I’ve been pro nuclear energy for some time. Over the past few years, it seems like most of Europe has given up on this venture (except the French – Vive la France!). I would say I don’t know why, but I have had enough god damned baby boomer conversation to know why. It is all residual terror from Chernobyl.
Seeing this book appear on the shelves some years ago was a bit uplifting. The title, which used to be a facebook group of the same name, translates to ‘The Lawyer of the Atom’: the subtitle ‘in defense of nuclear energy’. As if I wasn’t all in from that online, I found this lovely bit from the opening chapter:
Mi chiamo Luca Romano, ho trentaquattro anni, una laurea in Fisica e vivo in un paese di persone che spendono ogni anno otto milliardi di euro per consulti con astrologi, cartomanti, medium e fattucchiere. Bastarebbe questo a riassumere la risposta alla domanda <Perché lo fai?>
Trans: My name is Luca Romano, I am 34 years old with a degree in Physics and I live in a country of people who every year spend 8 billion euro on consultations with astrologists, [tarot] card readers, mediums and wizards. This is enough to summarize the answer to the question “why do you do it?”
Mr Romano is a skeptic, and my kind of skeptic at that. Which is to say a science based skeptic. The book tries to go over every possible argument you’ve heard against nuclear energy, and one by one debunk them. It talks about how Chernobyl was brought about more by soviet incompetence than dangers that would still be present in the technology today, how low the death count at Fukushima actually was, how dangerous fossil fuels are, how renewable energy just won’t make it on its own.
He does this with humor that may or may not hit if you aren’t Italian. Italy is the audience he was writing for, and at times some references are pretty culturally specific. Othertimes, I thought it might translate well. After reviewing all the out and out lies that were told by the media worldwide regarding the devastation at Fukushima, Romano quips.
Capite anche voi che queste non sono fake news: questa è letteratura di genere.
Trans: Understand that this is not Fake News: this is genre literature
The book was largely fun. My eyes did glaze over a bit during some of the scientific explanations. Romano does his best to walk the line between a rigorous explanation that is still written for the lay person. I am that lay person, and it wasn’t so much that I struggled as that i got to the point that I was willing to take his word for it. This isn’t epistemologically sound on my part, but that is something I have to accept about myself. The books on epistemology will follow.
I’ll end this on a quote I enjoyed:
Il guaio è che quante piu informazioni sono disponibili per confutare una convinzione, tanto piu le persone tendono ad arroccarsi, e questo accade perche nessuno, messo di fronte allo specchio, vuole vedere un idiota.
Trans: The trouble is that the more information available to refute a conviction, the more a person tends to harden themselves to it, and this is because no one, when put in front of a mirror, wants to see an idiot.
Failures in Polymathy 