The ideological Left is fond of accusing the Right of being “anti-science.”\u00a0 The evidence often\u00a0comes in the form of Exhibit A (climate denialism) and Exhibit B (Darwin denialism).\u00a0 True, these maladies are encountered more frequently on the Right than on the Left.\u00a0\u00a0As it happens, however, there are also\u00a0scientific allergies on the Left, and there is little question that they\u00a0have been a great deal more damaging than their conservative analogs.\u00a0 The best example is probably the Blank Slate debacle.\u00a0 In order to prop up leftist shibboleths, denial of the very existence of human nature was enforced for more than half a century.\u00a0 The effect on the behavioral sciences, and with them the self-knowledge critical to our very survival, was devastating.\u00a0 “Scientific” Marxism-Leninism is another obvious example.\u00a0 However, when it comes to scientific allergies, the Left’s irrational and often fanatical opposition to nuclear power may turn out to be the most damaging of all.<\/p>\n
Those who seek to alarm us about rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and yet reject the most effective technology for bringing them under control, are not serious.\u00a0 They are mere poseurs.\u00a0 Thanks to these anti-science attitudes on the Left, dozens of dirty, coal-fired power plants will be built in Germany alone to replace the baseload generating capacity once provided by nuclear reactors.\u00a0 The situation is no better in the U.S.\u00a0 Both countries have developed some of the most advanced, not to mention safest,\u00a0nuclear technologies known to man, and yet both, hamstrung by opposition coming from the Left of the political spectrum, have abdicated the responsibility to apply that knowledge.\u00a0 Instead, they are exporting it – to China.<\/p>\n
As I write this, we are helping China to build a novel type of reactor<\/a> that combines molten salt technology developed in the United States with a version of the “pebble” type fuel pioneered by the Germans.\u00a0 Approved in 2011, the original target completion date of 2015 has now slipped to 2020, but both goals would be out of the question in the byzantine regulatory atmosphere of the\u00a021st century United States.\u00a0 U.S. knowhow\u00a0will also be used to build\u00a0the novel “traveling wave” reactor design<\/a> favored by Bill Gates – also in China.\u00a0 The Chinese are also actively pursuing the high temperature gas-cooled reactor<\/a> (HTGR) technology that was proposed for the ill-fated Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP), further development of which was recently cancelled in the United States.<\/p>\n I certainly have nothing against China building advanced reactors using technology that was developed elsewhere.\u00a0 It’s good that the knowledge in question is being applied at least somewhere on the planet.\u00a0 However, I find it unfortunate that we no longer have the leadership, vision,\u00a0or political will to do so ourselves.\u00a0 It was not always so.\u00a0 The U.S. commissioned the world’s first nuclear powered submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus, in 1954, little more than a decade after the successful demonstration of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago.\u00a0 More than 50 experimental nuclear reactors were built at what is now Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in a period of about two decades stretching from the 50’s to the mid-70’s.\u00a0 None has been built since.\u00a0 The situation is similar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), site of the world’s first molten salt reactor.\u00a0 Instead of working, next generation\u00a0reactors, INL, ORNL, and the rest of the U.S. national laboratories now turn out only paper studies – gigantic mounds of them – in quantities that would probably stretch to the moon and back by now.\u00a0 The chances that any of them will ever be usefully applied in this country are slim and none.<\/p>\n The technologies in question are not mere incremental improvements over the conventional nuclear power plants that now produce almost all the world’s nuclear power.\u00a0 They have the demonstrated capacity to extract more than an order of magnitude more energy out of a given quantity of mined fuel material than conventional designs.\u00a0 They can burn the long-lived radioactive actinides and other hazardous isotopes produced in nuclear fission that represent the most dangerous types of radioactive waste, reducing the residual radioactivity from operation of a nuclear plant to a level less than that of the original uranium ore is less than 500 years – a far cry from the millions of years often cited by hysterical anti-nukers.\u00a0 Under the circumstances, it is worth taking note of where the opposition that stopped the development and application of these technologies in the past, and continues to do so today, is coming from.<\/p>\n The regulatory nightmare that has brought the continued development of these technologies in the United States to a virtual standstill is primarily the legacy of the “progressive” Left.\u00a0 The anti-nuclear zealots on that side of the political spectrum cling to bogus linear no-threshold models of radioactive hazard, grotesquely exaggerated horror stories about the supposed impossibility of dealing with nuclear waste, and a stubborn cluelessness about the dangers of the alternative coal and other fossil-fired technologies that their opposition to nuclear will inevitably continue to\u00a0promote in spite of all their strident denials.\u00a0 These are facts that it would be well to keep in mind the next time you hear the Left calling the Right “anti-science,” or, for that matter, the next time you hear them pontificating about their deep commitment to the fight against global warming.<\/p>\n