Judging a book by its cover

Figure 1. Old cover (right); new cover(left).

Gordian Knot News has about 3000 subscribers and 5000 followers. So I confidently expected the Two Lies book to fly off the shelf. You would think that investing 26 dollars to learn the secret of simultaneously solving energy poverty and global warming would be a decent bargain. Not so. In the first month, the Two Lies book sold a grand total of 8 copies.

Some would conclude the choir is a miserly bunch. After all they are willing to go to practice just to avoid the ushers sticking a basket under their nose a couple of times each Sunday. But I know better. The problem was the title. It exuded negativity.

The Gordian Knot Group has a joyful message.

1) Our fear of radiation is vastly overblown. A providential Nature has provided us with DNA repair mechanisms that can easily handle dose rates 100's of times above normal background. Dose rates that exceed the repair capabilities of our bodies will almost never be encountered by the public in even a very large release.

2) Thanks to its insane energy density, nuclear power is inherently cheap, less than 3 cents per kWh cheap. Nuclear power should consume far less of the planet's precious resources than any other source of electricity, while producing nearly no pollution and very little CO2.

3) Nuclear's problem is man-made. But what is man-made can be man-unmade. All that's required is an acceptance of these providential realities, a change in attitude, a metanoia. With this change, the way forward becomes obvious, and not that difficult to implement.

Could there be a more joyful message?

But instead the Two Lies title focuses of how stupidly we messed up nuclear power. We do need to understand where and how we went wrong. But that's just one chapter in the book. The rest of the book is a vision of how we can correct those mistakes.

One of the nice features of print-on-demand is an author can correct his mistakes. So I have re-issued the book with a new title. How We Can Make Nuclear Cheap Again may not be catchy, but at least it is forward looking.

Now we will find out how parsimonious the choir is.