. It was safe to walk down the street, and the city
miraculously recovered. By 1963, Hiroshima was a bustling business complex
with over a million inhabitants that in no way resembled its past life. In the
nuclear world, even a typhoon is a paradox. The Nevada Test Site, where
rainfall is rare, was the nexus of all the dark sides of the nuclear program.
Its long use had accumulated a sense of distrust of the nuclear science
establishment, particularly to those living in Nevada. The military secrecy,
the misdirections in the name of security, and a seeming lack of governmental
concern did not build public confidence. In the 1960s anti-nuclear movements,
small but loud, began to bloom. Pent-up rage over nuclear armaments spilled
over onto the relatively benign world of civilian nuclear power research,
development, and implementation. With construction costs of billions of
dollars, nuclear power was not exactly a mom & pop operation. It involved
large power conglomerates, and big money was a big target.” (Mahaffey, 2010,
p. 267)


“After the triumph of Apollo, the United States would establish a semi-
permanent base of operations on the Moon. The base would be supplied and have
men rotated out using a shuttle between Moon orbit and Earth orbit, and the
shuttle would be nuclear powered.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 263)


“Pluto was not exactly a stealth bomber. The aircraft was so loud, so hot, and
so radioactive it was hard to hide it. The new intercontinental ballistic
missiles, or ICBMs, seemed to solve all of the weapons delivery problems
without all the mess. On July 1, 1964, Project Pluto was mercifully put to
sleep without ever really having awoken, nuclear jet engines were never spoken
of again, and another $260 million was down the drain. As anyone who worked on
these projects will tell you, it was terrific intellectual fun while it
lasted, and some will say it was the best years of their lives.” (Mahaffey,
2010, p. 259)


“The vehicle would take off from some desert in the United States using
chemical rocket boosters to take it up to trans-sonic speed. The boosters
would then drop away, and the reactor would start up, at a point over the
Pacific Ocean and not over taxpayers’ property. The aircraft would then loiter
along the Western Pacific Rim at high altitude, running on nothing but fission
and air, waiting for war to break out. Upon signal it would tear away to the
target locations, running fast and below the radar. Although it would carry
multiple warheads, it would cut a swath of destruction with its supersonic
shock-wave alone, with half a gigawatt of naked fission taking down any living
thing that remained standing. […] It was simply a big air nozzle with a
nuclear reactor in the middle of it.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 258)


“There was nothing safe about the concept of a nuclear airplane, and this was
in direct opposition to what the fledgling nuclear power movement was striving
to attain: a perception that this was a safe, economical way to “power” the
future. It had the potential of killing more people with air crashes involving
the airplane than could perish under the bombs it was supposed to drop.
Dealing with reactors mounted naked in airplanes on a daily basis was the
equivalent of managing a continuous power-reactor disaster. […] Incredibly,
the Air Force and the AEC had another nuclear-powered aircraft project,
completely separate and independently funded, running in parallel with the ANP
program. This one was a real bad boy. Although it was scheduled to carry up to
12 nuclear weapons, this alternate nuclear air vehicle did not even have to
lug bombs to destroy civilization. All it had to do was deliberately fly into
the ground, and the city under it was rendered uninhabitable. The project had
the official name SLAM, or Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile. It became known as
Pluto, named for the Roman god of the Underworld. It was the weapons delivery
system from Hell. Thoughts of this system started officially with a report
from the Los Alamos atomic bomb lab in 1948 called, “Self-flying Atomic Bombs
or the New Mexico Jumping Bean.”” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 257)


“In June 1959 the Radiation Effects Reactor was first run at full power for an
extended time and managed to kill every living thing within 1,000 feet, with
the possible exception of weeds. Bugs fell out of the sky in mid buzz and
mighty oaks turned brown. Pine trees seemed the most sensitive, while
crabgrass seemed immune. […] Near the reactor, hydraulic fluid changed into
chewing gum, bouncy tires turned rock hard, and transistors just stopped
working. […] general mismanagement problems, budget overruns, and some unused
test facilities built in other states began to look bad. The Air Force was
digesting the data from the GNAL in Georgia and other test sites, and was
beginning to accept the hazards involved with flying this nuclear-powered
bomber. It was seriously suggested that older pilots be used, beyond the age
for fathering children, to minimize genetic mutations due to the radiation
exposure in the cockpit. The newly elected President John F. Kennedy announced
the canceling of the program on March 28, 1961. Programs to develop
intercontinental ballistic missiles to deploy nuclear weapons using chemically
fired rockets had progressed so rapidly, they over ran the ANP mission plan.
There was no longer a need for a bomber that could stay in the air. Twenty
billion dollars had disappeared down a hole. The engineering involved in the
ANP program was technically competent, and I am convinced that eventually a
nuclear-powered bomber could have flown […].” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 256)


“In the GE design, the airplane would land and then taxi over a water-filled
pit in the middle of the tarmac. The pilot pulls a handle, and the single
reactor drops out into the pit. His non-radioactive bomber is then ready to be
serviced. The idea was strangely ingenious, and the NB-36H tests proved that
it would work. […] An enormous, radiation-shielded hangar was constructed at
Test Area North, in anticipation of flying the nuclear bomber.” (Mahaffey,
2010, p. 253)


“Radiation would be allowed free leakage from the back, top, bottom, and sides
of the plane, but as long as the crew remained in front of the reactor, they
were protected by a round radiation blocker which left them in the shadow of
the reactor. Still, the shadow-shield was lead and borated rubber, weighing a
hefty twelve and a half tons. In the final design the loss of the weight of
the hydrocarbon fuel made up for the heavy shielding. The atomic airplane,
designated NB-36H, flew 43 successful test missions […].” (Mahaffey, 2010, p.
252)


“In two years the Air Force poured ten million dollars into the effort, but
the severe technical problems of putting a power reactor and men in a vehicle
made of light-weight alloys began to come into focus.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p.
251)


“In a nuclear jet, the only fuel is uranium in a reactor core. The core runs
at white heat, and compressed air running through it is expanded in a
continuous explosion, similar to the combustion process. No bombing target is
out of reach for lack of fuel. […] Nuclear-powered bombers would be able to
dither in the air for months at a time, just outside the territorial limits of
the Soviet Union. If World War III ever began, they would then burn all
reserve power and make a lightning dash into Russia, raining bombs before they
could rain back on us. Compared to a submarine, an airplane is not a good
platform for a nuclear reactor. A submarine is a weighty vessel, made of
thick, pressure-resistant steel. You can even put a lot of lead in a submarine
without concerns of sinking it. The heavy structure of a submarine is a
perfect shield for radiation […].” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 250)


“Nuclear energy has never been the cheapest way to do anything. It is not
because of public safety concerns, prospects of environmental pollution, a
lack of engineering proof, or limited fuel resources, which would initially
seem the most obvious. The reason may be that the nuclear option was developed
too early. It was ahead of its time. We had not progressed to the point where
the limits of chemical combustion had been reached, and a jump to nuclear
energy for space travel was obvious but not heeded or perceived as necessary.”
(Mahaffey, 2010, p. 249)


“Twisting the conventional wisdom, the safest reactor design appeared to be
none other than Hyman Rickover’s PWR, as installed in his by now famous
nuclear submarines. It was the most complicated reactor design in existence,
built with expensive fuel, exotic materials, hundreds of moving parts, and
thousands of beautiful, perfectly executed welds. Rickover was a driven,
demanding, crazy son-of-a-bitch who insisted not only on thorough training of
anyone allowed to get near his reactors, but on psychological testing as well.
It all seemed extreme, but it worked. His reactors operated perfectly and
never harmed anyone, but they were hardly practical in a mid-twentieth century
industrial sense. Industry was used to finding cheaper ways to conduct
business, and not to find the most exotic and expensive solution for every
problem.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 231)


“For a month all the milk from the surrounding areas was confiscated, diluted,
and poured into the Irish Sea, to be taken away with the rest of the detritus
from the unfortunate event. […] The specific cause of the fire is still open
to speculation to this day, but the general causes were inadequate
engineering, a need to save money at the expense of quality design, and a
hurried schedule. […] Another air-cooled reactor was never built again,
anywhere. The Windscale reactors are still there, sitting quietly. Robotic
disassembly of the graphite cores is scheduled to be completed by 2037.
Follow-up studies of the 450 men who participated in bringing the situation
under control in 1957 show no unusual incidences of cancer or any radiation-
induced sicknesses.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 231)


“The only thing that had kept 20 tons of burned reactor fuel, heavy with
fission products, from blanketing Northern England was Cockroft’s filter pack
at the top of the exhaust stack. The popular term “Cockroft’s Folly”
immediately fell out of favor. While it was very fortunate that the filters
were in place, they did not stop everything that tried to go up the stack.
There were two major radioactivity releases, the first about midnight on
Thursday, when the burning was fully engaged before the fire break took effect
and the crew noticed, and Friday morning starting at 9:00 A.M., when the water
first hit the fire and steam carried debris up the stack. It is not easy to
estimate the full radiation load that was released into the countryside, but
it was at least 20,000 curies of mixed radioactive material. To put it in
perspective, the radiation dumped on the United States by the Sedan nuclear
bomb test was 44 times bigger than the Windscale fire. The radiation release
from the Chernobyl disaster was over 1,000 times greater. Most of the
radioactive plume of smoke and steam drifted out over the Irish Sea and
disappeared from detection without any lasting effect.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p.
230)


“Windscale Unit 1 went critical almost on schedule in October 1950, and Unit 2
followed in June 1951. On March 28, 1952, Tuohy held in his hand the first
piece of plutonium metal made in Great Britain. The United Kingdom was on its
way to nuclear parity with the United States, and all was well. There were a
scant few operational difficulties, and yet there was always the worry of fuel
cartridges bursting open. Uranium metal cylinders were encased only in thin
aluminum cans with fins.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 225)


“It was too late to incorporate Cockroft’s suggested filters into a Windscale
building, and there was not enough dynamite in the UK to rip it down and start
over. The concrete was simply too thick, and yet Cockroft was insistent. The
only place to put back-fitted filters was the worst possible location, at the
tops of the exhaust stacks. With some grumbling and a lot of effort, the
engineering team hauled 200 tons of structural steel, concrete, and equipment
up to the top of the new stacks and installed sets of removable fiberglass
filters. […] New calculations seemed to indicate that the estimation of the
critical mass of the graphite and uranium pile could be off by as much as 250
percent.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 225)


“the burning graphite will set fire to the uranium, which is also very
flammable and difficult to extinguish. Pour water on a graphite fire and it
will simply burn hotter, as the flaming carbon grabs oxygen out of the water.
The remaining hydrogen from the water disassembly is an even worse secondary
effect, as it will explode when it combines with air.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p.
224)


“The fledgling British nuclear industry designed the simplest, cheapest large-
scale reactor possible, with the fewest number of moving parts and the least
expensive fuel. The Windscale units would be graphite moderated with metallic,
natural uranium fuel. They would avoid the complicated liquid cooling that the
Americans had used at the Hanford Works, with the miles of complicated
plumbing, valves, filters, and pumps. The coolant would be air, forced through
the core and up a smokestack using eight enormous, electrically driven
blowers. The design could not be any less complicated. Construction went badly
at first, but eventually 5,000 men got the job done, pouring concrete into the
foundation before the design was half finished and pushing over 300
architects, engineers, and surveyors to complete the plans as quickly as
possible. Problems develop in rushed designs. In this instance, the fuel-
loading machine, intended to automatically stick uranium slugs into the
reactor face, never worked. It was the only complicated part of the project,
and it turned out to be an engineering over-reach. The precision necessary to
find the fuel channels on the reactor face and carefully insert fuel was more
than a blind robot built in 1947 could handle. It was much easier just to
lower a man down on the reactor face and have him poke in a fuel cartridge
with a stick. There were also some problems with the air-blower design, but
the worst difficulties were with the graphite and the fuel. The existing
knowledge of nuclear graphite that was not locked up in security
classification was simply wrong. American scientists were forbidden from
giving any help to the endeavor, due to the Atomic Energy Act, but there was
still sympathy for the British effort. Advice was offered from then on out:
Beware of the Wigner Effect in your graphite.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 223)


“A component of The Paradox of nuclear power is that strivings for engineering
simplicity seemed to lead to fires, meltdowns, radiation contaminations, and
twisted wreckage. The simpler and more economical a large-scale reactor
project tried to be, the more likely it was to misbehave […]. The worst
reactor disaster in history was the destruction of Chernobyl Unit 4 in 1986,
and this was due to neglect and poor management as much as egregious
structural flaws. Fifty-five people were killed. The second worst reactor
disaster was the fire at Windscale Unit 1 in 1957 in the United Kingdom.
Nobody was injured, but the nuclear industry almost died in the crib as a
result.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 222)


“More people were killed in the development of the Ferris wheel than in the
experimental phase of nuclear power.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 222)


“Find some lead that is 446 years old, and you have lead that has reduced its
radiation emission by a factor of one million, as almost all the lead-210 has
decayed away. There was a known source of old lead. The roof and gutters of
the Notre Dame Cathedral on the Île de la Cité in Paris were sealed using
lead, and it had been there a long time. The roof was completed in about 1250,
and although the building had been extensively restored around 1850, it was
still the largest volume of verifiably old lead available. The Atomic Energy
Commission offered to replace the lead in the cathedral roof, and they would
also remove all the old lead, which was obviously an environmental hazard.”
(Mahaffey, 2010, p. 221)


“A favorite source of contamination-free steel at nuclear labs became World
War I naval guns. […] NASA did not want background contamination coming out of
the spacecraft frame. They needed pure, pre-atomic steel. The British were
glad to step up to the problem. They owned the contents of Scapa Flow,
including the water-logged former German Navy. Parts were routinely cut off
the sunken ships […].” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 220)


“Fire bricks in steel furnaces were made with cobalt-60 radioactive traces
built in. This made it possible to monitor the erosion of the firebricks from
a remote measurement and know when to shut it down and replace the bricks,
before there was a fire blowout. All you had to do was monitor the
radioactivity from the furnace. […] Contaminated steel got mixed with
uncontaminated steel, and before long all steel products built after the war
were hopelessly contaminated with gamma-emitting isotopes.” (Mahaffey, 2010,
p. 220)


“The sudden load of radiation in the Earth’s atmosphere affected many things,
particularly steel production. To make steel, a great deal of air must be
blown through the process, and anything in the dust sticks in the product. Any
steel made after World War II was noticeably radioactive.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p.
219)


“The Limited Test Ban treaty of 1963, signed by the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and
the U.K., made atmospheric nuclear explosions illegal. It was a reaction by
both sides of the Cold War to the alarming rise in fallout radiation around
the world. There was no hostile intent in the Orion liftoffs, but one launch
would have the same effect as a 40 megaton, above-ground nuclear test.
Although it would be extremely expensive to do so, an Orion craft could be
boosted to orbit in pieces by conventional, chemical rockets and then blasted
to escape velocity by nuclear means. The effect, however, would be the same.
Radioactive dust from the bomb explosions would enter the top of the
atmosphere and rain down on Earth. […] The Orion Project was officially closed
down in 1964. It was a magnificent piece of engineering […].” (Mahaffey, 2010,
p. 219)


“Today, there are 27 artificially produced radioactive isotopes commonly used
in medicine, for both diagnostic imaging and disease treatment. Isotopes range
from calcium-47, used to measure bone metabolism, to yttrium-90, used for
brachytherapeutic treatment of prostate cancer. There are 31 different
radiopharmaceuticals based on technetium-99m alone. It is used for imaging and
functional studies of the brain, myocardium, thyroid, lungs, liver,
gallbladder, kidneys, skeleton, blood, and cancerous tumors. Its half life is
only 6 hours, so its potency disappears quickly and it becomes harmless to the
patient and anyone handling or disposing of the substance. Technetium-99m
comes from the beta decay of molybdenum-99, which is produced by the nuclear
fission of uranium. It is extracted from nuclear power plant waste products.
Over 20 million people per year are given a dose of technetium-99m. […] There
are only four reactors in the world producing these isotopes, and none are in
the United States, where the fear of nuclear work is unusually acute. All the
medical and industrial radioisotopes, used daily in impressive quantities in
the United States, are made in one reactor, the National Research Universal
reactor, or the NRU, at the Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario, Canada.”
(Mahaffey, 2010, p. 215)


“If radium could cure cancer, it was felt that it could cure anything, and
radiation was aimed at everything from tooth decay to dandruff. Many people
died needlessly […]. Radioactive radium is still among the most dangerous
substances that exists in the Earth’s crust. It has a half-life of 2,600
years, so the danger does not go away quickly.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 214)


“Marie and Pierre Curie in Paris discovered radium and polonium in 1898, and
by 1910 Marie had isolated pure radium metal. Again, the medical community
pounced on it. Radium was a solid-state source of radiation, requiring no
clumsy, electrically driven equipment. All it took to destroy a local cancer
was a tiny speck of it, easily implanted on the tip of a needle, and the
radiation produced by it, alpha particles, was of extremely short range. If
thrust into a tumor, the radium would kill only the rapidly propagating cells
immediately surrounding it, as radiation is most damaging to cells with high
turnover rates, like cancer cells, and nothing beyond a microscopic range was
harmed. This technique, known as brachytherapy, remains in wide use to this
day, particularly for cervical and uterine cancers.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 214)


“The last Plowshare detonation was on May 17, 1973, deep under Fawn Creek,
Colorado, 50 miles north of Grand Junction. Three simultaneous explosions at
5,267, 6,152, and 6,611 feet were intended to stimulate the flow of natural
gas from a formation of small, disconnected oil fields. It worked, to some
degree, but, unfortunately, the gas was unacceptably radioactive. Gas
consumers in California might find radioactivity streaming out of their stove
burners somewhat offensive. Also, with $82 million invested in nuclear gas
stimulation, it was an elementary calculation to show that after 25 years of
gas production only 15 percent of the investment could be recovered. With
those final conclusions, Plowshare died.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 212)


“The Soviets wished to find natural gas, make underground gas storage tanks,
put out very large oil-field fires, crush ores in open-pit mines, and make
coal mining really fast. […] On March 23, 1971, after ten years of studies and
general delays, three 15-kiloton bombs were in place near the village of
Vasyukovo in Perm Oblast. The simultaneous blasts ripped a crater 2,000 feet
long. Radioactive contamination was somewhat higher than anticipated, and when
it was concluded that several hundred nuclear bombs would be necessary to
complete the canal, enthusiasm waned.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 211)


“A shaft 635 feet deep was drilled into the desert alluvium, the device was
lowered in, and at the backward count of ten it was detonated. A perfectly
round dome of earth lifted immediately off the ground, reaching 290 feet high.
It seemed to hang there for three seconds, and then it burst open, shooting 12
million tons of earth into the sky. It left a perfect crater, 320 feet deep
and 1,280 feet across. […] It certainly made a neat, perfectly predictable
hole in the ground, but it exposed more than 13 million people to radiation
fallout. Of all the nuclear tests conducted in the continental United States,
none exposed more people to more radiation. Two plumes had developed, with one
headed northeast and one going due east, dropping radioactive dust all along
the way. […] The New Panama Canal excavation would require 24 such shots, and
so the plan was quietly abandoned. After 80 days, or 10 half-lives, the
iodine-131 radioactivity was undetectably slight. An identifiable swath of
thyroid cancer and genetically altered newborns never materialized along the
path of the most severe radiation fallout […]. the buzz of controversy further
eroded the public confidence in the wisdom of nuclear technology expansion. It
did not matter how many people did not die from it, it was the over-hanging,
invisible danger of it.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 210)


“Operation Plowshare was born. It would eventually burn up $770 million and
detonate 31 test bombs, but, mercifully, the plans for nuclear landscaping
would be put back on the shelf in 1973. Plans were drawn up, probably without
consulting the Republic of Panama, to blow the new cut through the Darién
Province, just north of the existing canal. It was an unspoiled rainforest
with cloud-covered mountains and a scant population. Only 40,000 people would
have to be moved. Side effects, such as air blast, ground shock, plumes of
radioactive dust thrown into the atmosphere, and possible seismic
complications were all considered. From an engineering standpoint, there was
only one blank spot. In all the hundreds of nuclear tests all over the world,
no one had ever actually dug a hole with an atomic bomb.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p.
209)


“Only in 1961 did the Soviets set off more bombs than the United States. What
they lacked in numbers of tests they made up for with size. On October 30,
1961, in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, they set off the world’s largest man-
made explosion. It was designed to yield an explosion of 100 megatons, but out
of prudence the engineers cut it back to 50 megatons, or twice the size of
anything the United States ever designed. That is ten times the force of all
the explosives used in World War II, including the two atomic bombs dropped on
Japan. They named it RDS-220, or simply “The Tsar.” It made a mushroom cloud
40 miles high, and it broke windows in Finland. At a hefty 27 tons it was too
big to ever carry over enemy territory in a bomber.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 208)


“For the next two years of shakedown trials the Nautilus would break all
records, make all previous submarines obsolete, and generally perform beyond
all hopes and expectations. Underwater constantly, it could outrun anything on
the surface, and do so without a single radiation accident. No sailor was ever
exposed to a harmful gamma, beta, or alpha particle aboard Nautilus, and it
ran for 25 years of exemplary service. On February 4, 1957, the sub had logged
20,000 leagues of travel, under the sea. She was the first water-craft to
cross under the polar icecap […]. Rickover’s Westinghouse pressurized water
reactor was certainly not the cheapest nuclear power reactor in the world, nor
was it the simplest or the easiest to build, nor did it use the least
expensive fuel. It was a design chosen for two reasons. It would fit in a
sewer pipe, and it would not kill people standing next to it for extended
periods. For better or worse, this odd off-shoot of the wide, post-war
development of nuclear technology would become the most licensed, copied, and
stolen reactor plant design in the world. To the nuclear engineers, it would
simply be called “PWR,” or pressurized water reactor.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p.
199)


“After the January 21, 1954 launch, and ten months of power equipment
installation, the submarine first went to sea at 11:00 A.M. on January 17,
1955.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 198)


“The problem, in the end, was that all the zirconium known to exist could be
put in a shoe box. […] its oxide, the zircon, is mentioned in the Bible, and
the name is Ancient Persian, meaning “gold like.” At the start of Rickover’s
program, pure zirconium metal had little industrial use, and it was produced
by the extremely expensive “crystal bar” or iodide process invented by two
Dutch chemists in 1925. […] Westinghouse was quickly browbeaten and shamed
into industrializing the process, finding a usable zircon component in common
beach sand. […] By 1952 zirconium was being mined, milled, and produced in
large quantities at low prices. It made the problem of procuring hafnium,
needed for submarine reactor control rods, seem almost routine. Today, most
reactor fuel assembly frames and tubes are still built using Mr. Zirconium’s
metal.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 197)


“Westinghouse was given enough monetary incentive that they agreed to design
the entire reactor system. They bought the old Bettis Airport near Pittsburgh,
tore it down, and built a pressurized water reactor laboratory. […] In
searching for the perfect material for the internal structures of a submarine
reactor, zirconium turned up as ideal. It did not parasitically absorb
neutrons, and it could withstand high temperatures without melting or sagging.
Unfortunately, it was more precious than platinum, and one single reactor
would require truck-loads of it. The project metallurgist had to break the
news of the cost of zirconium to the excitable project head. It was $1,000 per
gram.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 196)


“The Navy at long last wanted the Nautilus to be built. It was, however, a
nuclear project, and so approval would also have to be granted by the AEC.
Fairly quickly, on May 1, 1948, the project had full approval and funding. On
August 2 Rickover collected his engineers from Oak Ridge and formed the
Nuclear Power Division of the Bureau of Ships. First contractor was
Westinghouse, receiving $830,000 to design the steam generator, a critical and
distinctive component of the pressurized water reactor. Rickover found the
command structure of the Navy with the AEC wrapped around it to be frustrating
and ponderous, and, in his high-strung opinion, the submarine program was
dragging. His solution was to have himself named Chief of the Naval Reactors
Branch of the AEC in February 1949. The move was bureaucratic artistry of the
highest form, making Rickover the first man in Washington to command two
different branches of government on the same project. He was able to write a
letter to himself, immediately dictate a reply, and receive full interagency
cooperation on all problems, big and small.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 196)


“On November 22, 1955, the Soviets drop-tested RDS-37, a staged fission-fusion
bomb, and ended another American monopoly.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 193)


“Performance exceeded all expectations, at nearly 1,000 times the power of the
bomb that had wiped out Hiroshima.” (Mahaffey, 2010, p. 192)


“Instead of collocating the fission and the fusion components, they should
separate them. Let the fission bomb go through the first stages of exploding
into a plasma ball, and use the shock from the explosion to compress and heat
the hydrogen isotopes into fusion. This idea would require modification, but
the key invention of a sequential staging of the explosion, from fission to
fusion, finally bumped the project forward. So was born one of history’s truly
unholy alliances, and of it came the Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb.” (Mahaffey,
2010, p. 192)


“held that uranium collected in anticlinal structures, as did oil. He, his
theory, his wife, and five children moved to a tar-paper shack near Cisco,
Utah. His only tool was a borrowed diamond drill, and he put it to vigorous
use. On July 6, 1952, Steen found the most massive uranium deposit known to
exist. […] The AEC never again wanted for uranium ore. In 1960, stockpiles
exceeded any projected needs, and the value of uranium dropped precipitously.”
(Mahaffey, 2010, p. 191)


“As the only legal buyer of uranium, the AEC was free to set the price, and it
set it artificially high. Uranium became more precious than gold, and an
article placed strategically in The Engineering and Mining Journal hit the
sweet spot, promising that the government would buy all the uranium that could
be found. Overnight, a uranium rush was created […]. One impoverished ex-oil
geologist, Charles A. Steen, lacked the funds necessary to buy a Geiger
counter, but he had some radical theories about where uranium lives.”
(Mahaffey, 2010, p. 190)