What made me think high-energy fuel could be as safe as rocks, anyway? Nuclear fission power plants. After all, UO2 is rock. Nuclear plants could safely make gasoline, and feed it to today's cars, and to future cars almost exactly like them. But this is incongruous ...

(snip*)

... So I mean to be at the public hearings regarding Ontario's new nuclear power development, wearing my "Nuclear Power: Yes Please" button.

... I won't be able to get there. Not without your help —

April 10, 2011 update: The Darlington hearings are now done. On March 26th the snake was there, but so was I, and so were numerous young people early in the afternoon. Having arrived late, I didn't speak until 5:30, when they had all left. My Nuclear Power: Yes Please button didn't arrive until the 28th, so no-one knew what I would say until I said it. It was something like,

I am a layman who is trying to promote nuclear production of motor fuel. For electricity production, I am in favour of the expansion of the Darlington station because it will use inexhaustible fuel that is currently very inexpensive, with no pollution, no waste worries, and, in particular, none of today’s real waste worry: global warming.

I was right to think I couldn't get there and back without help, but if you are one of four motorists whose names I didn't get, you did help. Thank you. Bicycling the whole way there and back would have been too much for me, but you reduced the part I had to do under my own power to about 70 percent.

Anyone who comes to this page, and is not one of those four, should still support my boron power research.

* It's a mismatch. The nuclear workers could protect themselves from the product by sending the gasoline-making energy through a conduit a few hundred metres to a few kilometres long, but what would protect the users? Gasoline is gasoline. Heavily taxed as usual, it would as usual provide governments a very comfortable chunk of their incomes, and as usual, each gigabuck of that income would require a few members of the public to die.

Governments also make money on deadly chemical fuels that are used to make electricity — especially natural gas. There, too, a billion or so in government income means someone must die. The nuclear electric enterprise has long been one of saving this person, and denying government the very large revenues his death might have brought, by burning nickels' worth of uranium rather than dollars' worth of gas.

So governments have long been of two minds about nuclear electricity. Is government fossil fuel revenue so lovely and necessary a thing that, in sufficient amounts, it justifies the death of a random innocent? It still won't do to just say that. What many find rewarding is, instead, to deny that nuclear power stations are lifesavers.

This might seem like a difficult lie, what with the devastating failures of fossil fuel installations in the recent Japanese earthquake. But it and the subsequent tsunami severely damaged Japan's Fukushima nuclear power stations, and while even the Japanese government admits no off-site harm resulted, other beneficiaries of fossil fuel taxation are not so conscientious.

So I mean to be at the Darlington hearings ...