Slashdot Mirror
France Will Be Home To Fusion Plant
ScentCone writes "After years of politicking, France has won the right to be the location for a $12 billion fusion research facility. The plant will use deuterium-from-seawater and a huge electromagnetic ring to produce the 100-million-C conditions in which researchers hope to produce viable fusion. The debate over whether this is even possible continues to rage. The ITER project started in 1985, and there has been a running fight over money and location since. France indicated that if Japan (one of the holdouts) didn't see it their way, they'd build a coalition of the willing and do it anyway. With financing and contracting agreements in place, the 10-year construction can begin." Coverage also available at MSNBC, the NYTimes, CNN, and the BBC.
I'm sure Greenpeace is gonna Love this!!
"I drank WHAT?!"--Socrates
Will this fusion plant usher in the foretold era of unlimited energy? I remember when those claims were made about nuclear power, about how it would be so cheap that it wouldn't be metered. That didn't happen with fission power, but perhaps it will happen with fusion power.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
From TFA:
Greenpeace, for one, stated that "at a time when it is universally recognized that we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Greenpeace considers it ridiculous to use resources and billions of euros on this project."
I swear, I think Greenpeace is more concerned about making sure nobody builds any new powerplants than they are about protecting the environment.
They are against new coal plants with modern scrubber technology, they are against fission plants, now they are against this expiremental fusion plant. Do they realize that humanity needs energy to live and thrive? Do they realize that by not building new more efficient powerplants they are forcing people to rely on older, more polluting powerplants more heavily?
It seems counterintuitive to me, it's like they would rather stick their thumb in the eye of corporations than actually help the environment.
At least the French and British decided to stand up against a dictator rather then only joining in to defend personal interests ...
I keep hearing that next to Fermi Labs, there are now snakes with two heads and albino deer
Yeah, but how do they taste?
Of course, you'd want to be far away if a leak happened, in a remote control centre.
I would have prefered India, I've been a big fan of Indian Fusion for a long time. Who's ever heard of French Fusion anyway?
Funny if they don't like this, as there are actually very few risks to Fusion recations. There is no waste by-product that is harmful to the area (like plutonium, for instance), there are few risks of "meltdown", the process uses only non-lethal fuels (seawater may suck to drink, but it isn't deadly to fish), and magnetic fields can be contained. Fusion != Fission. Remember that.
It will be available just in time to power Longhorn on the latest Intel. Oh yeah, and maybe restore power to the undersea Internet link to Pakistan.
I believe he was refering to this:
With financing and contracting agreements in place, the 10-year construction can begin
I have nothing against France (only some French), but I was warmly hoping that Japan gets the project. In my view, Japan is so perfectly suited, technology and mentality-wise, to pull this off.
Still, France is OK, because they are one of the countries with highest % of nuclear energy. So much so, in fact, that they make a lot of good money exporting it.
And get this: one of the largest importers (the largest?) offrench electric energy is Germany, who have outlawed and disbanded their nuclear plants due to Green misguided pressure, and are now
a) polluting themselves with coal plants, which actually produce more radioactive waste than nuclear plants of same energy output (not to mention other pollutants).
b) paying for el. energy to France, which is produced by nuclear plants which are close enough to Germany, that if a meltdown happened, they would be just as affected!
There is something humorous in all this.
Sigged!
Here in Colorado, USA, we're getting a new coal fired electrical plant. Stick with proven technology, we always say.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
I regret even thinking this.. but I can hear the thoughts of all the Republicans murmuring about how it is smarter to wait for the French to go through the first mistakes so 'we' can profit from your experienced knowledge. That, and there's more money in using up the equipment and reserves for the petroleum industry before jumping ship to the 'next big thing.'
I don't agree with these thoughts.. but I can hear them.
(puts tin-foil hat back on)
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
There are actually several french green politicians and activist who are pro nuclear fission (yes the old nukes!) because they see it as the only realistic way of cutting CO2 emissions in the short term.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I don't see Japan as really a loser here
Neither do I. My point is that the French complain sometimes, very loudly, when other countries (like the US) do things unilaterally, or suggest that maybe some partners aren't worth having. Then, they do the very same thing. But again, nice wine, cheese, and Greenpeace boat sinking. So, I somewhat forgive them that little bit of hypocrisy.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Fusion is supposed to be much cleaner and safer. If the contaiment field fails, it just stops going. I think there is still the issue of the surrounding structures becoming radioactive themseves and then we would have to dispose of that. But the fusion process itself is very clean. Overall you take deuterium (a type of hidrogen where there are two neutrons instead of only one) and you make them smash hard enough to make a helium molecule (plus a bunch of other particles) that is lighter than the the two hydrogen molecules taken separate with the difference in weight becoming energy by the famous e=mc^2. This is so hot that they have to use a magnetic container to keep the walls from melting and the hydrogen from cooling. If the magnet fails then the reaction just stops. With a bang but nothing more destructive than say a rocket fuel factory going up?
From what I thought, the reason that the Sun can support fussion is because the massive gravity of all the hydrogen pulling together slams them into each other hard enough to fuse. (more or less) Small scale fusion plants obviously won't have enough gravity to sustain a fusion reaction, so you gotta slam the atoms together some other way.
:)
But what I don't get is when you fuse an atom, energy is released, but when you split an atom into two, energy is released as well. How is this not perpetual motion? If fusion energy was possible, couldn't you just take your nuclear waste from fission and split it back into uranium and whatever again.
Obviously fission works, so I'm guessing you'll never be able to get enough energy out of fusion than what you put into it.
Which actually brings up another question, where does gravity's energy come from that supports the suns fusion? What causes the force of gravity?
I'm just a computer programer though, I only took one college physics course, but still am rather curious as to how the universe works.
For those of you who don't know what fusion is exactly, read at Wikipedia:
Fusion Power
Some interesting quotes:
"The natural product of the fusion reaction is a small amount of helium, which is completely harmless to life and does not contribute to global warming. "
"The half-life of the radioisotopes produced by fusion tend to be less than those from fission, so that the inventory decreases more rapidly. Furthermore, there are fewer different species, and they tend to be non-volatile and biologically less active. As opposed to nuclear fission, where there is hardly any possibility to influence the spectrum of fission products, the problems can be further reduced by careful choice of the materials used."
"Although fusion power uses nuclear technology, the overlap with nuclear weapons technology is small. "
A "fusion plant" is not the same thing as a "research facility." A misleading headline, in this case implying production-level fusion capacity, does nobody any good.
maybe they shoulds spend a portion of the money on cold fusion research...
First off, I am not a high energy physics person and I haven't looked into this too much, but from what I have read
0 7/1635251&tid=126&tid=14 to produce tritium as a fuel source would be a better fuel for fusion.
The start up power demand for this thing could be big. Separating Dueterium from the other isotopes of Hydrogen, heating things to 100 million degrees C, and the magnetic containment fields required for this research could use a lot of power in the years before it becomes a viable reality, assuming that they get practical fusion power.
I thought using neutrons from some idea like this one http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/
You don't see a difference between unilaterally invading another country and unilaterally developing a scientific / technical project? Are there any international rules against what France did? With the US there was that whole UN Charter thing...
So are American politicians going to call this new energy "Freedom Fusion?"
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
...and won?!?!?!
Germany hasn't dismantled their nuclear power plants just yet. They have a law saying that the existing plants will be shut down after a shorter than expected lifetime (20 years instead of 30) and that no new plants will be built, but this is expected to be turned around by the next legislature way before a single plant is actually concerned. I don't know whether they export lots of electricity from France. France does a lot of business selling electricity to Spain and Italy though.
kW.h prices for individual households in France are close to the European average, but the effective price is somewhat lower since the monopoly electrical utility belongs to the state, and that the juicy profits it makes are that much tax that doesn't have to be paid.
The old De Gaul slogan: Follow me! I'm right behind you!
Oh well, what the hell...
The job market for physicists is tough, but even so, I imagine they'd have trouble attracting top-notch people to the Sahara or other sparsely inhabited (or AIDS-decimated) parts of Africa.
Two headed rhinos and elephants would be cool, though.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Would I want a fusion research facility in my neighborhood? Hell yes!
...
Too many people have this stigma about anything with the word nuclear in it that they panic and envision 50 foot ants eating them. Nuclear = dealing with the nucleus of the atom. Nuclear fusion = combining two light nuclei to make a heavier nucleus and release energy. Other than neutron activation of the surrounding material (the immediate area around the reaction, since it likely to be well shielded) there is no residual radiation (unlike fission which leaves slowly decaying fissile materials afterward).
Magnets?
Ruin the soil or rain? This process doesn't have to emit anything to the atmosphere or water. Unlike conventional fossil fuel plants which spew tons (tons!) of material into the air.
I worked at Fermilab for awhile and there would always be a protest for a couple of weeks during the summer by people who just plain did not understand a bit of physics. They apparently read that the lab, reproduces the energy levels present at near the big bang, and assumed it was some sort of risk to the world (universe?).
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
we're trying to phase out coal. That technology never really panned out for us, even though we mine a lot of good coal here. Our Amish lobby is just too strong. We'll still sell it to Colorado, though.
We're going back to wood. The initial leading choice for the fuel is oak, since those are the biggest, oldest trees we have. When those are gone, the maple crop should be ready.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
They could just build one of these..
http://jlnlabs.imars.com/mahg/tests/mahg2c.htm
with a measured 1500% efficiency..
-or-
one of these
http://jlnlabs.imars.com/vsg/index.htm
which has a measured COP of 3.46% and is acutally fusion..
it already exists.. just need a large scale version of it
Bullshit. This stupid thing spread around way too damn much, hell it wouldn't be too hard to write something up like this for any country.
Ever wonder why there are so many words of French origin in the English language? Familiar with that time period when France de facto dominated England, and all people of culture/nobility in England spoke French? Did you know, in fact, that the origin of swear words (such as "shit") were that they were used by the lower classes (and are more authentic english) while classier ways of saying these things (such as "manure") were used by the upper classes (and are thus French).
France, like every other country in Europe, has won, lost, invaded, and been invaded countless times. So stop with this nonsense already.
Patrick Moore is no longer with GreenPeace, and in fact is one if its harshest critiques. He runs a site called GreenSpirit, which at first glance appears to be "environmentalism for those who aren't brain dead".
That didn't happen with fission power, but perhaps it will happen with fusion power.
It won't happen with either, so long as oil remains absurdly profitable and we're not choking to death on carbon-dioxide.
Oddly enough, despite their win/loss ratio, France is still around.
That never stops bugging me.
RTFA again for the best results.
Nice to see that on an interesting and scientific story about the possible solution to the world's energy problems the discussion decends into just slagging off the French. I thought this was a site for geeks interested in technology and science, not a playground for people to trade cheap insults.
And you Yanks are always accusing everyone of being anti-American, can you not see any hypocrisy?
For the record I am not French but I think the EU deserved to have this in their backyard - after all the EU is the major contributor. This is fantastic news, if this works then at a stroke the world will have access to what is essentially unlimited energy. No more greenhouse gasses, smog and you will be able to run a Pentium 7 without causing a blackout across the entire continent.
You can put it in my front yard. It has got to look better out my window than the freeway I look at now. (The freeway is ~ 1/2 mile away, close enough to be ugly, far enough that there is room for a fusion reactor to block that view)
I like the swamps in my backyard, even if they do breed billions of mosquitoes. I I'm technically a NIMBY guy. They can have the front yard though.
I post this as a former fusion researcher and a former project manager for the Office of Fusion Energy (OFE) of the Department of Energy (DOE)
Many decades ago the international fusion community put all of its chips on the Tokamak. It has been a disaster.
Even if a Tokamak could produce break-even fusion ( getting more energy out than you put in) the engineering obstacles to creating an economically successful reactor are daunting.
Many years ago, the OFE sponsored a study, Project Aries, of the costs of a Tokamak reactor. Even using the usual optimistic assumptions, the cost came in way above solar and wind power, let alone fossil fuels.
Another symptom of the problem is that three times in a row, projects to build larger Tokamak have collapsed in the design stage. That is, even before anything was build, none could come up with a working design. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the latest attempt, collapsed as the price tag spiraled above $20 billion, but now is resurrected. I assume that they found some technical advances, or just "cooked the books" space-station style to justify it.
The whole OFE degenerated into a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" process where the lab directories divvied up the pie. All non-Tokamak ideas were cut off, including the one I worked on.( more below).Congress cut the OFE budget almost in half a 10 years ago in response to this.
Now for a blatant plug. In the 70s I worked on a small project at the University of Miami, the Trisops project, which was defunded. The amount of money was not an issues ( our request was quite small), but the non-Tokamak nature, and the nerve of the principal investigator, Dan Wells, to point out that the Tokamac was unworkable.
Last decade the Trisops machine was moved from the University of Miami, to Lanham Md, with a small NASA grant, but there is not money to run it. You can see a report on it.
Another interesting project, the Plasmak(TM) project that is being run by Paul Koloc ( out of his garage!!).
The holy grail on fusion research is a stable plasma structure. The Trisops project achieved it one way. Paul has noted that ball lightning, which has been known for millennia, is a stable plasma structure. He has machine that produces ball lightning, and is measuring it. He gets no DOE funding of course.
This is a update of an earlier post Don't sell your Exxon Stock
The French have one military victory, and it messes up our language for centuries!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Yea I like cute volunteer chicks like that. "I wish everybody would stop fighting and polluting the environment. It'd make me feel much safer and secure."
They're just dying to find a nice highly-paid computer programmer like me. Then they can afford a hybrid car and go out to lunch with all their cute volunteer friends. And when I come home she'll tell me about all of the important volunteer activities she did that day. And I'll tell her about my day. About how my ideas are helping my huge company become more profitable and expand their energy-hunry operations. But she'll feel all cozy and safe and secure knowing that I've got a good job allowing her to do her volunteer work with Greenpeace.
Sometimes, you just gotta shut up and build the damn thing. The problem with fusion is not that it is impractical or environmentally unfriendly, but rather that the fusion researchers seem to be spending time and money in writing papers, rather than actually producing something.
I would be willing to bet that, if the American Government passed a law stating that all non-fusion powerplants were to be shut down (in stages) over the next ten years, we'd have fusion power before the time was up.
How can I be so confident? Because necessity is the mother of all invention, and because those fusion researchers won't get their papers published if there's no power to run the printing presses. You can't expect people to solve such complex problems overnight, but you CAN expect people to become a whole lot more focussed, if it was made very clear that their personal future depended on it, rather than some abstract "future" sometime long after they're dead.
If you want fusion even quicker, get the scientists involved up into Alaska, then provide power in winter only on those days they move forward on the science or technology. Give them the materials and funding they need, but give them some good reasons to do so.
Better yet, if you want fusion power in five years or less, move the top 100 richest people, along with Congress and the US Civil Service into Alaska, and not provide power in winter, except on those days they get the scientists to move forward. Then we'd see some dramatic improvement in the sciences.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So it took 20 years for ITER to make a decision? That would make even Washington D.C. bureaucrats proud...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Imagine if we had spent $180 billion on it in 2003 in a manhattan project style research program instead of fighting the Iraq war? We'd probably have limitless energy already.
I know this is flamebait (and pretty funny, besides they deserve it), but I always have to take issue with
- American Revolution
Sorry, Ameri-centrists, but France saved our ass on this one. Saying the colonists defeated Britain on their own is like saying the Northern Alliance defeated the Taliban. That's a little bit of hyperbole, but France was nevertheless instrumental in our victory. I try to tone down my French-bashing just based on this debt of gratitude.
As for the World Wars, I'm wondering what country you could have put in France's position and expected to do better. Holding off Germany for years in WWI while the U.S. decided whether or not they wanted to do anything isn't something to be scoffed at. U.S. gloating over these wars reminds me of two boxers going at it for ten rounds, and then in the eleventh round another fighter who had been sitting safetly in the locker room jumps into the ring and pops out the fatigued opponent, and then mocks the other fighter for not having the strength to do it themselves.
The enemies of Democracy are
yes, I'd have expected high-tech stuff to be in Japan too, but Japan is a geologically unstable country - a fusion reactor is an expensive bit of kit, and if it can be located in a less unstable country then yay! It'll reduce the costs of building an earthquake-proof building for it too.
iirc Japan currently has difficulty supplying itself with power and until it's producing power (somewhere near the end of the project, I suspect) it's gonna need a good source of power to guzzle from - France (and, if necessary, the power infrastructure of the rest of Western Europe - Japan being an island next to China and the back end of Russia)
Oh, and it'll be closer to CERN for access to clever particle physicist boffin types.
But most importantly, it'll be close enough to the UK for education establishments here to organise visits
FGD 135
The bay of Fundy moves more water in and out every 13 hours than .
.
.
.
.
.
.
0 3080222.htm
all the water of all the rivers in the world combined
If we could figure out a way to harness it, we would be good on
power for a VERY long time indeed
http://www.valleyweb.com/fundytides/
The 3 gorges damn is huge, the world's largest dam at present time,
but the power generation possible at fundy is just staggering
I think underwater screened turbines would prevent sea life
from being churned up, and prevent silting like the 'dam'type
hydro electric tidal generators built in france
Some under sea power turbines are being deployed near malaysia
Also in the fusion arena, I think the bubble fusion principle
makes alot more sense economically, and has already demonstrated
that it will work
Keep in mind it is not cold fusion, it is high temp based
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/03/0403
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Ok, the guy showed his ignorance. Know what, I wasn't aware of that fact too, so what?
He actually took the facts he knows, did a 2+2, and arrived at an apparent contradiction. Good thinking! I am ashamed that I didn't arrive at same conclusion without knowing about the iron's stability. I'd dare to say that that's the way of thinking that advances science.
So, OK, he asked a question, and you happen to know the answer. Does not make him stupid. I know this is Slashdot and all, but he really gave you no reason to bash him.
which relies upon a presumption that Greenpeace is against the technology rather than the timings involved in developing it
Or, you could do a little more homework and see that Greenpeace actually does oppose the very technology in question. Here they are quoted as saying that fusion "has all the problems of nuclear power, including producing nuclear waste and the risks of a nuclear accident." This doesn't come across like a position on the timing of the research. Greenpeace holds all sorts of positions that, acted upon, would be mind numbingly expensive. Even they can't think it's an either-or proposition (researching new methods, like fusion, while also making current technologies more efficient). These things aren't mutually exclusive, but Greenpeace's "anything with the the prefix 'nuc' is inherently evil/foolish" mantra is nonsense.
The larger issue, though, to get back to your point (wherein you called me a liar), is that the quote in question, as I presented it, is going to be digested by most casual (and non-scientific) news consumers in pretty much exactly the context in which is was quoted. They're going to hear "this is nuclear, it's bad" no matter how many phrases come before or after it. Greenpeace's frequently simple-minded fan club doesn't really bother with the details, pretty much ever.
But more to the (and back to my original) point: blocking this sort of research doesn't magically make any of Greenpeace's fantasy solutions instantly more achievable or economically viable. But if they can demonstrate to enough people that those things are worth pursuing, that doesn't make important research like this less so. If the people who speak for (or rave about) Greenpeace wanted to sound less shrill, they'd adopt a more rational tone generally. But after all these years, they keep choosing not to, and live in a emotionally inflated, eco-anthropomorphized echo chamber that doesn't actually help develop the tools that would burn less oil. They rely on fear-soaked press releases that, even to the non-savvy are transparently silly, and seem to think that grade-school level dramatics and tantrum-having will solve problems. And to the extent that not everyone involved is like that, those people should be realizing how the whinier majority of their group robs all of them of any credibility whatsoever.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The French, the British, the German, the Russian, the Italian, the Austrian (or these nation states ancestors) have all at different times dominated military in Europe and too often created havoc on the European continent, not to mention the rest of the world. Many of the European wars have been because one of the great nations got the military upper hand (or thougth they had) and wanted to revenge their last loss of land to one of their European neighbours. Look for instance how the land area behind France and Germany has traded owners through the centuries (latest land trade was of course after WWI and WWII). There is symbolic significance that Strasbourg is where the EU parliment is located, a very German and French city in culture, architecture and language for obvious reasons (just look at a map).
And European history is a reminder for all great nations to be careful before starting a war since the rule of war is that it only create losers and no winners. The US should be careful not to inherit (seems its already too late) the European tradition of starting uneccessary wars when having a large army. Just look at China's incredible long history to find an example how a dominant nation does not necessarily at all times need to expand or start wars with all its neighbours (remember Chinese invented gun powder, while it was the Europeans that used gun powder to conquere the world).
After all that, lets look at the last part of your "freedom fries" list. In WWI France had the main war on their own land and sacrified 1,400 ,000 men. US, which won the war in your history book, lost 116,000. And of course we all agree that WWII that followed, where 40 million people died all over the world, only was won by the US joining in 1943. Especially since the Germans lost 93 % of their forces fighting the Russians.
Anyway, making frog jokes is a nice way for your right wing media, like the Wall Street Journal, to stop USians ask any awkard questions why US marines are dying 3 per day in Iraq at the moment.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And get this: one of the largest importers (the largest?) offrench electric energy is Germany, who have outlawed and disbanded their nuclear plants due to Green misguided pressure, and are now
;).
The last nuclear reactor is currently[1] scheduled to be shut down in about 27 years. Sorry, they're neither outlawed nor disbanded, there're just no new ones to be built (Apropos "disbanded": in 2003 nuclear energy accounted for 27% of germany's electricity production, while regenerative energies amount for about 9% compared to ~5% in 1991). At least we try.
Oh, and by the way: In 2003Germany had an export surplus of 8 billion MWh. High imports from France are mostly due to it being "routed" through Germany towards the Netherlands and Italy.
a) polluting themselves with coal plants, which actually produce more radioactive waste than nuclear plants of same energy output (not to mention other pollutants).
Maybe. According to this site Germany has reduced its CO2-Emissions by 19% between 1990-2002 while France decreased theirs by 1.9%. This may or may not have anything to do with coal plants but was the first thing I found on google - so anyway
b) paying for el. energy to France, which is produced by nuclear plants which are close enough to Germany, that if a meltdown happened, they would be just as affected!
Ever heard of something called "leading by example"? Also, do you think that you (wherever you live) would be unaffected by a major nuclear meltdown?
[1] currently meaning that after the next election these plans will probably be scrapped by the conservatives.
If you follow cold fusion research, the list of countries that participate in the annual International Conference on Cold Fusion includes France, Japan, and other countries that don't have a lot of natural resources such as coal and oil.
Since the US has coal and oil, we don't have as strong a motivation to look into fusion.
To these groups, any given tree or platypus has more of a right to be where it is than we, the humans, have to put in yet another road for our SUVs People like you live in scifi phantasy land, where you actually think that we can make tradeoffs between more environment or more technology. But we can't. Our current level of population, our current resource consumption, and our current environmental destruction aren't sustainable. The longer we continue, the harder the eventual crash will be. It doesn't matter how much technology we throw at the problem. So, worrying about platypuses and trees isn't about "values" or "rights", it's about long-term survival of our own species.
To be fair, Bush sided on Japan's side for the sole purpose of blocking Europe from being the host site, that was seen back then (2003), as a retaliation, mainly against France, for not supporting the war. It's true that France, through Chirac, said they would support an extra financial burden to by-pass the US support and get moving with this project. Like it or not, France showed some leadership, got this project involving top science moving, while the US stepped back and did nothing.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I remember when those claims were made about nuclear power, about how it would be so cheap that it wouldn't be metered.
It was originally expected that "fast breeder reactors" would be used to recycle and re-enrich the spent fuel rods that came out of power plants. Instead, Carter used execuitive order to put a blanket ban on those types of plants. Fast breeder reactors would drastically cut hte amount of high level radioactive waste that comes out of power plants and cut the costs of operating a plant. Consider the nuclear version of recycling.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Actually, France got us into the whole Vietnam thing in the first place. And, while there were many mistakes, clearly the biggest one was not following through with post-war support of the the south Vietnamese government.
And now France wants us to cut off support to the post-war Iraqi government? That's not surprising, since the French government has publicly stated that they'd like to "counter-balance" (weaken) the United States on the world stage.
And yes, this certainly is the post-war stage. No remnant of the former government remains, and the whole insurgency would collapse without foreign support.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
I was at one of their mercury testing events where they served coffee that was brewed with solar power. They're nice people, and the chicks were really cute.
You should go to some industry shows for the chemical, oil and coal industries. They'll serve you coffee brewed with electricity generated at a coal plant. The reps will be very nice people to you, and the chicks in the booth will be really cute.
Um, your not supposed to eat the protective wax covering.
Me and my friends were making fun of the French *before* the Iraqi War.
I remember getting kicked out of our IRC channel, because I called a guy "Frenchie" This was well before we (the US) even started talking about going into Iraq. At least a year in fact.
Don't assume that all French bashing is done in malice over the Iraqi War. While it's true that most of it is because of this (hey, it became popular to make fun of the French.) But some people just made fun of France before then, just because.
Besides, they smell.
Seriously though, this is not really intended with any real heart people. I have no malice intended in my bashing of France. It's just a light hearting target of our bashing-rants. Like the one kid at school, who always got teased. I think France is doing a pretty damn fine job, and they've done miracles with their military at times.
And I will not take the claim that France's military sucks because they couldn't take out Germany in WW1, and were taken over in WW2. They were in a bad spot, against a very strong military opponent. In WW1, they deserve all the credit for holding out as long as they did. In WW2... hell, look what happened to Poland. It fell faster than France. Only reason why Britain took so long was the channel between the mainland and them. If Hitler had had the chunnel, England would have been his.
So, I don't make fun of France just because they didn't support the Iraqi War. I also don't make fun of France because I have some true malice in my heart. It's light-hearted, like when I make fun of Laughing Boy for having the most annoying laugh in the world. (Serious, he could be on the other side of Wal-mart and you would know he were laughing.)
Some of us are just kidding around.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
You might expect responses to this post to be long, angry rants, but how about just a couple friendly notes instead?
1. "US, which won the war in your history book..." This suggests that this is what you imagine "our" history books must say. All I can say is that I'm reasonably well-read, and I hope you find it reassuring that none of the WWI books I've read say that. To the contrary, the ones I've read all give a pretty balanced account of the War. In fact, if the U.S. is lauded, it is usually for our stance *after* the war -- i.e., that Germany should be rebuilt, not vindictively punished.
2. The whole "Russia did most of the fighting" meme has been addressed again and again. I won't go into it here, only remind you of the highlights: The Stalin-Ribbentrov pact; the fact that the Russians had previously executed most of their own skilled officers; the fact that Stalin disastrously insisted on a line-based defense, (rather than the defense-in-depth that his remaining generals advised); the fact that Russian troops went into battle accompanied by political officers, who shot their own troops to force others into battle; the fact that Russia received vital food, fuel and equipment via the U.S. Lend-Lease program; Russian mass-wave tactics vs. German armor; the fact that as many Russians as Germans froze to death; etc. etc.
3. "Many of the European wars have been because one of the great nations got the military upper hand"
Actually, allow me to suggest that the *only* times of extended peace Europe has ever known has been when one party (Rome, the British Navy, The Soviet Union, the United States) achieved a monopoly on power and *enforced* a peace. Believe me, I sincerely understand the degree to which this might rankle. It would bug me too. But think about it -- does France feel militarily threatened by Germany? No? Maybe that's because, 60 years ago, the U.S. forced Germany to become a democracy (then, of course, helped it rebuild).
4. China may indeed be a dominant nation. On the other hand, that "dominance" is supported by untold millions of faceless peasants laboring away in the fields under a communist government, occasionaly joining the People's Army so they can move into the city, massacre some political dissidents and throw others in prison. Is this really the nation you want to hold up to the U.S. as an example to emulate? Which country would you rather be: Canada, or Tibet?
Anyhow, don't want to come across as France bashing. France is no more or less motivated by self-interest as any other nation, as far as I can tell. Myself, I'd love to go there someday. I've heard it's wonderful.
- Alaska Jack