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Page added on August 13, 2018
The Black Plague And Nuclear Energy
wanted to share an article with you today because it explains so darn well how investment markets work… and yet it has nothing ostensibly to do with investment markets.
The original can be found here.
The black plague, also known as the black death, is a disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. It enters the body through the skin and travels via the lymph system. The bacteria live in the digestive tracts of fleas. The fleas, of course, live off blood from a host, and when the fleas swallow the blood, it becomes infected with the bacteria. As the bacteria multiply inside the flea, an intestinal blockage forms, starving the parasite because nutrients cannot be absorbed. The flea vomits in an effort to clear the blockage, and since the flea is starving, it feeds voraciously. When the infected flea vomits the diseased blood into a bite site on a host animal or human, the host becomes infected with black plague.
The disease was once devastating, and the resulting death was horrible. There were actually three forms of the black plague – the bubonic form, the pneumonic form, and the septicemic form. Victims of the bubonic plague suffered painful swollen lymph nodes in the neck and the underarms, called buboes. They were also wracked with high fever, vomiting, pounding headaches, and gangrene. Some were so weak that they barely had the energy to swallow.
The pneumonic form was even more punishing. As the body tried to fight off the disease, large amounts of phlegm were produced. The victims had to constantly cough up sputum in an effort to breathe, and more than ninety-five percent of the time, the patient drowned in his own body fluids. The pneumonic form of the plague didn’t need rats or fleas to spread – it was an airborne bacterium spread by the coughs of infected individuals.
Septicemic black plague was a form of blood poisoning and had a mortality rate of one hundred percent. With this type of plague, the individual suffered from high fever and purple blotches on the skin. Fortunately, this deadliest form was also the rarest.
From the middle of the 1300s until the 1700s, the black plague terrorized much of Europe and parts of Asia. Most historians believe the plague was first brought to Europe on ships from Asia. The most likely culprit was the black rats that often foraged among the ships’ holds for food scraps. These were smaller relatives of the brown rats.
The initial outbreak of the plague in fourteenth-century Europe was the most virulent. In fact, much of the populations of England and France were decimated. In some parts of England the death toll was 50%. Some parts of France suffered an astounding loss of ninety percent of their populations.
Many modern readers assume that there was only one outbreak of the black plague, but there were actually several. In fact, it raged through Europe about once every generation until the beginning of the eighteenth century. One of the last major outbreaks occurred in England with the Great Plague of London, which took place in 1665-1666.
Interestingly, the fate of mankind was curiously linked to that of the common house cat. When the cat populations rose, the pandemic ebbed, and when the cat population plummeted, the black plague made a resurgence. Why?
Remember that the plague was spread by fleas that lived on rats. A viscious cycle kept the disease going. Infected fleas would bite a rat, and the rodent would become infected. Then other fleas biting the infected rat would become infected themselves. Once the host rat died of the plague, any fleas living on it would find themselves homeless and would go in search of a new host. Unfortunately, this often took the form of a human. When the sick infected fleas bit the human in order to feed, the human would become infected. So why didn’t the Europeans just keep plenty of cats around to kill the rats and thereby reduce the incidence of the plague? They had cats at the time. They were originally brought to Europe by the Romans, who had discovered the felines in Egypt. Keeping pet cats as mousers had become popular in Europe by the time of the first plague.
To fully answer that question, you need to understand the belief system of medieval Europe. Based on historical accounts and medieval art, people during this period were prone to many superstitions. The Catholic Church was the most powerful entity in Europe at the time, and the masses were consumed with the presence of evil and eradicating it in any form it might be believed to take. Because of their secretive nature and their ability to survive extraordinary circumstances, the general population came to fear cats as consorts of Satan. The innocent cats began to be killed by the thousands.
The cats ultimately got their revenge, of course. Since there were few felines left, the rat populations increased unchecked, and the plague grew even more widespread. You’d think that the humans would make the connection by this point, but instead, they made things even worse. They began to associate the plague’s new vigor with the cats and even with dogs. They believed that since both of these animals typically harbored fleas, they must be the cause of the plague. Subsequently, cats were outlawed in many parts of Europe, and huge numbers of cats and dogs were killed. In fact, at one point in the middle ages, there were barely any cats left in England at all.
Even though cat ownership was illegal in some regions, a few people kept their felines. Other people finally noticed that these cat owners often seemed to be immune to the black plague. Word spread quickly, and more observations of this phenomenon were noticed. This resulted in research, crude as it was during the time.
Eventually, it was decided that the rats, not the cats, were responsible for spreading the black plague. Then, of course, everyone wanted to own a cat or two. And since cats are prolific breeders, it didn’t take long for the demand to be satisfied. The laws which had been the cats’ death sentence were repealed. In many regions, a new law took its place – one that protected felines instead of banning them and almost causing their extinction in Europe.
When I read this I immediately thought about how we humans can latch onto beliefs that are utter nonsense and pursue those beliefs to our detriment.
I could list numerous market sectors that have gone through this sort of behaviour, though none seem to fit so aptly as the uranium sector today.
There, too, we have something largely misunderstood where nuclear energy has been treated like a cat during the plague, shunned, ridiculed, and ostracised, while in actual fact it’s likely a bigger part of the solution to our future energy needs than most realise. And THAT should definitely be on your radar.
I know, I know, I get it. Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl — all black death stuff. Babies with 3 heads and all that nasty stuff. Except, when looking across the energy spectrum, please realise it’s complete bollocks. It’s a superstition that nuclear energy is some disastrous genocidal killer. Here, take a look. 
You see, the problem with nuclear energy is the same problem with airline travel.
There are more folks afraid of flying than there are afraid of driving cars, which is silly since airline travel is in order of magnitude safer.
This is because when a plane goes down, hundreds of people die in one fell swoop. A lady on the telly with big hair, furrowed brow, and tears in her eyes will tell us all about the dead children. And then we get to go to bed with visions of us clutching our ankles while overhead luggage pinballs its way around the inside of the plane and we stare at the terrified faces of our loved ones who realise we’re not going to make it home ever again. And this makes us understandably averse to being put in any situation where we may end up clutching our ankles.
Yet there are fatal car crashes all the time.
Right now, in fact, people are meeting their end smashing their way into barriers, poles, or even having their Teslas suddenly and for no reason burst into flames or have autopilot send them into oncoming traffic (that is… if they’re silly enough to buy one of those deathtraps). But the truth is we’ll likely not even hear about it. It’s mundane, happens all the time and thus not considered newsworthy.
The other thing that happens with aircraft crashes is that after an accident the men in fluorescent coats descend on the scene of the accident, armed with plastic bags and notepads, which they scribble on furiously. They then go away and build these giant pressurised tin cans to be that much safer. They do this repeatedly, and not only when hundreds die but every time a plane does so much as hiccup during a flight. And so they’re darned safe.
Well, the same thing has been happening with nuclear power facilities. And that’s even though they’re still the safest form of base load energy we’ve got.
Something else that’s completely missed by the market right now is that believe it or not nukes account for roughly a quarter of the electricity demands for 16 countries. 
Energy is, and always will be, important. It also promises to become increasingly important as the global geopolitical environment continues fracturing (something we’ve been chronicling in these pages) leading countries.
And when I say countries, I mean governments attempting to secure their energy independence and supplies. Watch for it. It’s coming as assuredly as Christmas.
And while all of this gathers steam we’re likely to see the political class act like our ancestors did, realising that cats were the solution, not the problem. Just as nuclear power is the solution not the problem. 
– Chris
“What gets us excited and what gets us out of bed in the morning are the long-term fundamentals of the uranium market.” ‒ Brian Reilly, Minerals Council of Australia
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Liked this article? Then you’ll probably like my other missives on
this topic as well. Go here to access them (free of charge).
30 Comments on "The Black Plague And Nuclear Energy"
Cloggie on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 9:04 am
Somebody is reading your posts, Antius.
Btw who is “Chris”… you?
Antius on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 9:06 am
The figure titled ‘Deaths per TWh’ illustrates the situation perfectly. Studies have persistently shown that nuclear power is the safest form of energy that we have. Why?…
The WHO estimates that air pollution caused by fossil fuels causes 3 million deaths per year, worldwide. Radioactive pollution from Chernobyl is estimated to have caused perhaps 4,000 early deaths over 50 years.
So we would need something like 1000 Chernobyl nuclear meltdowns every year, to reach the same death rate from nuclear power as we tolerate from fossil fuel air pollution. That is more nuclear power reactors than presently exist on the planet! So even if every nuclear reactor in the world melted down without containment, the consequences would be less than 1 year of fossil fuel air pollution. Fossil fuel pollution is like living in a state of continuous nuclear meltdown. It is equivalent to having a Chernobyl type accident somewhere in the world every 8 hours.
The reality is that these plants are quite safe. Even old 1970s vintage PWRs have core damage frequency not greater than 1 in 10,000 years. Newer plants are orders of magnitude safer; with CDF 1 in 1million years or less.
Do the maths people. What is more scary in real terms; the potential for an occasional nuclear accident somewhere on the planet, or dying by the hundreds of millions from cold, hunger and a lack of clean water?
Antius on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 9:11 am
“Somebody is reading your posts, Antius.”
I doubt more than a handful of people frequent the comments section of these boards. It is more about articulating our thoughts than it is about getting heard. Another reason why the Bitch-fests on this board are even more pointless.
“Btw who is “Chris”… you?”
No. Just another guy that realises the completely obvious.
Antius on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 9:36 am
Interesting article by Euan Mearns. The present day cost escalation in nuclear power are a result of regulatory overburden that has pushed costs through the roof. In country’s where this didn’t occur, nuclear remains the cheapest for of generation.
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/The-Myth-Of-Expensive-Nuclear-Power.html
For those of you that can access Science Direct, here is the original article.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106
MASTERMIND on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 9:47 am
Clog
How dare you say my Uncle deserved to be shot down..He was a good man and helped save the world from the evil Hitler..
joe on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 9:51 am
If he was flying a plane in a war and trying to kill the opponents, that pretty much qualified him as a deserving target for his enemy.
MASTERMIND on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 10:04 am
Antius
Euan Mearns is a nut job climate denier..Energy matters with the red pill from the Matrix..(barf)..
Duncan Idaho on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 10:08 am
“Euan Mearns is a nut job climate denier.”
Yep, a accurate summary.
GregT on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 10:10 am
MM,
My uncle was shot down and killed in WW2, and he was 9 years older than my mother, who is old enough to be your great grandmother. Something isn’t quite jiving with your arithmetic.
Cloggie on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 11:28 am
“Something isn’t quite jiving with your arithmetic.”
Apneaman, Vancouver, 50-ish
Common TalmudTurk, give us that picture again of Carl Sagan or a quote of the favorit author of Ape, Ahmed.
Maniacal poster apneaman disappeared and at the same time maniacal poster millimind appeared. This time thundering about peakoil rather than climate change. Main intention in both cases posting ultrared social content.
Davy on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 11:53 am
Neder, give it a rest. Ape man is not mnm by a long shot. Show some intelligence and quit looking stupid like Asperger or bony Juan.
JuanP on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 12:18 pm
Delusional Davy “Neder, give it a rest. Ape man is not mnm by a long shot. Show some intelligence and quit looking stupid like Asperger or bony Juan.”
Cloggie, The board’s regulator, moderator, equalizer, registrar, and qualifier has spoken so you’d better listen! LOL!
You are such a pathetic fuck, Exceptionalist!
JuanP on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 12:22 pm
MM is obviously not what he pretends to be. I think he is lying about his age, education, employment history, and maybe race, too. I do think he is an American male because the kind of stupidity, incoherence, and insanity that he exhibits is almost exclusive of certain types of American males.
Strawman on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 12:23 pm
So, we max out on nuke power and… Run out of ore 20-30 years later. Sounds like a plan…
Antius on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 12:33 pm
Strawman, Let me introduce you to the Integral Fast Reactor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
The test phase was extremely successful. Had the Dems not cancelled it for ‘political reasons’ we would have commercial reactors by now.
Everything those people touch turns into shit, doesn’t it?
@davy on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 12:37 pm
boney juan, we know a few things about you. You are a stuck up rich playboy cunt living in the heart of decadence and wastefulness, Miami Beach. If you had an ounce of integrity you would not be living there. You have a lover named Boney Joe. You are an anti-American resident alien leach that should be deported. Your family does not want you back in your shithole country Uruguay so they keep you supplied with funds. You are suicidal and depressive and currently off your meds. You are a board troll that uses others names, puppeteers, and does denial of service type name disruption antics. The best description for you is an intellectually lacking fiend. You are a complete waste of space on our board.
Anonymouse1 on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 12:39 pm
Of course ‘mushmind’ is lying about all those things Juan. That is because ‘mushmind’ is[Spoiler Alert]…the exceptionlturd.
Antius on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 12:45 pm
An excellent chapter explaining why nuclear power went from being the cheapest source of electric power to one of the most expensive.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
GregT on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 1:17 pm
“You are a complete waste of space on our board.”
By “our”, the forum troll can only be referring to itself and all of it’s sock puppets.
Please, stop feeding the troll.
DavyZ on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 2:08 pm
Our forum group sensor enabler and anti-American Canadian scumbag speaks. If anybody is dirty and fiendish it is greggie. He plays these games like he is respectable and above the snide activity but he lives for it. From the moment greggie gets up he is trolling Americans. Probably his first thoughts are about how he will attack an American. Canadian anti-Americanism is this way. It is extreme and Virulent.
greggie’s last real contributing comment:
GregT on Wed, 8th Aug 2018 9:59 am
since then he has done nothing but troll and stir up discontent.
JuanP on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 3:05 pm
I see Delusional Davy has developed two new personalities, @ & Z. Not that it makes any difference. His insanity shines through no matter what he calls himself! You should probably create a new file to track your multiple personalities, too, Exceptionalist! What a sad fuck! Little wonder his mother refused to breastfeed him, his women left him, and his children won’t see or talk to him. Only the goats keep him company because they are fenced in! ROFLMFAO!
JuanP on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 3:12 pm
Congrats, Davy! Developing two new personalities in less than two hours is a new record for you! LOL!
Davy on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 3:33 pm
Boney Juan, you think your hacking antics can prevent me from posting but as you see I get around your stupid tricks. Why not just contribute intelligent comments and have aggressive debates. I don’t think you have it in you. There is not enough ideas in your little playboy mind. You like playing the social media trolling routine.
JuanP on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 4:14 pm
Delusional Davy “Boney Juan, you think your hacking antics can prevent me from posting but as you see I get around your stupid tricks.”
More lies from the board’s deranged Exceptionalist! What hacking are you talking about, goat fucker? Is it now my fault that you’ve lost track of your multiple personalities? You should do as I said and create a file on your computer to keep track of them. It is quite obvious that your feeble mind is having trouble with them. LOL! What a sad fuck you are! Go back to your goats, fool!
makati1 on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 6:02 pm
Davy is a sick joke on Amerika. If he and his sock puppets left this forum, maybe there could be some mature, intelligent exchange of ideas and views. But it will only happen if he is institutionalized and not allowed access to the internet. Or, if he goes postal.
Anonymouse1 on Mon, 13th Aug 2018 6:21 pm
We can only hope mak…….that he does (eventually) make a long overdue visit to a nice amerikan mental institution.
For his own well-being….of course.
Cloggie on Tue, 14th Aug 2018 2:43 am
The speed of an energy transition, historic examples:
France, nuclear: 25 years (1975-2000) 0-80%
Holland, natural gas: 10 years, sixties, 0-80%
anon on Tue, 14th Aug 2018 3:24 am
“deaths per unit power produced” is the single most beloved statistic of the nuke proponents. They use this to deflect or ignore all the other forms of harm that might be caused by their pet technology. How about ‘square miles of the earths surface rendered uninhabitable for millenia’ ?
how about we ask those people, every single one of them, to answer with a straight face, if they would live downstream of one when it was a 100% certainty that there would NOT be sufficient budget for maintenance, inspection, upkeep, decommissioning, waste storage, or cleanup. Because that’s where we’re heading. our civilization has wasted its wealth on iphones and holidays on the beach and new cars and mcmansions chock full of consumer garbage- but we’ve wasted it. Our civilization cannot afford the true cost of managing in the future our current nuclear legacy, much less any future nuclear deployments.
Go Speed Racer on Tue, 14th Aug 2018 5:24 am
What a bunch of dummies, they killed all their cats.
If the Europeans had lit more old tires on fire, the black smoke and soot would have
sickened the rats & fleas, and then they
wouldn’t have any more black plague.
Instead they would have black smoke.
That’s how they could have solved it.
Antius on Tue, 14th Aug 2018 8:19 am
Anon wrote: ‘“deaths per unit power produced” is the single most beloved statistic of the nuke proponents. They use this to deflect or ignore all the other forms of harm that might be caused by their pet technology. How about ‘square miles of the earths surface rendered uninhabitable for millenia’ ?’
Not a non-issue by any means, but you overstate the matter.
If you are unlucky enough to live close to a nuclear power plant that experiences a core melt accident, which is an unlikely event, there is always the possibility some amount of Caesium will be released into the atmosphere. This will tend to increase background radiation levels in areas around the plant, as we saw at Fukushima.
If you live on that land, the extra background radiation (i.e. radioactive pollution) will impose an additional health risk over time. Whilst that isn’t a good thing, how is it really any different to breathing polluted air in an urban area? The levels of risk are about the same, and they both do essentially the same thing in pushing up your lifetime risk of cancer and heart disease. The difference is that you need to be unlucky enough to have the accident in the first place before you experience the problems due to radiation, whereas living in a city; you are exposed to air pollution every day. Whether contaminated land is uninhabitable or not depends upon what risks you are prepared to tolerate and what risks the authorities will allow you to tolerate. At least one study that I have read would seem to indicate that excluding people from areas following nuclear accidents does not make sense, as the risk they take living there is no greater than that introduced by air pollution in cities.
By the way, the half-life of Cs-137 is 30 years. So in 30 years, the radiation will only be half the problem that it is now. In 60 years, only one quarter as much of a problem. In a millennia, no one will care at all.
Anon wrote: ‘how about we ask those people, every single one of them, to answer with a straight face, if they would live downstream of one when it was a 100% certainty that there would NOT be sufficient budget for maintenance, inspection, upkeep, decommissioning, waste storage, or cleanup.’
I already do, thanks to Britain’s inane attempts at developing nuclear weapons in the 1950s. Whilst it isn’t a complete non-issue, I don’t lay awake worrying about it. A new nuclear powerplant is being built a dozen miles from where I live. I am not worried at all. Older facilities like Sellafield are more of a concern, but again, not very high up on my list. What worries me most is the impending economic collapse, losing my job, home, maybe even starving to death. That is a real threat. There is a very high risk that it could happen soon. I am facing that risk because my country failed to develop a nuclear power industry that could replace the declining energy from fossil fuels, not because of the ones it did manage to build.
Anon wrote: ‘Because that’s where we’re heading. our civilization has wasted its wealth on iphones and holidays on the beach and new cars and mcmansions chock full of consumer garbage- but we’ve wasted it. Our civilization cannot afford the true cost of managing in the future our current nuclear legacy, much less any future nuclear deployments.’
All of the infrastructure we have built will become a burden on future generations if we fail to maintain it. If we fail to produce enough energy, people will die by the hundreds of millions. Nuclear power can help prevent that. Legacy plants are a much bigger burden than new plants will be. Decommissioning is expensive for much the same reason that everything nuclear is expensive – regulatory ratcheting. Bottom line is, decommissioning is about dismantling old buildings.