Another Faux Vietnam Vet

The latest is Richard Blumenthal, a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Connecticutt. According to the Grey Lady, he claims he was in Vietnam, but was never there. Chalk up another one in the tradition of Tom Harkin and John Kerry with his Cambodia yarns.

Apparently Blumenthal laid it on pretty thick with lines like,

I served during the Vietnam era. I remember the taunts, the insults, sometimes even physical abuse.

I doubt he would have really experienced any of that even if he actually had been in Vietnam. If anecdotal evidence is any indication, I never experienced anything like it when I came back, nor did I ever hear any of my fellow soldiers complain of anything of the sort. Perhaps there were some isolated incidents, but I suspect the notion that we were all subjected to such widespread abuse is an historical myth.

Insty Finally Winds Down

According to a post on his blog yesterday,

I’ve also left a few scheduled posts, but don’t be fooled — if you’re looking for me, I’ll be trying to stay offline as much as possible, so email response will be something between slow and nonexistent. Sorry, but I need a break.

I was beginning to wonder how long he could keep it up without a rest. His productivity as a blogger over the years has been incredible, especially when you take into account his day job as a law professor, and all the other stuff he does in his “copious free time.” A stellar cast of blogosphere celebrities has taken his place for the time being, but I hope we don’t have to wait too long before he gets back in harness.

Obama for “Dictator”

Woody Allen suggests that Obama be appointed dictator for a few years so he can get things done without Republican interference. I personally would prefer Fielding Mellish.

Free Speech and “Tolerance” on the Internet

French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner had an op-ed in the New York Times on Friday entitled, “The Battle for the Internet.” (hattip Volokh Conspiracy)  Apparently it was conceived as a call for freedom of expression on the Internet, which Kouchner describes as the medium of an unprecedented “revolution in freedom of communication and freedom of expression.”  In fact, Kouchner’s notion of “freedom of expression” is somewhat constrained.  It doesn’t apply to people whose opinions do not bear a sufficient resemblance to his own. 

Kouchner does not keep us guessing about the type of people whose freedom of expression should be the subject of our particular solicitude.  In his own words,

For the oppressed peoples of the world, the Internet provides power beyond their wildest hopes. It is increasingly difficult to hide a public protest, an act of repression or a violation of human rights. In authoritarian and repressive countries, mobile telephones and the Internet have given citizens a critical means of expression, despite all the restrictions.

We should provide support to cyber-dissidents — the same support as other victims of political repression.

For those not familiar with current French political thought regarding the categories of people one can legitimately view as “victims of political repression,” I note in passing that they do not include Jews living in predominantly Moslem countries, Serbs in Kosovo, or Russians in Latvia.  But I digress.  Let us allow Mr. Kouchner to give a more comprehensive definition of those who, we must assume, are not so victimized.  In his words,

Extremist, racist and defamatory Web sites and blogs disseminate odious opinions in real time. They have made the Internet a weapon of war and hate. Web sites are attacked. Violent movements spread propaganda and false information.

I am not talking about absolute freedom, which opens the door to all sorts of abuses. Nobody is promoting that. I’m talking about real freedom, based on the principle of respecting human dignity and rights.

The battle of ideas has started between the advocates of a universal and open Internet — based on freedom of expression, tolerance and respect for privacy — against those who want to transform the Internet into a multitude of closed-off spaces that serve the purposes of repressive regimes, propaganda and fanaticism.

In other words, “freedom of expression” should not be extended to propagandists, fanatics, and promoters of “hate.”  That would be to embrace “absolute freedom of expression,” as opposed to ”real freedom of expression,” which should only be extended to those who are sufficiently “tolerant” to agree with Mr. Kouchner.  And how does one go about defending ”real freedom of expression?”  Why, by invoking the aid of ”international instruments,” presumably after the fashion of the UN.  Again, in Mr. Kouchner’s words,

We should create an international instrument for monitoring such commitments and for calling governments to task when they fail to live up to them.

No fewer than 180 countries meeting for the World Summit on the Information Society have acknowledged that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights applies fully to the Internet, especially Article 19, which establishes freedom of expression and opinion. And yet, some 50 countries fail to live up to their commitments.

We should create an international instrument for monitoring such commitments and for calling governments to task when they fail to live up to them.

In a word, then, we are to leave defense of “freedom of expression” to more or less the same people who entrusted defense of “women’s rights” to the theocratic rulers of Iran.  Good luck with that.

In response to Mr. Kouchner’s impassioned plea for “real” freedom of expression, I suggest that he take note of the fact that it has already been tried, with rather disheartening results.  Our Canadian neighbors implemented a version of it complete with a national version of his “international instrument for monitoring such commitments,” in the form of what they called the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC), throwing in a batch of clones at the provincial level for good measure.  It turned out that defense of “human rights” in Canada required the suppression of opinions that diverged from the prevailing “progressive” orthodoxy. 

Started back in the 1970′s, these organizations long had the good sense to limit their censorship to obscure conservatives, religious groups, unpopular and extreme political groups, and similar “violators of human rights” who lacked the name recognition and the wherewithal to fight back.  The CHRC prided itself on a 100% conviction rate in its vendettas against such malefactors, achieved via such dubious means as debarring truth as a defense, allowing hearsay evidence, and funding accusers but not defendants.  Eventually, however, they became “dizzy with success,” and started launching attacks on people who could actually defend themselves, such as conservative talk show host Mark Steyn, who occasionally sits in for Rush Limbaugh, the editors of Canada’s flagship Maclean’s magazine, and Ezra Levant, editor of the Western Standard.   Defend themselves they did, as can be seen, for example, here, here and here.  The mainstream media in Canada took note, belatedly realizing that their own collective freedom of expression was threatened, and not just that of the nameless small fry whose rights had been a matter of such singular indifference to them for 30 years and more.  They, too, began pushing back, and a host of Internet sites joined the fray, examples of which can be found here, here, here, and here.  Finally, assured that their backs were covered, even Canadian politicians rediscovered the value of freedom of speech.

Finally, confronted by forces it couldn’t intimidate, the CHRC backed down, in the familiar style of bullies whose bluff has been called.  The victory was a pyrrhic one, however.  It and its sub-bullies live on, and their existence will surely continue to have a dampening effect on the public discourse of anyone who might dare to disagree with them.  As Stefan Braun of the Winnipeg Free Press puts it,

Maclean’s, more mainstream and better-resourced than the niche Western Standard, survived its accusers. But to see any of this as a victory misses the point. If such wrongful accusations can be legally levelled to harass, hound and hurt even established media and renowned authors, can anyone really feel safe from rapacious censors, who may think to challenge popular wisdom or powerful censorship interests defending it?

What message is sent to malicious, or simply misguided, thought-accusers who think to silence them?

Thought persecution, not legal vindication, is the point. Legal vindication is evidence not of the absence of public harm from wrongful hate-speech complaints, but proof of its existence.

Steyn and Levant signify only the visible tip of a much larger chilling iceberg of public self-censorship lurking unspoken and unheard beneath…

The effects of Mr. Kouchner’s “real” freedom of expression are quite visible in Europe as well.  In the Netherlands, a major political party is threatened with blanket censorship in the trial of its leader, Geert Wilders, for daring to criticize Islam.  In the UK, high-handed bureaucrats banned popular US talk show host Michael Savage from entering the country, citing the now-familiar trumped up charges of “provoking criminal acts” and “inciting hatred.”  Once upon a time the country’s Independent Television Commission (ITC) even considered banning Foxnews for being “too opinionated.”  Apparently the commissioners failed to detect the irony of such a charge in the homeland of the BBC.

Europeans commonly refer to the First Amendment right to freedom of expression guaranteed to citizens of the United States as “radical” in comparison to their own “real” freedom.  How long we will remain “radical” in this respect is anybody’s guess.  Our latest nominee to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, has been quoted as saying, “Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.”  Predictably, one form of freedom of expression she feels bears an unacceptably high “societal cost” is “hate speech.”  Rest assured that “hate speech” will never include the torrent of obscene and violent abuse Sarah Palin has been subjected to since her candidacy for the Vice Presidency was announced.  Nevertheless, it is a highly flexible term, and can easily be construed to include any form of opposition to the prevailing orthodoxies.  Just ask the Canadians.

The Moralists Stagger On

Morality is a characteristic of human beings, and therefore, like every other characteristic of human beings, an evolved trait. Furthermore, the various physical features of the brain that contribute to moral behavior in modern humans evolved at different times in the distant past. At none of those times were human societies and groups organized into anything like the massive states, religious sects, political parties and international political organizations of today. The physical features in question evolved because they enhanced the likelihood that the individuals who possessed those traits and their offspring would survive. They exist for no other reason. There is no compelling reason whatsoever to expect that behavioral traits that evolved under conditions utterly different from the present will continue to enhance the likelihood of individual survival in the modern world, and certainly no reason to expect that any other identifiable purpose or goal can best be achieved by consistent application of some version of morality. We act morally because we are compelled to do so by our nature, and because there is no alternative to morality for regulating our day to day interactions with other human beings. Under the circumstances we make a virtue out of necessity by imagining there is a “true” or “legitimate” morality existing outside the realm of the mere expression of behavioral traits hardwired in the brain. In fact, there is not, and cannot be any “true” or “legitimate” morality. When we consider the nature of and reason for the existence of moral behavior in human beings, particularly in the light of recent advances in our understanding of the brain, that conclusion is obvious.

In spite of that, legions of moral philosophers continue their quest for the holy grail of a true morality, as they did in the days of Kant, and the days of Aristotle, and, in fact, since time immemorial. Logically, what they are attempting is absurd, yet they stagger on as before, clutching their tomes of moral philosophy. Many of them have accepted the truth, now becoming difficult to ignore in the light of recent advances in neuroscience, that morality is an evolved trait. Assuming that it is, then rationally, one is forced to the conclusion that all the musings of the old philosophers about what is “really” good are irrelevant except as historical curiosities. For all that, the deontologists, consequentialists, and other “experts” in ethics of every stripe continue their pontifications as if nothing had changed. One reads their papers, couched in the jargon of their trade, published by the score in scholarly journals with imposing reputations as if they were entirely serious, and wonders at the hubris of human beings in our belief that we are an intelligent species.

Of National Debts and Train Wrecks

One hears much hand wringing of late about the national debt, and the catastrophe it portends unless we bring it under control. Everyone has an opinion about it, but very few seem to actually understand what it is, or the extent to which it is really out of control, or even unprecedented. Based on the recent data point represented by the experience of Greece, we can safely conclude that excessive debt is potentially problematic. The trick is in determining whether, as the prophets of doom would have it, the particular train we are riding will encounter a brick wall around the next bend, or will continue to wheeze along as before for the foreseeable future.

Certainly, the train wreck hasn’t happened as quickly as some of the Jeremiahs expected. Paul Krugman, for example, predicted runaway interest rates and hemorrhaging inflation as long ago as 2003, in the expectation that the government would try to print its way out of the problem. The printing presses have been busy enough, but so far we’ve been spared a repeat of the Weimar Republic in 1923. Of course, the New York Times’ nobel laureate may yet be vindicated, but we’re not there yet.

If you try to get a handle on the problem, you soon realize just how slippery it really is. Take, for example, one of the more commonly used diagnostics in the field, public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product, or GDP. According to the CIA, in 2009 the figure for the United States was 52.9%. This compared with 192.1% for Japan, the developed country at the top of the list. The current interest rate for home mortgages in Japan is just over 2%. The reason often given for such apparently counterintuitive facts is that Japanese citizens save more than their US counterparts. It would seem, however, that it is possible for a nation to carry a much higher public debt than the United States and still not suffer exploding interest rates.

There are often great disparities in the numbers one sees bandied about on the Internet, even on pages that quote the same source. Economicshelp.org, for example, quoting the CIA figures, gives the “national” debt of Japan as the same 192.1% cited above, but lists the United States at a mere 39.7%. The same site, however, pegs the “gross” debt of the United States, which includes such things as internal pension and social security obligations, at 90.8%. According to usgovernmentspending.com, which lists the numbers going all the way back to 1792, that number has now risen to 94.27% compared to a historical post-war maximum of 121.25% in 1946. Checking these numbers at Wikipedia, it appears that the 39.7% number was taken from the CIA list for 2008, not 2009. The comparable number reported by the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation for the same year was 70%, and the International Monetary Fund had it at 61.5%. Pick a number, any number.

Moving right along, the usually conservative Washington Times projects a public debt vs. GDP of 90% a decade from now in the year 2020. That still looks positively rosy compared to Japan’s current rate of more than twice that amount. On the other hand, we are told that Spain will soon follow Greece into the abyss, but the CIA put its public debt in 2009 at 50%, more than 2% less than that of the US.

Obviously, we are comparing apples and oranges here. For example, how does one roll the combined debts of the States of the United States into the numbers so that they can be compared with the debts of the Departments of France or the Lands of Germany? How does one compare the internal debt of the US to its Social Security trust fund to its Japanese equivalent?

All these obscure numbers and incoherent outcomes are fertile ground for alarmists of every stripe with ideological axes to grind. Sometimes the results are amusing. For example, in a recent article that appeared in the leftist German Spiegel magazine, Marc Pitzke, who specializes in Amerika bashing, seemed to be channeling conservative talk show host Sean Hannity. Their messages are identical; the US debt is out of control and we face imminent disaster. Pitzke trots out the usual fare about the recent growth in the deficit one usually hears from such odd bedfellows as Hannity and Limbaugh, but is short on numbers that make any rational comparison between the United States and Europe. According to the closest attempt to such a comparison I could find,

Europe’s national debt seems positively harmless in comparison to the USA. The total indebtedness of the Euro-zone in 2009 amounted to around seven trillion Euros, just 70 percent of the American amount.

Pitzke doesn’t explain why the US debt is a cause for hysteria but an amount 70% as great is “harmless,” nor does he elaborate on the fact that the public debts of Italy, France, Germany and the UK, the four biggest economies in the Euro-zone were 115%, 79.7%, 77.2% and 68.5% of their GDP’s, respectively, in 2009, compared to 52.9% for the US.

And the upshot of the sport? I suppose that we can keep muddling along as we are for quite some time before the “Desasters, Debakels, and Katastrophes” that Pitzke and the editors of Der Spiegel so eagerly hope will be our lot finally overtake us. I certainly don’t find the situation attractive, but there you have it. To a large extent, a modern economy is a con-game. When the suckers lose confidence, the train will hit the wall. When that will happen is anybody’s guess.

Of Democrats, Republicans, and the Liquidation of Liberty

The values of the Enlightenment can be summed up in one word; Liberty. The term includes freedom of thought and freedom of action, the latter freedom precluding only acts that physically harm others. The American Revolution represented a remarkable and, it would seem, historically anomalous victory of Liberty. Liberty is no more a good in itself than any other human value. I must admit, however, that I have an emotional attachment to it, and will regret its passing for what one might call sentimental reasons. In fact, we may be witnessing its demise.

Both of the great political parties in the United States embrace Liberty as a slogan. Both promote policies that assume its liquidation. The Democrats promote the cancerous expansion of state power. As the greatest and most consistent proponent of Liberty among our founding fathers, Thomas Paine, put it, “That government is best which governs least,” and “There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” Today, the Democrats represent the polar opposite of his point of view regarding government. In an earlier post, I quoted Benjamin Franklin’s response to a scornful attack on the American Revolution in a letter from some of our British enemies:

The weight, therefore, of an independent empire, which you seem certain of our inability to bear, will not be so great as you imagine; the expense of our civil government we have always borne, and can easily bear, because it is small. A virtuous and laborious people may be cheaply governed, determining, as we do, to have no offices of profit, nor any sinecures, or useless appointments, so common in ancient or corrupted states. We can govern ourselves a year for the sum you pay in a single department, for what one jobbing contractor, by the favour of a minister, can cheat you out of in a single article.

Today, the Democrats are but the latter day incarnation of the evil Franklin and Paine recognized so clearly.

As for the Republicans, never has a party brayed the word “Liberty” so loudly while so actively subverting it in practice. They demand torture, imprisonment without trial, and punishment without due process of law for anyone they choose to call a terrorist, all in the name of “security.” When it comes to freedom of conscience, they have become the mirror images of the British Tories who were the great enemies of our Revolution. As I write this, their demands for the liquidation of that freedom are becoming ever more explicit. Consider, for example, these words in the latest platform of the Republican Party in the state of Maine:

Reassert the principle that “Freedom of Religion” does not mean “freedom from religion.”

As if to punctuate the absurdity of this remarkable version of “Freedom of Religion,” the authors of the Maine platform actually quote Jefferson in the same document.  If ever a man was thoroughly and diametrically opposed to everything today’s Republicans stand for in matters of religion, it was Jefferson. 

It may be that Liberty can only exist in a state of unstable equilibrium in human societies. If so, it had a good run in America.  To the extent that I experienced it, I count myself fortunate.

Thomas Paine

Hume on Morality

In 1729 the French Roman Catholic priest Jean Meslier left behind a Testament begging the pardon of his flock for the falsehoods he had been forced to teach during his life. It systematically and brilliantly exploded the myths of organized religion and demolished the notion of a God. I’m sure similar thoughts have occurred to countless human beings through the ages, but I have never seen them set forth so simply, forcefully, and thoroughly as in Meslier’s Testament, later somewhat incongruously christened, “Superstition in all Ages.” I personally rejected religious belief at an early age, and many years later found that not a single one of my reasons for doing so was missing from the pages of the Testament. Meslier did not require Darwin and his theories to reject religious belief. He simply recognized truths that should be obvious to any intelligent human being and set them down. Voltaire complained that Meslier wrote “in the style of a carriage horse,” but if the Testament was not elegantly written, it was simple, logical, and understandable. Anyone who wants to know the reasons I don’t believe in a supernatural being will find every one of them of any significance in its pages.

What Meslier wrote regarding religion is reminiscent of what another of his great contemporaries wrote regarding morality and human nature. I refer to the philosopher and historian, David Hume. Through the power of his logic, Hume grasped a truth that a whole generation of behaviorist psychologists denied, and that has only recently been vindicated thanks in large part to the development of powerful new tools that have enabled us to peer deep into the working brain. In Book III of his “A Treatise of Human Nature,” published in 1740, Hume set forth the reasons for his conclusions that morality has no independent existence of its own, cannot possibly be merely the result of culture and education alone, and has its roots in human nature. Quoting from the book:

…nothing can be more certain, than that it is not any relation of ideas, which gives us this concern (a sense of justice), but our impressions and sentiments, without which everything in nature is perfectly indifferent to us, and can never in the least affect us. The sense of justice, therefore, is not founded on our ideas, but on our impressions.

Since morals, therefore, have an influence on the actions and affections, it follows, that they cannot be derived from reason; and that becaquse reason along, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

Reason is wholly inactive, and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals.

If morality had naturally no influence on human passions and actions, ’twere in vain to take such pains to inculcate it; and nothing would be more fruitless than that multitude of rules and precepts, with which all moralists abound.

The utmost politicians can perform is to extend the natural sentiments beyond their original bounds; but still nature must furnish the materials, and give us some notion of moral distinctions.

Obviously, some of these conclusions are based on logical arguments set forth in the earlier books, as are Humes idiosyncratic definitions of terms such as “impressions” and “ideas.”  I heartily recommend that anyone interested in the development of these ideas read the whole book.  However, the point is that one of the greatest thinkers our species has produced didn’t require Darwin and fMRI brain scanners to realize that morality has its roots in human nature, and that it has no existence of its own independent of the human mind.  Now, nearly 300 years later, as attested by a growing flood of books on hard-wired behavior and evolutionary psychology, it’s finally starting to dawn on the scientific establishment that maybe Hume had it right all along.  I suspect the great man may have found it comical that the people who are writing these books are often the same Don Quixotes who continue to earnestly chase that gaudy imaginery butterfly, the good-in-itself.  After all, if their books prove anything, it is, as Hume himself so unequivocably pointed out, that the butterfly doesn’t exist.  Still, let us be optimistic.  One step forward is better than none.

David Hume

Of Environmentalists Crying Wolf

Another day, another UN report. It’s an old familiar tune: The world’s eco-systems are at risk of “rapid degradation and collapse.” Unless “swift, radical and creative action” is taken “massive further loss is increasingly likely.” Wolf! Wolf!

The scary thing is that, just like in the fable, the wolf really is out there. With the world’s population nearing 7 billion and counting, he will eventually turn up at our doorstep in one form or another. No doubt when he does, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity will cry “wolf!” once again, but no one will listen. They will have heard it all too many times before. For that matter, in a world of nanny states, all up to their ears in debt, what could anyone do about it? Print more money, perhaps? It may be that the only really effective solution will be to launch World War III, but that doesn’t seem like a very attractive option.

Japan Restarts the Monju Fast Breeder Reactor

It’s encouraging to learn that Japan has decided to restart its Monju fast breeder reactor. Among other things it will supply electricity to many Japanese households without releasing greenhouse gases in the process. If global warming is really a terrible threat to all mankind, one would think we would be building such energy sources as quickly as possible. One would, however, be wrong.

For global warming alarmists, the pose is everything and the reality nothing. You can tell because they have no interest in solutions to the problem that happen to be unfashionable. Fast breeder reactors are an excellent example. They produce electricity without releasing greenhouse gases, and without releasing the particulates that kill tens of thousands of people every year, while representing a smaller radioactive hazard than coal fired plants. In that respect the pathologically pious saviors of the environment are more or less as irrational as our military. After all, the Lone Ranger only shot silver bullets. They shoot depleted uranium bullets that are worth their weight in gold as potential sources of energy. Allow me to explain.

Imagine dropping an iron ball into a deep well. What happens when it hits the bottom? It releases energy, right?  If the bottom of the well were a sheet of glass, that energy would probably cause it to shatter.  The ball releases the energy because it has been accelerated by a force. In this case, it is the force of gravity. However, there are other forces in nature. One of them is the strong nuclear force. It is vastly more powerful than gravity, but is only effective at distances on the order of the size of an atomic nucleus. At that distance, however, when an “iron ball” in the form of a neutron happens along, it can make the nucleus of a heavy element such as uranium look like a very deep well indeed. Just like a real iron ball, when the neutron falls into the well, it releases energy. If you think of the nucleus as a drop of water, that energy can cause the drop to start jiggling and stretching, just like a real drop. If the neutron releases enough energy, it can even cause the “drop of water” to break into two, smaller drops, releasing more neutrons in the process. That’s what happens in nuclear fission. The neutrons released in the process can drop into other “wells,” resulting in more fission, leading to a self-sustaining chain reaction, which can be used in controlled form to power a reactor, or in uncontrolled form to cause an atomic explosion.

When a neutron falls into a nuclear well, the energy released is only large enough to actually split certain very heavy atoms.  One of them is uranium 235, or U235 for short, which occurs in nature as 0.7% of natural uranium.  The rest is mainly uranium 238, which generally doesn’t split unless the neutron is going very fast to begin with, and therefore has some of its own energy to contribute when it falls into the well.  Another of the “fissile” heavy atoms that can split even when a slow neutron falls into its well is plutonium 239.  It can also be used to power nuclear reactors.  It doesn’t occur in any significant amounts in nature.  However, it is produced in nuclear reactors.  Interestingly enough, the “raw material” for its production is the  U238 which makes up the lion’s share of natural uranium.  When a neutron falls into a U238 “well,” the nucleus usually doesn’t split, but can capture the neutron, becoming U239.  This nucleus then releases an electron, resulting in its transmutation into neptunium 239. The neptunium nucleus, in turn, releases another electron, leaving Pu239. 

Now, if we’ve produced Pu239, and Pu239 is the fuel for nuclear reactors, we should simply be able to keep the reactor running, gradually converting the U238 to Pu239 and “burning” it right along with the naturally occurring U235, right?  Wrong!  In order to change to Pu239, U238 has to capture a neutron, but neutrons are what’s necessary to keep the nuclear chain reaction going.  Take away too many neutrons and the chain reaction stops, shutting down the reactor.  That’s where “fast breeders” come in.

Recall that, if the neutron that falls into the well is going very fast, then it can add a substantial amount of its own energy to that which is released when it falls to the bottom of the nuclear well.  In some cases that can cause even U238 to split, or fission.  More importantly, however, when such a fast neutron causes an atom of “fissile” material, such as U235 or Pu239, to split, the number of neutrons released in the process goes up.  If enough extra neutrons are released, the chain reaction can keep going even if many of them are captured by U238 to produce Pu239.  This is what makes it possible for a fast breeder reactor to produce more fuel than it consumes.  In the process, it gives us access to the massive amounts of energy locked away in the U238.  Instead of wastefully burning up the U235 in natural uranium and throwing away the rest by, say, shooting it out of gatling guns, we can now burn a large proportion of the U238 as well. 

Under the circumstances, does it make much sense for the military to be turning this potentially invaluable material into projectiles?  Apart from being a grotesque waste of a potentially valuable resource, it also releases radiation into the environment.  Granted, the amount of radiation will be very low.  It takes over four billion years for half of the atoms in a chunk of U238 to decay, and since there are many other natural sources of radiation in the environment, it is generally difficult to detect its presence above the background noise.  That fact, however, has hardly prevented legions of freeloaders and their professionally virtuous advocates from pretending that any number of ills from hangnails to heart disease are all directly caused by that radiation, and getting gullible politicians to believe it.  Apart from the waste, is it worth the grief?  I think not.

If fast breeder reactors can vastly increase the amount of energy available from the limited quantities of uranium available to us, what is the point of building more conventional reactors that waste most of the available fuel?  If global warming is really such a terrible threat to mankind, and the environmental alarmists are really more concerned about actually doing something to address the threat than in striking heroic poses from the moral high ground and pretending to do something about it, why aren’t they on board as well?  Whatever the severity of the threat of global warming, fast breeder reactors, along with solar, wind, hydroelectric, and other sources of energy that do not emit greenhouse gases could substantially end that threat.  Why, then, aren’t we building them?

Japan's Monju Fast Breeder