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I’m horrified by Parsons et al.'s suggestion. The nuclear reactors coming up to their planned retirement now were built around 1980 and designed at least a decade earlier. I have always been and continue to be a dedicated proponent of nuclear energy, but I want to see new reactors representing all the significant advances made in a full five decades of development. Of course I understand the political motivation behind the suggestion. All plans for new plants are bound to face fierce opposition while the existing ones have been silently standing there for decades without any smells or fumes and providing jobs and income for their communities. But their pressure vessels have already sustained four decades of neutron embrittlement which is long known to be far more severe then originally envisioned when planning their lifetime. Of course none of them is unsafe in an absolute sense, but neither are they as safe as expected for a plant being issued a new lease for operation in 2020.
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I shall miss David's valiant warriors scaling up to Jerusalem through the water pipes in the dead of night and opening its doors from within as I heard the gripping tale in the lower grade of grammar school, but alas, Grossman’s analysis has the ring of truth and would be hard to discredit.
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Chen et al.'s study is extremely well designed and convincing and still Striedter & Burley find and discuss possibly unaccounted-for confounders. This is in stark contrast to all the shoddy and superficial trials on human volunteers that are uncritically taken at face value.
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In the common public discourse all weather extremes are taken to be exceptional and sampling many places on all days of the year one is bound to find some. Lehmann et al. avoid this fallacy and employ a valid statistic of extremes – record values always rise, what else can they do? – to extract a trend if there is one. Also they do not look at warming itself, which is undisputed, but at adverse effects, which are. Their result has to be taken seriously.
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