"If Iran had really wanted nuclear weapons we couldn't have stopped them."
Iran has enough highly enriched uranium (up to 55%) to make several hundred bombs.
They've made no move whatsoever towards even beginning to make one. All that enriched uranium is sequestered for use as the core of their civil nuclear program (you need a lot more enriched uranium to start a reactor than you need to make bombs)
That isn't my opinion, it's one published by MOSSAD. In their opinion the Iranians have no desire whatsoever to build nuclear weapons
So yes, you're right - more to the point, the USA intelligence services knew it too, but continued their "iran nuclear bogeyman" posturing for several decades because it suited them to do so.
"China deeply fears a united pro-US Korea that will have US troops stationed on its borders and they will not do anything to enable that outcome."
The UN mandate for US troops on the NK/SK border is what keeps them there. If "peace" broke out tomorrow there would be no reason for US troops to remain in SK _at all_, in the same way that US troops are not stationed on other chinese borders.
Yes, they could be peripherally fearful, but it's an unlikely scenario. In the past, a greater fear would have been that of a wealthy Korea over the border from China but over the last 20 years the economic differences between China and SK have evened up a lot. Relations between the two countries are also better than it's been at any point in the past.
The largest risk to China (and SK) if the NK government falls is famine. Millions of refugees heading north and south would have majorly destabilising effects on both of NK's neighbours and there is a high liklihood that the Kim dynasty would lash out at all its neighbours during its death throes.
As for Yeltsin: Yes he stopped all aid, but it was restarted again as soon as he was deposed.
China only got involved when Douglas McArthur directly disobeyed orders and pursued the NK army closer than 50 miles from the chinese border. Even then they only pushed back when McArthur's troops were next to the chinese border with most of the NK army sitting in China.
The USSR propped up NK during the entire cold war and even now it's Russia still propping NK up (almost all international trade goes through the NK-russia border railway, not by sea and what little trade goes over NK-chinese borders isn't worth mentioning.)
The fruitcake with a funny hairdo has so far only demonstrated enough to destroy a few city blocks.
And of course should he do so outside his own borders, China will probably be dropping something on him faster than the USA could (Russia is the true power behind the NK throne, not China).
There's not even any evidence that NK has managed to produce a nuclear weapon small enough to be loaded on top of the kinds of ballistic missile they're known to possess.
The best way to deflate the NK threat is a stable and economically Russia with leadership who aren't able to play on the national paranoia of invasions (russia's been invaded so many times that it's easy to play up to this fear and it's the basis of the "Strong man" cult behind Putin.). Bear in mind that China have already made it clear they'd prefer that the NK leadership was changed.
"The US has no trade with North Korea, no financial ties, nothing. The US can't take anything away from them."
China's not in a much better position.
They sell electricity and oil into NK and you'd think this might give them some leverage, but both supplies were cut off for 4 months in 2014 because of chinese displeasure with what the NKs were doing - it had _zero_ effect on NK's activities(*).
NK was a Stalin creation and to this day the lion's share of international trade that NK has runs through the 50 mile-wide NK/Russia border - the approaches to this border are "no go" zones for foreigners for at least 30 miles each side.
For this reason even a full naval blockade wouldn't work, assuming China could be convinced to buy into it (which may not take much persuasion, especially as chinese/SK relations are improving despite China's chest thumping in the area)
(*) The NK elite simply take what they want and let the peasants starve, as usual.
It's worth noting that the primary activity of the NK military is farming and the reason most people join is simply to get themselves and their families fed. Popular folklore has it that other than elite units, most NK military units do not have ammuntion except for commanding officers, as the first casualty during any conflict is most likely to be those commanding officers, from their own troops.
It's quite likely that in the event of any kind of invasion, the invaders will be overwhelmed by surrendering "enemies" even though the structure imposes collective punishment on the families of those who attempt to escape from the country and would be expected to react the same way for the families of surrendering troops - that means an invading force would need to move swiftly to occupy the entire country in order to prevent this kind of attack, but the NK elite military is embedded everywhere and may take quite some effort to be dislodged (think: "Republican Guard")
WRT SK bombardment: almost all positions of NK artillary are well known and dialled in, however they're also known to be heavily fortified, so a large, _accurate_ simultaneous attack would again be needed to knock them out. The interesting part is that the improved active targetting ability _built into_ projectiles that's being developed in conjunction with naval railguns might well enable such a scenario to play out from SK artillary batteries without needing thermobaric or nuclear weaponry.
That said, having NK around as a remaining asian "bogeyman" is politically worthwhile for the USA. The sensible thing to do would be not to react to NK provokation and to find as much excuse as possible to make them a laughingstock - this would prevent them from using any reaction as justification for playing up the "USA monster" bogeyman amongst their own population. With hawks like Hilary or DonDon in the driving seat this might prove difficult.
"Google needs to stomp these idiots flat. It should be trivially easy to do so with their war chest"
The problem is that the system allows the trolls to pick and choose who they go after. It's not like trademark law where every perceived infringement has to be chased.
For Google to become involved they have to be recognised as having standing in the case - and in all liklihood the troll would fight very hard to prevent that happening.
It's possible they could buy into the dev's legal fees but that opens other problems for Google that I'm pretty sure they'd prefer to avoid. Do they indemnify anyone publishing via Google Play against patent claims on the method?
"The problem is that all of this carbon was locked out of the usual carbon cycle by being buried deep underground (in the form of coal or oil). "
Coal carbon was pulled out of the air tens of millions of years ago.
Most oilfields were produced during oceanic anoxic events - and if you look those up you might start worrying about the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere for more than "warming" or "sea level rise" reasons (Hint: more than half of atmospheric oxygen is ocean-sourced)
"but it would have to run without occurring additional costs for 12-15 years before it would have produced enough kwh for them to cost the same as I'm currently paying."
The current crop of chinese solar panel will last 7-8 years before being effectively dead
And "dead" is a pretty apt description of the areas where they're being produced. Solar PV production is an environmental toxic disaster. It's not "Green" to simply shift your pollution somewhere else.
"You seem to forget that Germany got hit very badly by Chernobyl."
You seem to forget that coal plants worldwide emit enough radioactive particles each year to equal 5-8 chernobyls, yet noone worries about that/
The problem with nuclear plants is not the nuclear part, it's the panicmongering by the same kinds of people who think that accupuncture and homeopathy are valid sciences. Approached statistically nuclear energy is several hundred thousand times safer than coal even if you factor in all deaths and injuries from all nuclear incidents and add hiroshima/nagasaki too.
Yes, more thyroid tumors were found in screening program initiated after fukushima and chernobyl. More were found in Korea too after screening programs were increased there and there was no nuclear incident at the time. The factor of increased screening is far more related to the higher rate of discoveries than any radiological source.
Similar correlation-is-not-causality cases: The increase in feline cancers in the 1970s-80s tracked the increase in the rate of being fed canned petfood, but the actual underlaying factor was that cats were living longer - and therefore living long enough to GET cancers. (Living long enough to get them is the prime cause of more humans developing cancers too)
The _actual_ death toll of chernobyl is about 200-300. Once you understand how radiation works you'd realise that if it was as bad as the doomsayers make out airline crew would generally die in their 50s or younger and that Helsinki/Conrwall/Denver should be radioactive wastelands. I'd far rather live downwind of a nuke plant than a coal one and I'll happily live close enough to a nuke plant to make use of their waste heat.
Importing more power from countries which use coal to produce electricity whilst shutting down your internal nuclear sources is simply shifting the location where the coal is burned, not reducing your coal-based consumption. The reality is that germany's reduction in domestic nuclear power generation has been made up for by an increase in electricity imports from carbon-sourced generation in other countries _and_ an increase in domestic carbon-sourced generation (yes, there's been an increase in nuclear-sourced imports from France but the majority of imported power has come from coal sources)
Additionally, moving to gas-fired CCGT instead of coal does not reduce your carbon emissions very much but it does allow you to say "we're moving off coal" as if it is a good thing (the only good thing is the reduction in radioactive particulate emissions and ash-disposal that come from coalburning.)
Going "green" in this day and age means "reducing carbon emissions everywhere" and the only way to do that whilst simultaneously increasing electricity production by a factor of 8-10 (to make up for reductions in carbon-based heating systems and transportation systems) is nuclear.
Pressurised water systems aren't ideal but we simply cannot afford to wait until molten salt systems are ready for commercial production - and unlike USA plants, EU nuclear systems pay a percentage of their income into an independent fund for decommissioning costs during their lifespan.
Murky's kneejerk response to shutdown perfectly safe nuclear plants in germany was entirely the wrong move and the german government deserves the multibillion euro lawsuits it's now facing. Amongst other things she's made it impossible to decommission the plants without state aid as their shutdown hasn't been paid for.
At some point someone in the USA is going to take advantage of the concentration of people at the checkpoints for maximum mayhem. The most likely someone is another Timothy McVeigh.
"There is no question that mining for lithium and rare earth minerals and other things that will be used in abundance has a severe environmental impact."
The main impact is due to the "nuisance" byproduct of rare earth mining - thorium.
That would be solved if thorium -based nuke plants were a "thing" (LFTRs) and those rare earth mines would probably become thorium mines producing rare earths as a byproduct.
"Most Model S owners complain about extremely fast tire wear"
I don't have a model S, but as a former biker I'm willing to bet that the tires use a soft formulation to ensure traction. Soft tires wear _very_ quickly - it could be as much as 3 times faster than harder ones even on a small bike with only 16hp at the wheel.
"The taxes on gas (and diesel) are (supposed to be) for infrastructure maintenance, like public roads and bridges. A number of places are talking about replacing some of these gas taxes with a mileage tax because they're not collecting any gas taxes from electric vehicles."
Other countries already collect milage taxes for heavy vehicles - bearing in mind that the damage inflicted on roads runs somewhere between the 3rd and 5th power of axle weight with a multiplier based on the square of the velocity.
> We already have electric motors driving aircraft-carrier-sized cruise ships and pulling massive trains.
Have you seen the size and mass of those motors?
> Electric motors are a solved problem and have been for ages.
Not lightweight ones.
On the other hand, a gas turbine engine driving electric motors with a peaking battery might work. Airbus are working on this concept but it needs practical superconductors to work.
The problem with nuclear is specific to the technology in use - water-moderated/cooled systems are a safety hazard (but still safer than virtually everything else in use)
Molten Salt tech can't come to commercial reality soon enough.
Slashdot Mirror
"If Iran had really wanted nuclear weapons we couldn't have stopped them."
Iran has enough highly enriched uranium (up to 55%) to make several hundred bombs.
They've made no move whatsoever towards even beginning to make one. All that enriched uranium is sequestered for use as the core of their civil nuclear program (you need a lot more enriched uranium to start a reactor than you need to make bombs)
That isn't my opinion, it's one published by MOSSAD. In their opinion the Iranians have no desire whatsoever to build nuclear weapons
So yes, you're right - more to the point, the USA intelligence services knew it too, but continued their "iran nuclear bogeyman" posturing for several decades because it suited them to do so.
"China deeply fears a united pro-US Korea that will have US troops stationed on its borders and they will not do anything to enable that outcome."
The UN mandate for US troops on the NK/SK border is what keeps them there. If "peace" broke out tomorrow there would be no reason for US troops to remain in SK _at all_, in the same way that US troops are not stationed on other chinese borders.
Yes, they could be peripherally fearful, but it's an unlikely scenario. In the past, a greater fear would have been that of a wealthy Korea over the border from China but over the last 20 years the economic differences between China and SK have evened up a lot. Relations between the two countries are also better than it's been at any point in the past.
The largest risk to China (and SK) if the NK government falls is famine. Millions of refugees heading north and south would have majorly destabilising effects on both of NK's neighbours and there is a high liklihood that the Kim dynasty would lash out at all its neighbours during its death throes.
As for Yeltsin: Yes he stopped all aid, but it was restarted again as soon as he was deposed.
"China created this problem, quite literally"
Um....No. Stalin did.
China only got involved when Douglas McArthur directly disobeyed orders and pursued the NK army closer than 50 miles from the chinese border. Even then they only pushed back when McArthur's troops were next to the chinese border with most of the NK army sitting in China.
The USSR propped up NK during the entire cold war and even now it's Russia still propping NK up (almost all international trade goes through the NK-russia border railway, not by sea and what little trade goes over NK-chinese borders isn't worth mentioning.)
The fruitcake with a funny hairdo has so far only demonstrated enough to destroy a few city blocks.
And of course should he do so outside his own borders, China will probably be dropping something on him faster than the USA could (Russia is the true power behind the NK throne, not China).
There's not even any evidence that NK has managed to produce a nuclear weapon small enough to be loaded on top of the kinds of ballistic missile they're known to possess.
The best way to deflate the NK threat is a stable and economically Russia with leadership who aren't able to play on the national paranoia of invasions (russia's been invaded so many times that it's easy to play up to this fear and it's the basis of the "Strong man" cult behind Putin.). Bear in mind that China have already made it clear they'd prefer that the NK leadership was changed.
"The US has no trade with North Korea, no financial ties, nothing. The US can't take anything away from them."
China's not in a much better position.
They sell electricity and oil into NK and you'd think this might give them some leverage, but both supplies were cut off for 4 months in 2014 because of chinese displeasure with what the NKs were doing - it had _zero_ effect on NK's activities(*).
NK was a Stalin creation and to this day the lion's share of international trade that NK has runs through the 50 mile-wide NK/Russia border - the approaches to this border are "no go" zones for foreigners for at least 30 miles each side.
For this reason even a full naval blockade wouldn't work, assuming China could be convinced to buy into it (which may not take much persuasion, especially as chinese/SK relations are improving despite China's chest thumping in the area)
(*) The NK elite simply take what they want and let the peasants starve, as usual.
It's worth noting that the primary activity of the NK military is farming and the reason most people join is simply to get themselves and their families fed. Popular folklore has it that other than elite units, most NK military units do not have ammuntion except for commanding officers, as the first casualty during any conflict is most likely to be those commanding officers, from their own troops.
It's quite likely that in the event of any kind of invasion, the invaders will be overwhelmed by surrendering "enemies" even though the structure imposes collective punishment on the families of those who attempt to escape from the country and would be expected to react the same way for the families of surrendering troops - that means an invading force would need to move swiftly to occupy the entire country in order to prevent this kind of attack, but the NK elite military is embedded everywhere and may take quite some effort to be dislodged (think: "Republican Guard")
WRT SK bombardment: almost all positions of NK artillary are well known and dialled in, however they're also known to be heavily fortified, so a large, _accurate_ simultaneous attack would again be needed to knock them out. The interesting part is that the improved active targetting ability _built into_ projectiles that's being developed in conjunction with naval railguns might well enable such a scenario to play out from SK artillary batteries without needing thermobaric or nuclear weaponry.
That said, having NK around as a remaining asian "bogeyman" is politically worthwhile for the USA. The sensible thing to do would be not to react to NK provokation and to find as much excuse as possible to make them a laughingstock - this would prevent them from using any reaction as justification for playing up the "USA monster" bogeyman amongst their own population. With hawks like Hilary or DonDon in the driving seat this might prove difficult.
"Google needs to stomp these idiots flat. It should be trivially easy to do so with their war chest"
The problem is that the system allows the trolls to pick and choose who they go after. It's not like trademark law where every perceived infringement has to be chased.
For Google to become involved they have to be recognised as having standing in the case - and in all liklihood the troll would fight very hard to prevent that happening.
It's possible they could buy into the dev's legal fees but that opens other problems for Google that I'm pretty sure they'd prefer to avoid. Do they indemnify anyone publishing via Google Play against patent claims on the method?
Why aren't there any OLED 17" laptops?
"The problem is that all of this carbon was locked out of the usual carbon cycle by being buried deep underground (in the form of coal or oil). "
Coal carbon was pulled out of the air tens of millions of years ago.
Most oilfields were produced during oceanic anoxic events - and if you look those up you might start worrying about the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere for more than "warming" or "sea level rise" reasons (Hint: more than half of atmospheric oxygen is ocean-sourced)
"I'm not a denier, by any means, but it does make some sense that a slower release would be better."
You're 100% correct.
The problem is that in order for emissions to be balanced by absorbtion, human carbon emissions will need to drop at least 80%
"but it would have to run without occurring additional costs for 12-15 years before it would have produced enough kwh for them to cost the same as I'm currently paying."
The current crop of chinese solar panel will last 7-8 years before being effectively dead
And "dead" is a pretty apt description of the areas where they're being produced. Solar PV production is an environmental toxic disaster. It's not "Green" to simply shift your pollution somewhere else.
"You want to burn something in a power plant with max 42% efficiency to create electricity and then heat a house with that?"
No, I want to use the "Waste heat" and pipe it around the neighbourhood as hot water to provide district heating systems.
You can even use that "waste heat" to drive cooling systems (stirling pumps, or Solarfrost-modified ammonia adsorbtion pumps)
"You seem to forget that Germany got hit very badly by Chernobyl."
You seem to forget that coal plants worldwide emit enough radioactive particles each year to equal 5-8 chernobyls, yet noone worries about that/
The problem with nuclear plants is not the nuclear part, it's the panicmongering by the same kinds of people who think that accupuncture and homeopathy are valid sciences. Approached statistically nuclear energy is several hundred thousand times safer than coal even if you factor in all deaths and injuries from all nuclear incidents and add hiroshima/nagasaki too.
Yes, more thyroid tumors were found in screening program initiated after fukushima and chernobyl. More were found in Korea too after screening programs were increased there and there was no nuclear incident at the time. The factor of increased screening is far more related to the higher rate of discoveries than any radiological source.
Similar correlation-is-not-causality cases: The increase in feline cancers in the 1970s-80s tracked the increase in the rate of being fed canned petfood, but the actual underlaying factor was that cats were living longer - and therefore living long enough to GET cancers. (Living long enough to get them is the prime cause of more humans developing cancers too)
The _actual_ death toll of chernobyl is about 200-300. Once you understand how radiation works you'd realise that if it was as bad as the doomsayers make out airline crew would generally die in their 50s or younger and that Helsinki/Conrwall/Denver should be radioactive wastelands. I'd far rather live downwind of a nuke plant than a coal one and I'll happily live close enough to a nuke plant to make use of their waste heat.
"Germany is not shifting to coal. "
Importing more power from countries which use coal to produce electricity whilst shutting down your internal nuclear sources is simply shifting the location where the coal is burned, not reducing your coal-based consumption. The reality is that germany's reduction in domestic nuclear power generation has been made up for by an increase in electricity imports from carbon-sourced generation in other countries _and_ an increase in domestic carbon-sourced generation (yes, there's been an increase in nuclear-sourced imports from France but the majority of imported power has come from coal sources)
Additionally, moving to gas-fired CCGT instead of coal does not reduce your carbon emissions very much but it does allow you to say "we're moving off coal" as if it is a good thing (the only good thing is the reduction in radioactive particulate emissions and ash-disposal that come from coalburning.)
Going "green" in this day and age means "reducing carbon emissions everywhere" and the only way to do that whilst simultaneously increasing electricity production by a factor of 8-10 (to make up for reductions in carbon-based heating systems and transportation systems) is nuclear.
Pressurised water systems aren't ideal but we simply cannot afford to wait until molten salt systems are ready for commercial production - and unlike USA plants, EU nuclear systems pay a percentage of their income into an independent fund for decommissioning costs during their lifespan.
Murky's kneejerk response to shutdown perfectly safe nuclear plants in germany was entirely the wrong move and the german government deserves the multibillion euro lawsuits it's now facing. Amongst other things she's made it impossible to decommission the plants without state aid as their shutdown hasn't been paid for.
At some point someone in the USA is going to take advantage of the concentration of people at the checkpoints for maximum mayhem. The most likely someone is another Timothy McVeigh.
What happens then?
> but I not sure if any were killed
They were. It's put back smallpox and polio eradication efforts by about a decade.
"The payouts, when they come, are meagre compared to the actual probabilities."
Gambling, religion and addiction are all much the same.
Talk about the wins, never mention the losses.
I watched my father regularly lose most of his paypacket on horses with his winning strategies.
When he made money (which was rare) it was a big deal.
The "amazing" part would be if it can pull this off consistently.
"There is no question that mining for lithium and rare earth minerals and other things that will be used in abundance has a severe environmental impact."
The main impact is due to the "nuisance" byproduct of rare earth mining - thorium.
That would be solved if thorium -based nuke plants were a "thing" (LFTRs) and those rare earth mines would probably become thorium mines producing rare earths as a byproduct.
"Most Model S owners complain about extremely fast tire wear"
I don't have a model S, but as a former biker I'm willing to bet that the tires use a soft formulation to ensure traction. Soft tires wear _very_ quickly - it could be as much as 3 times faster than harder ones even on a small bike with only 16hp at the wheel.
Diesels are problematic due to the number of PM10s and smaller they produce, which can be directly inhaled.
The important part (and which is omitted) is what the size of these extra particles are. Larger ones fall out of the air very quickly.
"The taxes on gas (and diesel) are (supposed to be) for infrastructure maintenance, like public roads and bridges. A number of places are talking about replacing some of these gas taxes with a mileage tax because they're not collecting any gas taxes from electric vehicles."
Other countries already collect milage taxes for heavy vehicles - bearing in mind that the damage inflicted on roads runs somewhere between the 3rd and 5th power of axle weight with a multiplier based on the square of the velocity.
This is yet another argument in favour of pushing harder for MSR development.
> We already have electric motors driving aircraft-carrier-sized cruise ships and pulling massive trains.
Have you seen the size and mass of those motors?
> Electric motors are a solved problem and have been for ages.
Not lightweight ones.
On the other hand, a gas turbine engine driving electric motors with a peaking battery might work. Airbus are working on this concept but it needs practical superconductors to work.
The problem with nuclear is specific to the technology in use - water-moderated/cooled systems are a safety hazard (but still safer than virtually everything else in use)
Molten Salt tech can't come to commercial reality soon enough.
Even temperate reservoirs emit shitloads of methane.