Europe braces for mobile network blackouts
reuters.com
reuters.com
Europe's decision, Germany especially, to be reliant on Russia for energy when they could have not shut down nuclear plants and built more.
Anyway, France is full blown nuclear state and they are having energy issues too, because as it turns out nuclear power plants require long regular maintenance periods.
Maybe there's no simple answer for energy issues and countries don't simply build or close down power plants over single issue? Maybe it wasn't done just to please some tree huggers?
Maybe someone in Germany could have had crunched the numbers too and see the risks? Maybe some politicians were too close to fossil fuel money? Maybe it was considered as a way to keep the relationship with Russia profitable for Russia and encourage Russia to build good relationships with their primary customer? Maybe EU wanted to have Russia as a reliable petrostate as an alternative to the USA so they can do their thing without USA? Maybe they wanted to reduce their footing in Africa by not relying for them in Uranium production? Maybe it make more economical sense to use the non-nuclear solutions?
Just maybe it wasn't a single issue decision even if it didn't play out as hoped? Europe is acutely aware of its tight energy situation, that's why they have been regulating the efficiency since decades, it's not coincidence that in Europe everything is very energy efficient. They squeezed it to the point where faster water heaters and more powerful vacuums were presented as Brexit benefits.
Oh, I'm so fed up by this culture war.
This is not a good discussion, this is fanatics fighting. Anytime someone suggest simple solution to a big problem %99.9 of the time they don't actually have a simple and obvious solution.
The problem of relying on Russia for energy was obvious. There isn't a singular "the solution" because there were many possible solutions, nuclear energy being just one. In addition to investing in wind/solar, there are other solutions besides nuclear. Particularly, fracing and coal mining. Both of these are unpopular for obvious reasons (which is the reason everybody talks about nuclear instead), but I think both are better than the political autonomy of an entire subcontinent being threatened by a belligerent foe.
In 2020, the EU imported 13 786 PJ of natural gas, while gross available energy was 57 767 PJ, i.e. gas imports accounted for 23.9% https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Also in 2020, 27.2% of petroleum gas imports into the EU were from Russia. https://oec.world/en/profile/international_organization/euro...
Put together, 6.5% of gross available energy in the EU was from Russian gas.
It's not so obvious that that is a problematic level of reliance threatening the political autonomy of an entire subcontinent.
If it meant that 6.5% of the population will be left without any energy, that would be quite terrible. If it meant a 6.5% drop in GDP per capita PPP, it would be worse than the drop from 2019 to 2020, but still only throw the EU economy back to 2013 levels.
That doesn't mean it isn't worth planning ahead for the consequences of reduced energy availability, but maybe we don't need to panic, either.
Indeed. Always found it strange that Germany didn't see a problem with relying on Russia for their main energy source.
I find it tiring that any country that plays chicken with the superpowers gets all these warnings and abuse while the superpowers themselves do not give a crap who does what to undo their progress to Armageddon.
Germany was right to give Russia an option not to suck, the idea that Russia would not already suck worse by now and yet still be a military superpower if Germany didn't try to keep a vague semblance of balance in economics is a fantasy.
Is it seriously believable that Russia would have done nothing with violence by now to force changes in the economics if the west was shunning its natural resources for strategic reasons since the 1990's?
Nuclear actually is a solution, in the sense that if you implement it, the problem will go away. Renewables are not a solution in the sense that even if you over-implement to an absurd degree, with present technology the problem will sometimes remain.
The people pointing this out are not zealots, they're people with a basic understanding of how electricity works. It's the people who insist against basic physics that renewables can power 100% of the grid that are the zealots, and now we all will pay the price for accommodating their extremism :(
Variable renewable sources can’t power 100% of the grid, but they can easily power 80% of it without any of the normal whatabout problems. Renewables could also power 120% of the grid without problems, interesting variable loads to take up the extra very cheap energy would manifest soon enough.
Claiming exactly 100% is full of problems is true, pedantic, and nowhere close to any reality which would happen.
Of course there will be a mixture of power sources, relax. You can develop a lot of variable renewables before the issues come up.
Europe needs to develop every power source at the same time, distributing resources compromising for risk, several time frames, and cost. This involves a solar/wind heavy mix along with longer term nuclear developments and large scale energy imports from North America.
Still that's just one building block obviously...
Seriously?
Trying to now pretend, ex post facto, that this was strikingly obvious and the result of incompetent leadership is profoundly narrow-sighted.
When thinking of politicians, Intelligence is not an attribute which comes naturally to my mind.
Yet the absence of intelligence in karge swaths of green politicians is striking. Im specifically talking about the German green movement, not generalising.
Yeah, absolutely stupid things to do in the current situation.
"Kochen ohne Strom" https://www.bbk.bund.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/202...
It would have been useful to keep coal powered electric plants in use and stocked with a mountain of coal.
Thats 60 years ago. Wow.
we should have taken the US more seriously when they said to buy US oil. not wise to piss the US off
That's because everyone has been operating their PWRs/BWRs way beyond the design lifespan, which would be fine if we didn't just stop building new ones in the past 20-40 years (depending on country) to prevent too many of them needing regular maintenance at once.
Then again, the parent says all these things and goes to the culture war. Feels a bit all over the place to me. Though it does seem that a lot of these issues are all caused by us trying to act more intelligent than we are and social signaling. But I don't think that's what the parent was saying.
[0] You could also easily make the argument that we wouldn't be in this mess if Germany didn't shut down their nuclear plants early because doing so increased their dependence on France and Russia for power. But this also isn't that great of an argument.
I suspect that the cost-based anti-nuclear arguments aren't really meant for the crowd that understands budgeting or long term planning, since the arguments tend to highlight numbers out of context. It's really meant to create short, stand-alone soundbites that could be repeated in social media posts and news articles.
Nuclear power should be subsidized as necessary for the exact same reason healthcare is: energy security is a critical matter.
A nation like Germany for example could easily afford to have many more nuclear power plants and be pushing that much more energy over the borders to the rest of the EU in exports. They could do a lot to further the EU's energy security, given their fiscal and engineering capabilities. Their main reason for not doing it (fear) is heavy in emotionalism, irrationality.
Not that I disagree, but money is not an infinite resource. So yeah, it does matter. Maybe I'm interpreting your comment as more dismissive than it actually is.
I don't know the difference between a beta+ and beta- particle so please tell me, why would my, positive to some degree, views on nuclear energy be more valid if I did ?
Now what does this specific test have to do with nuclear energy? I'll be honest that the specific example only has a little, and that's to do with waste. These particles are common forms of radiation and knowing how they interact is important in understanding safety and longevity of waste. (our decay typically comes in the form of alpha, beta, neutron, and gamma)
I do want to be clear though, that this doesn't -- and shouldn't -- stop you from having an opinion. But it should note how strong those opinions should be, as it is naive to have strong opinions on topics you also do not care to learn about the details. This is more what I'm getting at. Strong opinions matched with weak knowledge is a dangerous situation. The key part being the strength of the opinion, not existence.
I also don't think this disqualifies other types of opinions that you can have about nuclear (or other topics). An economist could not have any working nuclear theory knowledge but also be well qualified discussing the cost. But they may also not be well qualified to discuss the cost of decommission or waste without the support/collaboration of someone with working nuclear theory. At least we can recognize that without the combined effort that the opinion is limited in accuracy. (this is also true in the reverse direction fwiw)
So for some signals that may help you navigate this space (these are not absolute, mind you, but there is a tendency).
Pro-nuclear armchair experts tend to hype up thorium, ignore costs, claiming nuclear's issue is only fear, and dismissing the waste issue completely.
Anti-nuclear armchair experts tend to exaggerate the waste issue, ignore developments over the last half century, and pit nuclear against renewables (a position no scientist actually has. Our opinion is that nuclear is a zero carbon energy source and should be _on the table_. Which isn't a strong stance btw).
But mainly I think the issue is that in a world of ever increasing complexity we are also gaining access to large amounts of high level knowledge and internalizing that as expertise. I do think this is a recipe for disaster and we're already seeing the effects of it. We see this commonly in climate discussions. Where even the pro-green people are not always aligned with the scientists albeit substantially closer in alignment than the anti-climate people. But climate is one of the most (if not them most) complex issues humanity has ever faced. Unfortunately complex issues require substantial amounts of nuance and require complex solutions. Which ironically includes political support which is hard to garner without these same high level explanations. I'm not sure there's a good solution to all this tbh.
> Maybe EU wanted to have Russia as a reliable petrostate as an alternative to the USA so they can do their thing without USA?
Considering the EU’s actions since the war started we can safely discard this theory.
Did Russia transform from a cosmopolitan, Western European-loving, tolerant nation with fantastic relations to the EU overnight into a savage brute in Feb 2022? Or was it always at least a little bit backwards, clearly not democratic, sphere of influence-envious, and had already arguably been at indirect war with Ukraine since 2014?
To claim that Germany/EU wanted closer relations with the Russian Empire contra the American Empire is clearly asinine if you look at the actions of Germany/EU.
Russia decided to throw all that away in a failed bid to keep NATO away from their borders. Or rather Putin did.
... with a fuel cycle that goes through a breeder in Seversk, Russia
... with no long term plan for low radioactive waste and contaminated equipment
... with almost no uranium deposits worth exploiting left
as is true for all of europa
No, the fuel cycle doesn't depend on Seversk, the contract from EDF was signed in 2018 (and EDF says that nothing was sent yet)
No, this is not even the fuel cycle, Orano signed a contract with Rosatom so that they could send spent URT and Rosatom uses it for their own reactors. Literally selling spent fuel (instead of burying it)
No, you are lying, there are plans both for long term storage (Cigeo) and for low radioactive waste which the Andra handles. (https://www.irsn.fr/FR/connaissances/Installations_nucleaire...)
No, you are lying once again. The uranium deposits are not worth exploiting because it is currently cheaper to get mines in say, Niger, but Europe still has large potential mining sites, and extracting it from lignite is easy.
So, no, your sources are Greenpeace and are lying.
well, if you put it that way, then the fuel cycle doesn't even exist at all, france just imports fresh uranium from Russia, Nigeria, Kazhakstan and Australia and sells spent fuel to Russia.
> and EDF says that nothing was sent yet
under that new contract maybe, here is an article from 2009 in which EDF "told news agency AFP that it is only “recyclable uranium from fuel processing at EDF nuclear power stations that is transported to Russia to be enriched.” - rfi.fr/actuen/articles/118/article_5481.asp
> No, you are lying once again. The uranium deposits are not worth exploiting
that is literally what i said. They are not worth exploiting
> So, no, your sources are Greenpeace and are lying.
that is just low effort insults, here have an IAEA uranium deposit database: https://infcis.iaea.org/UDEPO/ France largest "reserves" are the trace amounts in the rocks around a mine they closed 21 years ago. Even if the price rises to a point where exploitation of those trace amounts becomes worthwhile again, there are no large reserves in europa, we are talking a demand in the thousands of tons per year.
The nuclear industry in europa depends on imports, stop peddling some makebelieve about large untapped reserves with which europa could theoretically become energy independent if they would just use them. It is nonsensical
France has 56 nuclear plants in operation. A cursory web search puts a 1TW reactor at about 30 tonnes of processed uranium per year. 56*30=1680.
8700 tons per year according to: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264796/uranium-consumpti...
quite hard to find good numbers, but the size "thousands of tons" seems to fit. The thread starter proposed that Europa, not only France, should build more nuclear power plants, so we may even be in the tens of thousands of tons per year for the whole continent.
Well, two things. One, pretty sure the push to shut down Germany’s nuclear plants was a response to a single issue, Fukushima.
Two, one simple answer to this particular situation is to assess your energy independence before sanctioning the country you rely on for natural gas. Germany is getting raked over the coals with the same talking points precisely because they walked into a situation they weren’t well-equipped to handle.
Safety concerns are definitely an issue that can nudge you to prefer alternative sources but this doesn't make it single issue. It's simply one of the things you consider.
As you can see, despite NPP construction stalling in late 1980s, world energy consumption continued to increase: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
This simply means, considering the risks and cost of all energy sources, nuclear power fell unfavourably. Doesn't mean single issue.
Trump blurted that to the Germans around 2019. The press brushed it off as "highly misleading".
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/13/trump-is-exaggerating-german...
And the Germans literally laughed in his face: https://youtu.be/FfJv9QYrlwg
Pretty hard to watch now. The smugness is palpable.
Then the article spends significant time pointing out that Russian natural gas plays only a small part in Germany's total demands in energy, citing numbers like 20% & 13% and thus Trump's claim is am exaggeration.
And then goes on to say:
> To be sure, Russia also accounted for about 40 percent of Germany's crude oil imports and 30 percent of its foreign coal supplies in 2016, according to IEA. But that hardly makes it an outlier in Europe.
How is that glossed over? Is it just me or - I hate to say it - Trump actually had a point?
Obviously this point is _highly_ debatable but it is worth consideration. And it is not like the US hasn't benefited from the military industrial complex. Though I do think the funding structure could be reworked or we at least acknowledge that this is what is happening.
EU/Germany energy politics were/are a trainwreck and that was obvious for at least a decade. Instead of recognizing the obvious warning in 2014, most of the continent doubled down on Russia energy dependency.
As a citizen of EU county - this is depressing. Most of our political elite should be locked up somewhere and keys tossed away. They are directly responsible for the clusterf*ck that follows.
I'm not sure why people are afraid to say this. He has literally said everything under the sun. You throw enough darts and you're bound to eventually hit the board. Supporters just focus on the hits and don't pay attention to the misses, but this isn't different from any populist (I mean look at Musk. If you keep predicting that autopilot is a year away you'll eventually be right and that's all we'll ever remember)
>Maybe EU wanted to have Russia as a reliable petrostate as an alternative to the USA so they can do their thing without USA?
The decision to rely on Russia was made when USA was a net energy importer, with some dependence on natural gas from Canada, and terrible dependence on oil from whoever could offer any.
To add to that, nuclear was phased out to a large degree because it gets in the way of renewables, as it's impossible to regulate. Nuclear reactor is pretty much an on/off thing and can't safely operate on power levels much under 100% continuously, and if it's off, it can only be restarted in a day, or even a few days. It makes balancing the grid including a lot of intermittent renewables, a huge headache. Renewables already provide more electricity in EU than nuclear ever did, and they cost a lot less to build, and almost all of them were built in less time than it takes to build a single nuclear reactor.
Speaking of the future, all of this discussion is meaningless again, because of time. If we start today, electricity will be 100% solved by renewables everywhere in EU before any new nuclear can be commissioned.
Notice the OP doesn't even mention the environmentalists etc. but the comment is instantly recognisable. It's the same talking point that needs to be repeated every single time.
[edit] if you’re going to disagree, I’d be interested to hear your specific objections. The shift away from US natural gas is well documented.
Meanwhile Russian has almost always been hostile to or at least in competition with Western Europe. Moreover Russia’s Duma follows Putin’s lead.
It only made sense if one pretends that Russia is not Russia.
To get there you'd have to forget to take into account all of the factors, namely that Russia's culture will always bring it back to trying to conquer its smaller/weaker neighbors.
Risk is a factor when considering economic security. Whether something makes economic sense must include that factor or it's a garbage calculation. The EU widely ignored this obvious risk regarding Russia. It has been obvious what Putin was for at least 15-20 years. And anybody that missed it after 2014 is an outright fool. I remember reading about his moves to strip the Russians of human rights in the early days of his reign and it was quite clear what he was doing and what direction he was going (standard Russian authoritarian), all of this is the natural culmination. I don't believe the EU was taken by surprise by Putin's choices, they merely wanted their cake and wanted to eat it too (for as long as possible), which is pretty typical behavior. Now they get to pay for that willful mistake.
I've been trying to come to terms with this since the invasion of Ukraine. Yes, the details on the ground are significantly different. But it doesn't change the legal reality of what occurred. I've come to the same conclusion about Iraq recently.
I was an 18 year old US Army infantryman getting ready to deploy to Iraq in 2007. I made the decision back then to not go, because ultimately something just felt completely wrong about it during training. The guilt around that had haunted me ever since. It wasn't until this year that I understood clearly what I did was the right decision, and felt vindicated. The entire last 20 years, our country has been engaged in global terrorism led by the neo-con hawks like Rove, Rumsfeld, and Bolton. It's sickening to truly realize and accept the horrible things we did, but I am forever grateful for having refused to take part.
I’d add that while the bursts of hawkishness in US foreign policy are awful, they pale in comparison to the barbarism of other past powers or modern regional powers. That isn’t meant to excuse anything, but look at the Russian invasion and the intentional atrocities being committed. Compare that to the invasion of Iraq and I think any honest reading will reflect governments and societies with very different values.
First of all, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. The US practiced torture, as we all found out when the pictures of Abu Ghraib came out. The US worked with Shiite militias that conducted ethnic cleansing and torture on a massive scale. The US put down uprisings in places like Sadr City, Najaf and Fallujah with full urban ground invasions. As a result of the invasion, Baghdad turned into a warzone for years, and the city's religiously mixed neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed (or however you refer to its religious equivalent). Iraq became a byword for failed state.
Finally, I would tell anyone who talks about "values" to take a look at the "Collateral Murder" video, in which helicopter pilots crack jokes while shooting explosive rounds into the windshield of a van full of children.[0] Only two people have gone to jail for that: the soldier who leaked the video (Manning) and the guy who published it (Assange).
In fact they seem to show (to a certain extent) some restraint with regard to civilian infrastructure, while America bombed everything from the sky for 1 month before invading.
In terms of intentional atrocities every army has its bad apples, and I'm sure there is a Russian equivalent of Abu Graib. But there is no evidence there is a deliberate policy by the Russian military to commit war crimes.
The French sent an elite unit of the scientific police to investigate Bucha. They came back months ago with not a single press conference, audition, report. Nothing, nada. Why? Why aren't they telling the world about the alleged Russian war crimes they witnessed there?
So you went AWOL? I’m a little confused on how an 11B E-2 can “decide“ he’s not deploying.
E-3 actually. I was an Eagle Scout, Civil Air Patrol cadet, three years of high school JROTC - the full nine yards. Completely brainwashed. But yes, I ultimately went AWOL.
A week before our deployment, I hitchhiked out to the desert and lived in a tent for a month. Turned myself in right before the 30 day desertion mark, took my article 15 and got busted to E-1. I was able to secure an honorable discharge with the help of a few sympathetic commanding officers after explaining everything, but they put me out pretty quickly “in the best interest of the Army”.
This was the height of the surge in '07, where we were losing over a hundred guys a month. My mom's best friend had already seen her son come home in a casket. The guys I served with came back as shattered husks. I have zero regrets choosing life over death.
Yeah, 8 years after invasion, maybe.
I’m not here to justify the Iraq war, and no good faith reading of my post would suggest that.
It had nothing to do with the Iraq War. If you look at a graph of German natural gas imports from Russia by year, you will not see any major changes after 2003. Imports from Russia (back then, the USSR) reached 50% of total imports in the 1980s, and flatlined after that.[0]
I say energy markets, because global availability of gas doesn't seem to be an issue, prices are. Gas shortages have nothing to do with crazy electricity prices lately. And even then there were no shortages or blackouts anywhere in Europe so far. Energy prices did hurt industry and drove inlfatuon, sure, but this is a global issue not sole caused by the war in Ukraine, COVID, Chinese lockdows and the chip shortage all played a role in that. As did the constant injection of money into the global economy since 2008.
Who knew sabotaging a continent’s energy policy was so affordable.
To be clear, I have zero evidence either way, I’m just curious how large an effect these campaigns have had on public policy across the world
The angles of attack range from the top-down to the grass roots. There are tactics for each (e.g. corrupting state leaders vs controlling mass media narratives).
As a German, no, that was quite voluntary. People like me completely agreed. I only woke up on 24 February. I'm from East Germany, speak some Russian, and have been to Russia a few times, and to Ukraine too, for months actually. I did not care about the Krim annexation either. I think because it was peaceful, and because I did not see Ukraine and its government in any better light than the Russian one. The corruption problem was (is? no idea now) real, and some really bad and shady stuff happened in Ukraine.
The reason I turned is all because of the behavior and the atrocities of Russia. My opinion does not require a "good" Ukraine, so arguments like "but... corruption" (for Ukraine) don't matter any more. To me, having seen the incredible modernization of Russia - supported almost completely by the West and a little bit from Asia, not self-made, and then Putin's declarations about "war with the West" was one of the things that turned me. You owe the "evil West" BIG TIME! I actually have friends who have done business in Russia since the 1990s, so I've followed along the stories passively and still do.
No, you cannot blame Russia for what we Germans thought and did before this war. I was for Nord Stream 2, I was outraged about US interference when they pressured us to stop the project, I was outraged when Trump made his comments. This was not because of any "propaganda", that was my own 100% self-made opinion. I only read some mainstream news portal headlines to begin with, so I'm not exposed to anything like those people in some Telegram channels, or Stammtisch discussions in some places in East Germany (I moved out of East Germany - and in the end to the US for a long time - not long after reunification).
You need to understand a lot of Germans, especially East Germans of course, did not fear Russia but saw them as a true partner. Putin spoke in the Bundestag in a "historic speech"! They were mostly interesting to do business with. They needed so much from us (and got it), and we had good use for their oil and gas and metals and other things. Business was really good, for both sides! We ignored Russian aggressive moves with mostly just some eye-rolling - "that's just how they are" but did not think much of it.
Now, I see that Russian society as a whole has a big problem. It's very far from only Putin being responsible. If they don't lose very hard they may develop like Germany after WWI, thinking they only lost because of "Dolchstoßlegende" (stab in the back myth - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth). I want us to ignore the nuclear threats and to sent Leopard tanks and Marders. Biden too seems a bit afraid, e.g. limiting rockets for HIMARs to the shortest range "to not provoke Putin".
I find this strange, if the West wants Ukraine to win Putin will be very "provoked". What kind of conflict is this when the enemy gets to decide which weapons out side is allowed to use? Essentially, Putin now has veto power over what weapons the West sends. I hope there is more going on underneath the surface, because this does not make sense.
Maybe they want Putin to invest more and more and grind Russia down slowly? Losing too quickly would leave Russia with too much left? Of course, the cost of such a strategy would be borne by the Ukrainians, who pay in blood. They may agree though, I don't know, because only a big loos for Russia would give them real peace instead of just a pause. Just my speculations about why we hear (tome) flimsy excuses instead of seeing more done to let Ukraine win more quickly.
But why the hate of nuclear? Was there a lot of propaganda in the media how dangerous it is? I really don’t understand it. It gives clean energy independence almost for free!
It was not voted on directly. Like removal of Deutschmark under Köhl, it was done by those governing without direct vote. The people didn't react, so you get what you tolerate.
I think this has been the conventional wisdom for a while. One thing I ask people who are vociferous in their support of Ukraine (and our paying for that support) is, how is this going to end?
Russia quietly bleeds out and overthrows Putin? Is that realistic? If Putin is a madman dictator, do you really think he'll just whimper and disappear? It seems necessary that a negotiation take place at some point, and that negotiation result in lost territory for Ukraine. It's not a question of justice, but practicality.
Something a lot people miss, is why Russia is doing what they are doing, many assume they just want to conquer Ukraine "just because", or that it is a purely cultural issue, or that it is Putin personal design.
The major point of contention here is that USA and allies (including NATO and the non-NATO members of Five Eyes) have proven themselves to be very aggressive, there are repeated claims that NATO is defensive, yet a lot of the wars in the past 25 years were started by USA or allies in first place.
So first thing is, yes, Russia has reason to fear USA.
The other problem here is strategic and geographic: Russia border is enormous and in the middle of plains, driving across the border with tanks and reaching Moscow and other major population centers right now is something trivial to do, Russia still didn't recovered properly from WW2 and don't have the manpower to defend such huge border from a land invasion.
When Putin says he is defending Russia survival, he is speaking that literally, Russia border is a major vulnerability.
There are basically three "good" solutions for this problem:
1. Have NATO disbanded or made much smaller. Or join NATO in first place. It is obvious this won't happen and Russia doesn't have the means to make it happen.
2. Conquer surrounding countries until they reach the mountains, that are easier to defend. This of course would result in massive negative repercussions, also a lot of countries that Russia would need to conquer for this joined NATO.
3. Convince somehow the countries between Russia and the mountains, to be neutral and not accept NATO inside them. This way if NATO decided to invade Russia by land, there would be time to mount defenses.
----
Russia was basically attempting to do the solution 3 using diplomacy. USA did their best to prevent that, because it would be a victory for Russia and a clear loss from USA point of view. Russia then decided that the option left was force option 3. Attack Ukraine and force them to be neutral.
It ALMOST worked, but the peace talks in march ended being cancelled by the Ukranian side.
So plan became a mix of 2 and 3, conquer some parts of Ukraine and keep trying to convince some "Neutrality" peace.
----
The problem now of trying to help Ukraine win, for example by giving them tanks as you suggested, is that option 3 would be gone, and Russia would see themselves forced to use option 2. Russia not declaring war and using "special operation" is meaningful, they are STILL trying to do things semi-diplomatically, but as soon it becomes clear this is impossible, things will be very ugly.
Also Russia has a time limit here, their population is still declining for various reasons (including a cycle where each generation that is descendants of WW2 adults are smaller than the others, Russia demography graph look "wavy" because of this). They must solve the problem of the massive hard to defend border with NATO "now", thus they will get more and more desperate, the next generations will be too small population-wise to defend that border effectively.
----
If NATO never had expanded right up the border with Russia, all this would probably been avoided. Yes I know people in the countries that border Russia that joined NATO are happy with NATO and wanted to join, but this doesn't change the fact that NATO members been attacking other countries left and right, and Russia thus has all the right to be terrified of NATO on their giant flat plains border.
Still, NATO did. So what is left now? Ideally NATO should pull back with the condition Russia pull back too, but I think the chance of this happening is close to zero.
What will most likely happen is Russia will keep trying to secure their border by any mean necessary. For NATO this is in a sense a golden opportunity, it means they can keep Russia busy there and grinding themselves to dust as they try to get defensible borders.
But for me that is in Brazil, and I am not pro-Russia, neither pro-USA, I think this is extremely dangerous, because eventually there might be a situation, where the only way for Russia to be safe, is if they turn the the area between their border and the mountains into a wasteland hard to cross, and decide to bomb the shit out of the people there until all that is left is craters and rubble that can be used for defensive purposes.
I see Ukranians having only these paths:
1. Somehow, winning the war without getting bombed to oblivion. (I think the chance of this working is minuscle and not worth attempting for real).
2. Fighting to win and get utterly annihilated eventually, with Russia making sure the country becomes a barrier between NATO and Moscow (unless Russia conquers all of Ukraine first).
3. Cutting their losses, giving Russia some territory that moves the border away from Moscow, and pledging to not help NATO invade Russia in the future.
EDIT: forgot option 4 here, because it is unthinkable, but could happen: Ukraine attempts to win the war because it convinced other countries to actually help them beat Russia, for example with actual boots on the ground... but this would turn into WW3, in this scenario everyone loses.
"actively block at an eu level"
Do you mean not labeling investment in nuclear as green?
Because that is very fair, if I invest my money in "green energy" I don't expect to fund nuclear.
This is the reality of institutional stupidity at the highest EU political levels.
There is nothing prohibiting investing in nuclear energy, but you shouldn't be able to label that investment as green.
You can argue all day if nuclear is green or not, but most people on the street will not think of nuclear if I ask them what a green, safe and sustainable energy source is. At least in Germany, which of course represents the interest of their people.
So if you include nuclear in that label, for most people it will become meaningless and will fail to draw more investment.
Is coal green if it used to as a stepping stone for wind or solar?
Storage technology to support an industrialized nation with pure Wind+Solar does not exist, necessitating gas. Advocating for Wind+Solar but not gas is like advocating for building with lumber but not cutting down trees. One inescapably implies the other.
They were anti-nuclear first, the whole CO2 thing only ever started to get traction with them when they won their first Atomausstieg and needed a new topic to terrorise children into next-generation voters with.
Their model, I think, only works for democracies. When a dictator controls a country, and their quality of life remains unchanged and revolves mostly around delusions of grandeur (like an impetuous monarch centuries ago), that dynamic isn’t enough of a deterrent. It only works when the leadership is sensitive to the well being of the country and it’s people
Completely agree but I suspect democracy is not enough. When a leader manages to assume a power that can be kept by other means like nationalistic rhetoric or cultural issues they can too engage in economically irrational politics.
People often rally behind ideas about god, identity or ideology. In fact this is very natural and expected because otherwise people could have accepted offers like "if you let me exterminate this group of people I will give you gas at discount".
I think the line of thought that economic (co-)dependence makes conflict impossible or leads to a more harmonious relationship is probably the gravest error in german foreign strategy. I think it's a reason behind both our relationship with russia and china. But it assumes a rational actor who's concern is the well-being of its people. Putin doesn't care for his people, he cares for power. He want's to increase his power, the stability of his regime etc. He might have employed the same flawed thinking to come to the conclusion that europe won't help ukraine if it's dependent on russian energy.
In reality, economic costs only become apparent after the harm is done. The greatest strategy crumbles if it is build on flawed assumptions.
I think it's simplistic to rely on that dichotomy when unaccountable power dwells within countries and bodies like the EU that are ostensibly democratic, and nearly every government that is called authoritarian holds elections of some sort and is subject to regime change irregardless.
It is more of a continuum than a sharp line.
Wait. I thought their brand was about making fun of BS? Did they peddle BS themselves as an ironic gesture?
> Their model, I think, only works for democracies.
Like the nominal democracy the US of A?
This is something that worries me about covid supply chain onshoring.
> Their model, I think, only works for democracies.
It's kept China in-line, but it's also made North Korea a pariah state.
The other lesson we recently got in world peace is countries with nukes can do what they want to countries without nukes. Could be the US and Iraq or Russia and Ukraine.
Tragedy of the commons: to save the world, we need to get rid of all the nukes. But unless you have nukes, you are helpless against everyone around you, so everyone has to get nukes (or a trustworthy ally who has them)
You can see Putin paying a price for the continued economic hardships. He is absolutely risking an end to his reign, but apparently the possibility of glory is more important to him.
I no longer believe that most "democracies" are actually democratic in the sense that people are actually represented. One keystone to a functioning democracy is transparency and an informed populace. That population also needs to be capable of shared coherent goals. Culture is programming for the masses, and was once something established through blood. Now, culture is established by media, and control by control of information.
Dictators are just as beholden to culture as a tool for control as are democratically elected leaders. If culture can be manipulated in short order, consent can be manufactured, then there's really not that much difference the authoritarian by declaration versus the authoritarian by "consent".
As long as people have there very most basic needs met, and they are sufficiently convinced that there is no other possibly better state of existence for them- they will live and they will die to the benefit of the leaders subsisting from their labor.
The real, current example of this would be the USA- we've been in conflicts for the entire duration of my life, it hasn't been cheap, but the expenses have been neatly placed on the shoulders of people that will probably never even realize the origin of the burden they bear.
In the meantime, the expenses of war need to be paid to someone, and with a democracy supplanted by lobbyists, we are saddled with a parasitical class of elected officials that do not answer to votes.
tldr - Even in a global economy, wars will happen, because all wars are just wars against the lower classes. War won't stop until the standard of living of the elites are threatened, regardless of the political system.
We're in a situation where the hate between both sides is very close to the surface, no one is trying to hide it anymore.
All that's needed now is one excuse... as it happened so many times before, for centuries... one small thing - an important figure murder, a bomb that lands on the wrong side of the border (accidentally?)... the destruction of NordStream, which I thought would be enough to start a full scale conflict with Russia, but for some reason hasn't yet (though it remains to be seen). It's very clear that what we're seeing today looks exactly like what we saw just before other large wars: a mostly regional conflict that serves as a proxy conflict between the bigger players causes the hostile rethoric on both sides to grow more and more, until the population not only supports a conflict, but demands it. Whether or not the news are telling the truth (which anyone who was there in previous situations like this, including Iraq not so long ago, knows is full of lies and uncontested half-truths from both sides) doesn't even matter anymore. It's a matter of time, you can be sure of that.
Needless to say, "German energy policy of the last two decades" and "Let's Invade Ukraine and Blackmail Europe!" are different decisions, and subject to different analysis. You can have reasonable opinions about both, but if your opposition to Russian adventurism and brinksmanship[1] is grounded only on your support for the German nuclear industry, I think you're not helping the discourse.
[1] It's looking increasingly likely that they blew up Nordstream, which is dangerously close to an act of war against other nuclear powers.
> Why is this possible? When we told you that Nord Stream was a weapon and a preparation for a great war, we heard in response that it was an economy after all. Economy. Economy. But it was cement for a new wall. [1]
[1] https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/promova-prezidenta-ukra...
There is a good argument that those two are related. Energy is a weapon of war for russia, and it works best when there is a dependency on it. A lot of money flows towards increasing that dependency, including towards advocacy groups with irrational stance against nuclear.
There can be some strategical value in some situation to be perceived as crazy.
> These are rational actors
Probably but it's not 100% guaranteed
Hell, GWBush was an inch away from approving tactical nuke use in Afghanistan but ultimately talked out of it and opted for the MOAB, but now a cornered rat thinking about it is now crazy? Does that mean GWB was crazy too?
Makes perfect sense.
No one would be scared of a military managing to destroy something on their own soil.
In fact, a better theory for you would be to claim that Russia did it in order to make it look like sabotage from the EU/America. Just a propaganda exercise since the pipeline is “useless” to them right now in any case. But you are clearly so desperate that you just go for the first cartoonish theory that you can come up with.
If you know history you should understand that a "small" even like this, in a highly volatile situation like we have now, could easily trigger an irrational war no one can win to start. I would think that Putin knows that very well, so it's not imaginable to me that he would risk.
Could someone who feels so strongly against Russia, given all the news we're being fed daily in the West, actually want NATO to enter this conflict directly to finally "destroy" the enemy (which seems to be the only thing that will make Putin give up on Ukraine's East)?? I feel like, given responses like yours, that's exactly what's going on. You believe Putin is so murderous that he would just blow up one of his country's main sources of income, which he supported (against American strong opposition) for so many years, just "to send a signal" he will blow up Poland's main source of energy if the West doesn't back off... I can totally see someone who believes that also believes the only acceptable thing to do right now is to start a full scale war against Russia.... which would be so disastrous to humanity that, once we look back before that happened, we will wish we had just had the balls to freaking sit down with the Devil himself and have a talk and resolve our issues if that would've prevented Armagedon.
The only point I want to address is that I really don't believe Putin is acting rationally in this war. Nothing he has done has been rational. If he cared about the billions of euro flowing through those pipes, he simply wouldn't have attacked Ukraine in the first place. Judging him by what he's done in the past is pointless - he has congratulated and praised Zelensky when he was elected, now suddenly the guy is a fascist neo-nazi? Putin has military objectives and he won't stop until he achieves them. I wouldn't support an all our NATO Vs Russia war, but I do think that Putin shouldn't be allowed to annex parts of Ukraine just because he wants to - because yes, as a Polish man that triggers a very deep response, response that tells me that at some point, maybe not now but at some point, he will come and just declare that portions of Poland are now Russian. The comparison to Germany isn't really relevant here because Germany isn't attacking its neighbours currently like Russia is - but if it was I'd feel the same for very similar reasons.
You yourself haven’t given any rational reasons for your original theory.
Isn't the very existence of a ground war in Ukraine clear evidence that Putin does not "know that very well"? Your point seems to be "Putin clearly won't escalate because he already escalated". That seems poorly grounded.
And in any case the logic seems generic anyway; you can make that argument about literally any theory about "Who Blew Up Nordstream?". If you think Putin is risk-averse, why do you think western governments aren't? You really think Biden is going rogue over this but you... trust Putin to be a steady hand at the tiller?
Now, you can't compare invading Ukraine, right on Russia's backyard, with invading or attacking a NATO country (or its supplies in this case, which has the same effect).
My argument was not the Biden did it :D is that really what you read from what I wrote?? My argument is that someone in the West (or just on Ukraine's side), not thinking rationally anymore, may have been responsible. That's the only thing that fits with all we know so far - lots of people in the West see Putin as the new Hitler... would you do everything in your power to stop Hitler if you were in a position you believed you could?
If you believe only a Government has the capability to do such thing... then it's not so difficult to find one that would be "desperate" enough. Ukraine itself seems to be the one who would most benefit from NATO entering the war, right? But would they really risk getting caught and losing the trust of NATO? I don't know, but when your country is half in ruins you may not think straight anymore.
Related, an article in the WaPo about this behavior: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/02/27/r...
And many people just eat it up without questions :)
Mobile towers are probably have some of the highest electricity:benefit ratios out there, it would be silly to not prioritize them.
> Lessons were learned.
That's why our emergency services use Rogers as the main, and Telus as a backup - but only after the multi-day Rogers outage that took out payment processors and emergency services this year.
Lessons will have been learned instead of parroted when we have a crown corporation as the main, and a private corporation as the backup. We need cell service to be reliable and rock-solid, even if it's not always cost-competitive to be so. Same reason hospitals, fire, and police services are public: turning a profit is less important than availability.
What is wild was that this was entirely localized! A single substation affecting maybe 20,000 people. How many cell sites were affected, a dozen? And still T-Mobile couldn't manage refueling. In a country-wide crisis we would be totally boned.
In Europe the grid has historically been quite reliable, so backup options are likely more limited at these sites.
Ex: Atlanta gets roughly 2 inches of snow a year (usually one or two minor snowfalls) and it's far cheaper to simply shut down for a day when it happens than it is to have the infrastructure in place to handle staying open.
Every 10 years or so we'll get a big snow, and be down for a week (ex: 2014) and people will freak out - but on the whole, still much cheaper to have that downtime than to be exorbitantly over-prepared for situations that are rare and not disastrous.
I suspect this will be the case for the mobile outage here - on the whole, the circumstances causing the outage (lack of power) is likely not recurring, and the costs of weathering this outage with existing infra is much more favorable than being over-prepared for blackout conditions which are rare.
Cities operate with limited budgets. It does not make financial sense to prepare for some relatively rare events, versus allocating that money to better prepare for likely events.
If Atlanta had a fleet of snowplows, they'd be unused 75% of winters and used for only a couple days in 20%. Bad investment.
A few years ago, we had a bigger 6h or so power outage, all the stores had to throw tons of products away because there was literally no redundant power supply at all. It was my 2nd power outage in Germany in over 30 years.
We were just at stage 6 recently, and this means there are days with 1x2.5hr outages and 2x4.5hr outages, with maybe 2-3hrs between these stages to recharge batteries. In my experience the cellphone towers do not always have sufficient time to recharge their batteries.
I live on an estate with a cellphone tower owned by the largest network operator, and this is still an issue. SMS-based MFA becomes a problem when this happens.
Interestingly, I have never once had a fibre outage through years of load shedding. (I have battery backup for my fibre CPE.) I can easily get 200mbps to a local DC while people relying on 4G or 5G are completely cut off.
The Swedish power grid is a single grid and the idea is: all eggs in one basket, but pay close attention to the basket.
Unfortunately when it comes to datacenter designations, two independent power feeds is required for tier 2 and above. Excluding all datacenters in Sweden.
At least some portions of Canada are also excluded because they have rules that say that only hospitals are allowed to have two independent power feeds. So Ubisofts Montreal Datacenter is in the same building as a hospital...
If you mean fed by two different substations it’s not a problem in Sweden at all. Most(every station I’ve ever worked in) medium/high voltage substations in Sweden are fed by at least two separate lines. Same as any other country I’ve built substations.
Does Bahnhof and Tele2 know about your stations?
My next work assignment literally starting in a week is building a high voltage substation for a data center(customer is well known on HN) so that’s why I’m curious
The latest ones which hang on every roof in cities might be turned off, but it just means phones scan until they find 2G/3G signals.
It's a factor in the recent price spike - Swedish companies are selling surplus power to Europe at the prices these are prepared to pay.
If the grid is designed for unreliability, you probably have the ability to order load sheds of various levels, so you can cut power to houses without cutting streetlights and cell towers.
Alternatively, you could have it built into smart meters.
I'd be highly surprised if, of all possible things, this is where they want to cut to lower electricity usage.
Where it's easy to anticipate that hospitals/police stations/fire birgades will need a special connection to the grid, it probably was harder 20 years ago to realise the numerous new cell towers also needed to be put on a separate connection.
So they'll get cut at the same time as the companies and the houses in the local area.
So they should have some kind of ability to target at least a kind of user. I don't know if cell towers qualify as industry or their own, separate kind.
There's also the fact that there has been a massive rollout of connected meters, so, at least in theory, they could target individual homes for the blackouts (I'm not saying that would be useful in any way).
I don't know if other kinds of endpoints have similar kinds of meters, but they could.
Industrial power is easier to separate because it is almost always a separate grid region. There aren’t many houses built up against your local steel mill or refinery.
Cell towers are collocated with residential areas because that’s where the users are. The power for homes and cell towers comes from the same source.
There are enough people people who hate linky for no reason, I hope EDF won't give them an actual good reason to do so.
Just to give some perspective, that figure is less than 2 times what a single Antminer S19 Pro Bitcoin mining appliance draws (found by searching "most used bitcoin mining hardware"). Mining farms contain from hundreds to thousands of these devices (search "antminer farm") kept on 24/7. Also, that model is far from being the most power hungry. And no, they're not only operating in poor countries where energy is cheap: all it takes for whoever operates them is being able to profit more than the cost of energy plus maintenance, no matter where.
Rationing power for cell towers would be pure idiocy that would give nothing in return, while there are well known places where lots of energy is wasted 24/7.
The utilities don’t have the ability to turn specific sites on and off at random throughout the day.
The top priority for keeping power on goes to grid segments with life-sustaining equipment. If you live within a grid segment that also powers a hospital you will likely not be subject to load shedding.
The first time power cuts, you might have 8-10 hours to run on battery. But if it comes back on and then goes off again just a few hours later, the batteries might've only recovered 3 hours of charge. Increasing the recharge rate wouldn't be technically complicated (just adjust the rectifier output), but it would have a logistical cost: These rectifiers aren't designed to be fiddled with so it would take a bit of skill, and someone with that skill would have to visit every site.
Worse, by boosting the rectifier voltage, the batteries would then fail faster, as commensurate with cycling rather than standby service. A site that normally gets 10 years on its battery plant might need new batteries every 3 years, for instance. That's a bad deal.
(And no, the rectifiers simply are not set up to do multi-stage charging. That would add a bunch of coordination and complexity that's just not needed in standby service where they can output a simple float voltage and be done with it. Changing that would be a forklift upgrade, replacing the simple rectifiers with complex chargers.)
It's reasonable that new sites may be installed with lithium batteries someday instead of lead-acid, and that may already be occurring in some places, and that would solve the problem quite simply because lithium just has such higher charge acceptance rates. You can float-charge a lithium and still use it in cycling service because it absorbs charge much more readily even on float. Lead-acids charge incredibly slowly on float, which is fine in a standby application, but it might be the Achilles' heel here.
> "It [Enedis] said it was able to isolate sections of the network to supply priority customers, such as hospitals, key industrial installations and the military and that it was up to local authorities to add telecoms operators infrastructure to the list of priority customers."
This is also a good argument for mesh-networks between cell phones independent of cell towers, although those don't scale for large numbers connected phones and large numbers of users. Texting could be supported via such mesh-nets easily I imagine, but not video.
In France, most homes have a smartmeter (called "Linky") and these could be used to have very precise load shedding (they communicate with PLC) but I believe this feature is not available or developed (yet?).
Starting to feel like Reuters isn't worth my time anymore. Too many clickbaity titles like this lately.
Even when massive ice buildup took down a whole region's power grid in my home EU country, mobile cell towers were the first to be kept up and brought online to allow emergency services and citizens to communicate.
This feels like a nothing burger from Reuters (which is publishing some seriously dubious news these days).
I can see smaller network operators save money on backups, but major monopolies usually don't have a choice in this manner.
So I wonder which regions don't do that?
I don't understand how a two hour outage is a panic event, both Cellular CO's and Cell Sites should have at least 3-4 hours of holdover time. Thats just the standard of design.
Like, what happens if I storm blows thru, knocks down the infrastructure, if you have heat related infrastructure failures, or some other just normal failure - power outages happen, for those sites in the states where long power outages are common they'll have a permanent generator on site.
> Europe has nearly half a million telecom towers and most of them have battery backups that last around 30 minutes to run the mobile antennas.
Which seems bonkers to me. Perhaps they deploy incredibly small batteries because they're engineered for a different outage profile than the US? Or perhaps the reporter is quoting something inappropriately -- traditional large sites with many hours, and many new small sites with no backup at all, might well average out to 30 minutes.
I think there's real work to be done on improving bring-up time when power returns, though. I worked on the EVDO rollout and rebooting a site after work would take 20-30 minutes because it's something that's only expected to happen once in a blue moon. I believe if they relaxed GPS timing tolerances a bit and optimized a few other things, this could be shortened to 5-ish minutes without a whole lot of work.
The US has many extreme weather events - Hurricanes, Blizzards, Floods, Wind Storms, Ice Storms, Tornados, Wildfires (yes, thats sorta weather), Heavy Rain events, etc - that will often bring down trees onto distribution circuits. I may be wrong, but I have the belief (based on news reporting) that weather events which in the states are considered 'normal' would be 'extreme' in Europe.
I just can't imagine power design is that different, I'm used to these cabinets even in urban areas having 4 strings of batteries in them, are they only building sites with a single string in europe?
It's rare that power cuts last so long, usually it's like 10-15 mins, but I've experienced 3-4 hours cuts a couple of times over the years. When I lived in Cancún these were more frequent though, because AC consuming so much power during summer.
- 4G
- 5G
- Fixed voice
- Digital TV
- SMS
- voice
It took _several_ days to bring everything back online. [0]
No Ransomware requests issued, most likely a state actor.
Many people speculate the attack was a training ground for Russian cyberwarfare.
I find this a much more likely failure mode for communications (including emergency services) than network operators not managing uptime because of blackouts.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/02/vodaf...
Every other provider would like a word with you. I don’t even think there’s a good one outside tiny ones.
Mobile stations are usually very well prepared for power redundancy
Stuff that keeps working for a few hours: the Kindle, tablet and local files on the laptops. So there's that.
...which is also just plain ridiculous! Phone service is a critical piece of infrastructure and in almost all markets subject to special treatment and provided with redundant power mechanisms.
Lots of things may break this winter. Phones won't be one of them.
The EU needs to recognise the situation: this is not working, 15% of Ukraine is now part of Russia despite all the NATO help.
Meanwhile the US is laughing as the dollar is rising above everything and the media is un-ironically saying that it could have been the US who blew up the pipelines in the Baltic Sea.
https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-cove...
"starting with a beta in select areas by the end of next year after SpaceX’s planned satellite launches". On Elon time, that's 2025 and perhaps never.
Surely that would be a madness and no reasonable organization would do this, right?
I’m unclear. Uranium is fine. But it’s totally exhaust-able.
I would also like the point out that network operators have mobile cell towers they can deploy and do deploy during large crowd events. These run for hours on diesel.
This is sensationalist journalism trying to sell papers. Every paper will be reprinting this in their language as they do for many reuters articles. Irresponsible IMO just like the weekly nuclear holocaust headlines because of that reactor in Ukraine. How about we educate the public instead of printing garbage headlines?
I know I'm not supposed to do this, but is this "concern trolling"? I can't see how you could get from A->B unless you're trying to rabble rouse?
https://www.wionews.com/photos/in-pics-protests-across-europ...
https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/31/government-internet...
It is not a fault, but a virtue to be suspicious of governments during times of protest. Does a 4 hour black out slow down protests? Probably not, but it does not stop countries like India from constantly doing so:
https://therecord.media/governments-intentionally-shut-down-...
Planting narratives in the media is not an unusual agency tactic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...