Category Archives: Mind and Brain

Nuclear, The Story Not Told

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Two numbers.

Hydro: 1.30 deaths per terawatt-hour of energy generated.
Nuclear: 0.03.

I spent thirty years in power electronics and systems engineering. I’m used to evaluating risk from data. When I first looked at those two numbers sitting side by side in the same table, I had to read them twice. Then I went looking for where the data came from, who had reviewed it, and whether anyone had poked holes in it. Nobody had. The methodology is consistent across multiple independent sources, and the numbers have held for years.

The question that’s stuck with me since is a simple one: why does one of those numbers drive policy, and the other one barely gets mentioned?

That’s not a rhetorical question. It has an answer. And the answer is worth understanding, because the same mechanism is almost certainly operating right now on something else entirely.

August 1975

Henan Province, China. Typhoon Nina hits a cold front and drops roughly a year’s worth of rain in 24 hours. The Banqiao dam, built to handle a so-called thousand-year flood, gets overtopped. Sluice gates are partially blocked by sediment. The dam fails. Then 62 downstream reservoirs fail in sequence.

A wall of water six meters high and ten kilometers wide moves down that valley at close to 50 kilometers an hour.

Direct deaths: approximately 26,000. Total deaths, once you account for the famine and disease that followed the destruction of the regional water supply and agricultural system: somewhere between 171,000 and 230,000 people. The Chinese government suppressed the numbers for decades. Most people in the West have never heard of Banqiao.

Nobody stopped building dams.

No global regulatory freeze. No decades-long moratorium on new hydroelectric construction. Banqiao killed more people than every nuclear incident in history combined, and the policy response was essentially nothing.

Hold that thought.

Nuclear’s Actual Record

Three events define public perception of nuclear power.

Three Mile Island, 1979. Partial meltdown. Serious incident. Zero direct deaths. Peer-reviewed studies found no measurable increase in cancer incidence in the surrounding population. The containment system worked.

The public response: mass panic. The regulatory response: construction permits frozen across the United States. No new nuclear plant ordered after 1974 was completed for decades.

Chernobyl, 1986. A genuinely catastrophic failure of a reactor design with known safety flaws, operated outside its safety envelope during a test. Peer-reviewed death toll: approximately 433. That number gets reported in popular media as tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands. The peer-reviewed literature does not support those figures.

Fukushima, 2011. This one needs context. A magnitude 9 earthquake and a 15-meter tsunami killed approximately 20,000 people directly and destroyed the regional infrastructure. The nuclear plant failure was a knock-on of that disaster, not a standalone event. Hospitals were already overwhelmed, supply chains already broken, shelters already strained.

That context matters, and it makes what follows more striking, not less.

Deaths from radiation: zero. UNSCEAR and the WHO both confirm no member of the public or plant worker died from acute radiation exposure.

Deaths from the evacuation: 2,313. Officially certified by the Japanese Reconstruction Agency. Cohort studies compared evacuated groups against matched groups in the same disaster zone who were not subject to the nuclear evacuation order. The excess mortality still tracks to the evacuation specifically, not the general disaster. Patients pulled off ventilators and loaded onto buses. Elderly evacuees in unheated gymnasiums in March without their cardiac medications. Long-term displacement that drove a documented spike in strokes, heart attacks, and suicides.

The evacuation killed 2,313 people. The radiation killed none.

Germany’s response: shut down all nuclear plants within twelve months.

The Thing Nobody Talks About

If nuclear is the thing people are afraid of, coal is the thing nobody discusses.

Coal sits at 24.62 deaths per terawatt-hour. That’s not an accident rate. That’s a baseline. It runs every hour the plant is operating, in every community downwind, invisibly.

The mechanism is particulate matter, specifically PM2.5. Fine particles that bypass your lung filtration and enter the bloodstream. They drive ischemic heart disease, stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The people dying from this don’t die in a dramatic event. They die over years, and the death certificate says heart disease, not power plant.

In the United States alone, between 1999 and 2020, 460,000 deaths were directly attributed to coal particulate emissions. That’s a peer-reviewed figure from a study published in Science in 2023, based on Medicare records.

Globally, fossil fuel air pollution causes an estimated 5.13 million excess deaths per year.

No headlines. No evacuation zone. No footage. No panel of experts. It just happens, continuously, and we have decided as a society that this is acceptable.

Why the Data Didn’t Matter

This is the part worth sitting with.

The deaths-per-TWh data has been available and consistent for a long time. The numbers aren’t new. So why did the policy response to nuclear go one way and the response to everything else go another?

The answer isn’t scientific illiteracy, though that plays a part. The answer is how human risk perception actually works, and specifically a category psychologists call dread risk.

Before applying it to nuclear, try it somewhere closer to home.

Roughly 40,000 people die in car accidents in the United States every year. Commercial aviation kills, in a typical year, somewhere between zero and a few dozen. Per mile traveled, you are orders of magnitude more likely to die in a car than on a plane. Most people know this, at least abstractly. And yet a significant portion of the population is afraid to fly and gets in the car without a second thought.

That’s not stupidity. That’s a predictable failure mode of the human nervous system. Dying in a plane crash feels uncontrollable, invisible in its causes, and catastrophic in its image. Dying in a car feels like something that happens to other people who weren’t paying attention. The statistics are not what’s driving the fear response. The characteristics of the event are.

Psychologists have a precise vocabulary for this. The factors that amplify perceived risk include: whether exposure is voluntary or involuntary, whether the mechanism is visible or invisible, whether effects are immediate or delayed, and whether the hazard carries prior cultural associations with catastrophe. Score high on those dimensions and people will treat a low-probability event as an existential threat. Score low, and they’ll accept a high-probability harm without complaint.

Nuclear hits every trigger. Radiation is invisible. Exposure is involuntary. The effects are delayed. And the word “nuclear” has carried the weight of Hiroshima and Nagasaki since 1945. Thirty years of Cold War civil defense films, fallout shelter drills, and duck-and-cover exercises had done their work long before Three Mile Island. The public was primed.

Coal has none of that. It kills more people per unit of energy than any other source in widespread use. It kills them slowly, distributed across populations, through mechanisms that show up on death certificates as heart disease and stroke. There is no “coal incident” that preempts the evening news. So coal never triggered the dread response. It just kept running.

Here’s where it gets interesting from a broader perspective. Once you understand that nuclear had a unique set of psychological vulnerabilities, you also understand that those vulnerabilities were predictable. And predictable vulnerabilities are usable ones.

You didn’t need to fabricate data to keep nuclear from expanding. You didn’t need to lie about the death toll or invent risks that didn’t exist. You just needed to keep the fear operational. Any outcome you wanted from that situation, whether it was energy policy, geopolitical competition, protection of existing energy assets, or genuine environmental concern, ran through the same lever. The mechanism did the work regardless of the motive behind it.

That’s how you get a policy response that froze an industry after an incident with zero deaths, while an energy source that kills hundreds of thousands of people a year kept operating without comment.

The data didn’t change the policy because the data was never the driver of the policy. The fear was the driver, weaponized by a lot of different actors. And fear, once well-established in a culture, doesn’t need new information to sustain itself.

What It Cost

After Three Mile Island, the NRC froze construction permits and shifted to an adversarial licensing posture. Plants that were 80% complete had to be redesigned to meet new rules written after they broke ground. The rules kept changing. Cable separation distances. Concrete specifications. Redundant backup systems. Each rule issued as a response to perceived risk, none ever rolled back.

The industry has a name for it: the regulatory ratchet. Rules only move in one direction.

The result: construction timelines doubled. Overnight capital costs increased by over 200%. An industry that had been commercially viable became financially impossible.

One example makes it concrete.

The Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, New York. Construction started in 1973. The original cost estimate was $75 million. The plant was completed in 1984 at a final cost of $6 billion. The regulatory environment had changed so many times during construction that the finished plant was essentially built twice. After completion, the plant ran a single low-power test. It never delivered commercial electricity to a single home. In 1989, Long Island Lighting Company transferred ownership to New York State for one dollar. The plant was decommissioned.

Zero deaths at Three Mile Island. The containment worked. The response was to make nuclear power economically unbuildable for the next forty years, and to leave a completed $6 billion power plant sitting idle until it could be taken apart.

The Question the Data Left Open

The engineering question was answered a long time ago. Deaths per terawatt-hour is a clean metric. The data is consistent across multiple independent methodologies. Nuclear kills fewer people per unit of energy than any fossil fuel, and roughly the same as wind and solar. Hydro sits at 1.30, driven almost entirely by a single dam failure in 1975 that most people in the West have never heard of.

The question the data leaves open is not whether nuclear is dangerous. The data settled that. The question is why the data didn’t matter, what it cost us that it didn’t, and whether you can now look at any other technology or industry and spot the same pattern running.

Find something that scores high on the dread risk dimensions. Invisible mechanism. Involuntary exposure. Delayed effects. Prior cultural associations with catastrophe. Then look at what the data actually says about it versus what the policy response has been.

The mechanism is still running. The only variable is what it’s pointed at today.

Here is the file

nuclear_video_slidesDownload

M.A. Harris is a systems and mechanical engineer with 30 years in power electronics and a particular interest in how engineering data interacts with public policy. He writes hard science fiction as M.A. Harris and runs The Unretired Engineer on YouTube.

📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Scifiengineer-09
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-a-harris
📚 Published works (M.A. Harris): https://www.amazon.com/author/m-a-harris

The Why-Shaped Itch

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From cave walls to the cosmos: how humans built the One out of questions they couldn’t stop asking

Philosophy | May 2026

Intelligence is based in memory, without why they are useless. The moment you can ask why, you will, and you’ll keep asking until you hit a wall the evidence can’t get you past. That wall is where religion lives.

This isn’t a weakness. The why-drive is the engine behind every model humans build of the world. It starts with fire and weather and then, inevitably, it turns to the question behind all questions: what started this?

Vocabulary

Most discussions of God get tangled before they start because people use the same word to mean very different things. Here’s the map I work with:

  • The Origin — the start of everything, defined as an event. No feeling of intention behind it.
  • The Final Cause — which is to say, first cause, a step between the Origin and the Absolute. Still largely intentionless, but there’s a tint of something.
  • The Absolute — Less an event than an impersonal creative condition.
  • The One — the Absolute plus intent. This is a matter of faith, not evidence. It cannot be known from what we observe.
  • God — the personification of the origin of all we perceive. The One given a face and a relationship with humanity.
  • god (lower case) — a referent to one of many deities in a system where there is no single final origin.

On gender: rendering God as he or she assumes things that aren’t in evidence and are arguably contra-indicated by the concept itself. A creator might seem more female if you think in terms of procreation, more male or neuter from a philosophical standpoint. Neither is satisfying unless you set out from an assumed initial condition, personification is a human need.

Beginning

Animism came first — scratching the why-itch into a set of beliefs that could be shared across a tribe. It works at small scale. As culture complexifies, you get gods: local, specific, squabbling. Then philosophy pushes further back, past the gods, toward a single origin, and you start to get God.

The Hellenistic world shows this arc clearly. It started with gods, evolved philosophy that defined the absolute origin, and from there derived a concept of God. That Hellenistic concept of the One then wrapped around evolved Judaism — with its apocalyptic messianic tradition — and produced Christianity. Islam followed, melding tribal Arabian religion with Judaism and Christianity into something that collapsed individual conscience into a tribal collective. That’s the source of its strength but a reason that it’s historically been a threat to neighboring structures.

Egypt started a similar philosophical evolution and then, probably due to the shaping effect of Nile Valley culture on its social structure, devolved back to gods. The environment bends the theology.

Consciousness

Even extremely simple worms react to stimulation in idiosyncratic ways, suggesting some differentiation in even minimal nervous systems. Single-cell organisms show behavioral differentiation that might indicate some level of something. Ants recognize themselves in a mirror and try to remove marks that would get them attacked at the nest entrance.

Does only self-consciousness constitute mind? Does consciousness without self-consciousness exist? These are thoughts we struggle with as we look at the evidence in the world we live in and apply it to the question of origin. What is the relationship of Mind and Consciousness to the Absolute?

The evidence says there’s an origin. Whether that beginning had intent is the question the evidence cannot answer.

Origin

The origin of our universe produced complex organization that chained up through cosmology to chemistry, to life, intelligence, ecology, and society. That’s not random noise out of an infinite field of interactions. It’s structured emergence across effectively infinite time and space.

This argues, at minimum, for an Absolute that set the conditions for what is. It also suggests that ethics, philosophy, and meaning were intrinsic from the start not invented by humans but discovered, the same way mathematics and physics are discovered. Invention from nothing is not real, we find what was already there (in my opinion a categorically more difficult problem given the complexity of our reality.)

Whether you take the next step, from Absolute to One, from impersonal origin to intent, is where evidence runs out and faith begins. Not faith as credulity, but faith as a position you hold in the absence of proof in either direction.

From the One to God is personification: a human need, driven by the desire for relationship with the absolute rather than mere acknowledgment of it.

That’s not irrational. It’s the oldest human need there is.

More on engineering, technology, and science fiction on YouTube. Fiction and commentary on the bigger questions at Substack.

How Physics Empowers Free Will in a Deterministic Universe

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Why determinism never felt right to me — and how modern physics actually opens the door to real agency.

For years, the idea of hard determinism has bothered me. It clashes with how life actually feels. The universe as a giant clockwork machine—every particle with a fixed position and momentum, every event preordained from the Big Bang—sounds elegant in theory. But it implies that everything I’ve ever done or will do was inevitable. My choices? Just an illusion.

Hard determinists often present this view with a certain intellectual swagger, as if it signals deep sophistication. Yet many of them still look both ways before crossing the street. As Stephen Hawking wryly observed: “I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined… still look both ways before they cross the road.”

That quip captures the tension. If the future is fixed, why bother acting at all? The view also carries an eerie resemblance to extreme Calvinism—some are saved, some damned, and nothing you do in this life ultimately changes the script. It never sat right with me, either intellectually or existentially.

Then I encountered the work of physicist and philosopher Jenann Ismael, particularly her book How Physics Makes Us Free. Link Her approach resonated strongly with an intuition I’d been developing for years: determinism and free will are not mutually exclusive. Physics doesn’t enslave us—it enables a deeper kind of freedom.

The “Now” Problem: Why the Instant is Trivial

Imagine the universe at a single frozen instant—the “Now.” In that timeless 3D snapshot, every particle has a position and energy vector. Past events fully determine what happens next. It looks perfectly deterministic.

But here’s the catch: that “Now” has no real existence for any actual observer. Relativity imposes strict limits. No particle (or person) can access information from outside its past light cone. At the exact moment of “Now,” that light cone has zero depth—nothing from even a tiny distance away has had time to reach you. Complete information about the universe is impossible in the present.

Laplace’s Demon—the hypothetical super-intellect that knows every particle’s state and can predict the entire future (or past)—assumes a “God’s-eye view from nowhere.” Modern physics makes that view untenable. Any real system faces data latency, noise, uncertainty, and computational irreducibility. The demon’s omniscience is a fantasy.

In short, strict determinism at the instantaneous “Now” (what I’ve called the InP, or Instant-Point) is technically true but functionally trivial. It tells us almost nothing useful about how agents like us actually operate.

Memory: The Engine of Agency

Freedom emerges not in the frozen instant, but across time through accumulated memory and structure.

Even in a blind, non-living universe, basic thermodynamics creates imprints: a rock scars the ground when it falls; waves erode a shoreline. These are primitive forms of “memory”—the past shaping the future through persistent physical traces.

Life takes this to another level. Biology is essentially memory in action. RNA, DNA, neural patterns—these are systems that record what worked and what didn’t. Evolution itself is a memory process: successful patterns persist and build upon one another.

Over eons, this scales up:

  • Simple input → output (basic matter)
  • Input → memory/comparison → internal model → action → output (living organisms)

A frog snaps at a fly. A squirrel flees at a predator’s scent. A honeybee dances to communicate nectar locations to the hive. These are not random reflexes but decisions grounded in accumulated history and pattern-matching.

Humans take it further. Language, culture, and shared knowledge externalize memory, allowing us to build on the experiences of countless others. Our decisions arise from rich internal models shaped by personal and collective history—not from some magical spark that violates physics, but from the universe’s own lawful processes.

The agent does decide. The cause of the action lies in the person’s internal identity and accumulated experience. Labeling that “determined” is technically accurate but misses the point. It’s how we function.

The Generalized Good as an Attractor

This memory-driven agency isn’t aimless. Over deep time, beings with even modest volition tend to optimize for what they perceive as “good”—survival, order, flourishing. Humans are guidable, not perfectible. We make mistakes and fall for bad influences, but signals from reality (what works vs. what fails catastrophically) are powerful if we’re willing to heed them.

History shows progress: fewer people in extreme poverty, fewer dying in wars (in percentage terms, at least). Our ancestors weren’t ignorant fools; their traditions often encoded hard-won lessons. Change isn’t inherently good, but neither is stasis. The “generalized good” acts as a global attractor, even if local maxima vary by time, place, and culture.

In deprived environments (think North Korea), external options shrink, yet people still imagine and yearn for “other worlds.” The internal model remains a generator of possibility.

My Thesis

Free will is not a violation of physics. It is the high-level, computational process of an autonomous agent using the universe’s built-in memory—personal, biological, and cultural—to steer itself through time.

Determinism at the microscopic level may hold, but it becomes trivial once you account for relativity, light cones, computational limits, and the reality of embedded agents. What matters is that you are the one deciding, drawing on your history and internal model. There is no external puppet master. The causes flow through you.

Physics doesn’t rob us of freedom. By creating a world with persistent memory, evolving complexity, and embedded perspectives, it makes genuine agency possible.

That’s why the universe feels open rather than claustrophobic. That’s how physics makes us free.

Time

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Enrique Zafra

Time is fundamental, it is much of what ‘being’ is about. It is central to reality. It is central to our lived experience, it is central to our hopes and dreams. But as central as it is, it is still an enigma.

Time is a knotty problem for physics, metaphysics, philosophy, religion, something fundamental to our existence and experience but for thousands of years and billions of person hours of contemplation and analysis it escapes understanding. Like others down the centuries I find that the more I think about it the harder to grasp it becomes.

Pragmatically there is only the local now, a few moments from the past and a glance into the future. Practically there is the Past and the Future, now is just a transition from one to the other.

What is time? It seems like it is about change, and times arrow is provided by entropy, the slow winding down of the universe.

Existence, the now, is only the Plank Time instant. What stitches the universe together are memory(enabled by change) and imagination (enabled by memory.)

One option of quantum physics says that it is the conscious mind that ‘collapses’ the probability function to one reality. In that view it is our mind-memory that provides a crashing rock against which universal potentiality breaks into reality. Is it us, stitching together the universe?

Why do we talk about timespace? Because time has no meaning without space and space no meaning without time. Imagine an infinite cube of arbitrary complexity. Without time nothing about it has any meaning. You cannot travel from one point to another, there is no energy, because no movement, nothing can move, because movement is about change of location and that has no meaning with no time. Equally, without space, time has no meaning, there is nothing to change, one could say something can endure or wind down but without space for that to occur it has no meaning.

So we ‘live’ in timespace that we instantiate and make objective. It is still real in that the physics of it are fixed (probably) but is it possible that it is our (or other consciousnesses) that take possibility and harden it to reality and inflate the universe around us, out to the limits of our questing minds?

Maybe….

Government lying to itself Again..

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20140201-223217.jpgGovernment Says You Can’t Overcome Addiction, Contrary to What Government Research Shows, Why does the National Institute on Drug Abuse contradict its own research? from Reason, Stanton Peele | February 1, 2014

The truth is, the vast majority of people quit addictions on their own. Every population study (that is, research with people not in treatment) tells us this. There is no ambiguity, no doubt, no scientific questioning of this truth. Only the neuroscientific, “chronic brain disease” crowd—represented by the new official medical subspecialty, the American Board of Addiction Medicine (ABAM)—strives to convince us of the opposite, even as a never-ending flood of data tells us otherwise.

By reinforcing the myth that addiction is uncontrollable and permanent, neuroscientific models make it harder to overcome the problem, just as the 12-step disease model has all along. Telling yourself that you are powerless over addiction is self-defeating; it limits your capacity to change and grow. Isn’t it better to start from the belief that you—or your spouse, or your child—can fully and finally break out of addictive habits by redirecting your life? It may not be quick and easy to accomplish, but it happens all the time.

12 step programs do help people (my opinion) but I can well see that they may in fact be bad for some. I also agree that addiction is something you can grow out of or shake yourself, most of us have done it, even if it’s just chewing your fingernails, everything is on a spectrum and we all live on different arcs so different levels of self healing are bound to exist. This author makes the right points but I think let’s individualism blind him to the fact that some will need help.
The other point is that in all likelihood the American Puritanical War on Drugs, has all but certainly been a horrific waste of resources and souls…

Scared Stupid, the US in the post 9/11 world

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Read the whole thing, if you can take the blood pressure spike:
Scared Tactics: Why America will be paying for decades for a foreign policy based on fear.
BY DAVID ROTHKOPF | JUNE 18, 2013

Prudence is a term often invoked by the fearful for doing too much or too little. But it shouldn’t obscure what is really happening. Our insecurity rather than our goals is too often playing too great a role in driving our actions. Whether this is a momentary anomaly or longer-term symptom common to declining nations that have lost confidence in important aspects of themselves remains to be seen.

Sorry to say it but every day I see more evidence of our craven collapse in the face of a dangerous but far from existential threat. Our whole damned political class has lost the ability to stand straight, speak straight, be straight. To understand fundamentals like human nature and human societies outside our bubble, economics, social dynamics, technology, etc except in the narrowest most self serving way.

One Two Three Four, We Could Get A Nuclear War

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One Two Three Four, We Could Get A Nuclear War.

ARES a AWST blog….

“money quotes:”

Watts argued that many countries are no longer pursuing nuclear weapons as a direct counter to U.S. nuclear power, but to compensate for relatively weak conventional forces. That includes Russia, where Watts cites president Vladimir Putin’s emphasis on the importance of nuclear weapons, and post-Cold-War doctrinal writings that talk about using limited nuclear attacks as “demonstration and de-escalation” strikes, to deter or terminate a large-scale nuclear war.

…it’s like a police department whose only force option is to blow up the entire block where the perpetrator lives.

Indeed, U.S. extended deterrence is something that not enough people think about when they advocate further cuts in U.S. nuclear forces. The American “umbrella” covers nations such as South Korea, Japan and Turkey, which have the industrial and technological capability to go nuclear very quickly if they feel that they can no longer rely on the U.S.

Watts warns, “limited use of low-yield nuclear weapons will become the new normal and give rise to a second nuclear age whose dangers and uncertainties will dwarf those of the first.”

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Crap!

Thoughtful, useful, analysis of the NorK problem

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From the Thin Pinstriped Line, a good read and some reasonable analysis of the reality facing the NorK regime and the world.

An extremely cogent point is how the current situation is pointing out the limited usefulness of Nukes in the long twilight between proven technical capability and getting beyond only having enough to commit (a messy) suicide.

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