Another pro-nuclear blog – Some Truths of Things

A friend of mine sent an email describing a new blog titled Some Truths of Things. The earliest available post on the blog introduces a detailed computation of a wonderful new unit of radiation measure called the banana dose. (Hint, if you do not like math, you probably should avoid reading this particular post.)

The final conclusion is that living within 50 miles of an atomic power plant provides an average annual dose of just 0.916 banana units (where 1.0 is the dose provided by eating a single average sized banana.)

The only profile information available on the blog is that the author’s name is Luke. I found his full name (I will not post it here, just in case that was an accident) by following a link to a paper he is writing about Helen Caldicott’s Nuclear Power is Not The Answer. According to the front matter on that paper, Luke has an email address that leads me to believe that he is a grad student at the University of Melbourne in Australia. (The paper, by the way, is well worth a read if you have plenty of time and like academic papers. It is especially noteworthy for its discussion about pebble bed reactors.) Here is a teaser except from the paper:

In this document, I have gone over Caldicott’s book systematically, critically analyzing key arguments, and showing the many examples of gross misunder-standing of the physical basis for nuclear technology, the citation of source information of little or no scientific merit as scientific fact, with no critical analysis of this source material, and the confusing, misleading and inaccurate claims made within the book, with no credible references to support them. I will also demonstrate that surprisingly simple scientific derivations can show that many of Caldicott’s claims are simply factually untrue nonsense, rooted in junk pseudoscience.

I think Luke is going to provide us with another interesting contribution to the growing body of information about the current benefits and huge growth potential for atomic fission. Welcome to the world of pro-nuclear blogs, Luke.