First LNG tanker arrives at Germany's new floating terminal
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For all the criticism modern governments get (often rightly) it’s incredible how fast Germany built these new terminals.
And it does show we have just as much productive capacity in western societies today as we did 100 years ago. What’s missing is consensus that problems should actually be solved, not used to enrich yet another rentier class.
I hope Germany learns from this and keeps away some of the barriers to growth they regulated into existence.
Some how they can "go to war" for gas, but when it comes to climate change it's, "meh"?
- we don’t have the mineral supplies for other non-fossil options
- nuclear has a better safety record, all in
- nuclear doesn’t require we do business with cobalt slavers
- nuclear can supply the base load
- nuclear produces rare elements that help with advanced medicine
But you can’t reason people out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, and many people were raised in a green-washed death cult. Like most religious people, they uncritically repeat that faith and become angered if you point out the inconsistencies.
Better than... wind turbines? Solar panels? Hydroelectric?
Wind and solar don't have catastrophic failures, but people installing and repairing them do sometimes fall. Residential rooftop solar is especially bad here, since the deaths are divided over a relatively small amount of generation capacity. Still, overall wind and solar are safer than nukes, and data sources saying otherwise generally are using pre-Fukushima stats.
More: https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#what-are-the-safes...
I thought only one person died as a direct result of the Fukushima meltdown? And the other deaths attributed to it were due to poor handling of the people who evacuated; basically frail people dying in temporary shelters, unrelated to the nuclear aspect.
You can't cause an evacuation, expect that it'll go perfectly and deny any responsibility when it doesn't.
I had thought that counting evacuation deaths was correct, since I'd thought the evacuation was to reduce the risk if far more radiation was released. But reading up on it now, it seems like the evacuation was after the risk of that was over, and was in response to the current levels of radiation? In which case it looks like a large overreaction.
The wind and solar industries are ramping exponentially, and the death rates are usually done per TWh generated. The solar deaths are heavily weighted towards the start (mining, installation) while the energy produced lags and accumulates over decades.
The stats used to show that rooftop solar was slightly more dangerous that nuclear per TWh, but the number is dropping faster for solar so it's not been true for years.
The slighlty more important point is how far ahead nuclear solar and wind are, compared with fossil fuels. It's a stark difference.
Similarly solar is missing all the silver (and past Cd/Te/In/etc miners) miners and people dealing with pollution and wind is missing knock on effects from rare earths and PFCs (nuclear may also be, but we don't get any public info on the LCA of UF6 production or what modern centrifuges are made of).
The first is ongoing however, and the second is decreasing exponentially.
They wouldnt be dead if there weren't a nuclear incident, so....
The immediate cause of most off the "evacuation" deaths, was that a large number of very old people were exposed to moderate amounts of stress due to being relocated which caused them to die slighly before what they might otherwise have. (Kind of like when we count terminal cancer patients as dying "from Covid" if they had covid when dying).
For these people, there was no medical reason to relocate them in the large majority of cases. If you're 80+, a few MSv of exposure has no effect on you life expectancy, since you will die from other sources long before any cancer can develop.
In other words, very few years of expected life were lost, and those that WERE lost, was almost entirly due to a huge overraction to whatever increase in radiation there may have been. Which, I would argue, should primarily be blamed on anti-nuclear fear-mongering propaganda.
Imagine a racist couple living in a suburb when a Mexican family moves in to the next-door house, stressing them out. If the racist husband dies from a stress related illness after that, I would argue it was his racism that killed him, not the Mexican family.
Spreading excessive (as in actual misinformation) anti-nuclear propaganda is like spreading such racism or similar forms of prejudice or bigotry. It doesn't matter if it's Greenpeace or Tucker that spreads the propaganda.
The fact is that the Fukushima plants were built at a time when the only alternative was coal. Had they never been built, Japan would have built coal plants with the same capacity at the same time.
Given the amount of toxic polution caused by old coal plants over such a time span, I'm sure Nuclear Power in Japan has saved 10s if not 100s of thousands of lives to date, even before counting any damage from global warming.
And Japan is STILL building new coal plants, partly because of the anti-nuclear propaganda, which will continue to cause harm long into the future.
If anything, the vast majority of deaths that will happen as a consequence of the Fukushima incident, will be due to several countries shutting down (or failing to build) nuclear plants while still relying on large amounts of dirty fossil fuels, in many cases still including coal/lignite.
I do take your point, I interpreted the parent to mean that the reason for the evacuation was radiation. In that case I'd still maintain that the deaths should be attributable to the nuclear incident.
Agreed man years lost may be a better measure. I'm not sure what the morality is Vis a vis valuing a young person's life more that an old person, as a society though, we seem to have come the conclusion that an old person's life is more valuable than it should rationally be.
I don't think it's reasonable to resort to whataboutism. Yes nuclear energy has probably saved lives overall, but it still costs lives. If a plane crashed should we accept the people died due to the plane crash or should we discuss how it's much safer than driving?
I suppose half the problem is that humans are bad at evaluating risks. So I'm not averse to contextualising the risk, but the contextualising cart shouldn't be put before the actual quantified risk horse.
Hydroelectric - if it is a damn, then again, there is a possibility of the damn breaking and flooding.
Solar is the real alternative, but not effective enough, yet.
Looking over the border to France, can it? The forecasted load factor for French nuclear power generation this year is 51.5% and the energy there is probably the most expensive in whole of Europe.
Nuclear is an ideal base load provider because nuclear plants really like to run 100% of the time, only shutting down for refueling or maintenance. Which is exactly what you want to meet a demand that exists 100% of the time.
If you have enough generation, nuclear is an ideal base load provider.
As a result, the confluence of maintenance and safety updates to the nuclear fleet are a greater issue effecting supply than they otherwise would be.
Compare USA in 2021, nuclear provided 19% of electricity while having only 8% of total nameplate capacity.
Thanks to climate change, this situation will likely become more common in the future.
Anyway, Germany and France are essentially the same grid, so differences in consumer prices tend to be determined largly by transport costs and the costs of neighboring countries.
German power gets cheap when they can import from Scandinavia, Poland and Central Europe, and expensive when they have to export to those. French power is similarly affected by imports/exports to Spain, Italy and the UK.
If you want to compare nuclear costs to other sources, you have to look at production costs for PLANNABLE energy for a conglomerate of sources, adjusted for risks and externalities (dry spells, reliance on dictatorships or other unstable or adverserial countries, market prices for commodities, pollution and climate change, etc).
If you adjust for all externalities, especially polution and climate change, I'm convinced French electrical production is far, far cheaper per stable GW of output than Germany's.
So the current situation is EDF will be nationalized to avoid going bankrupt, and who knows when and if the stress corrosion issue with older reactors will be resolved. Let's just hope there will be enough water in the rivers and reservoirs for them to use, because the droughts are worsening. Meanwhile the EPR reactors are still not working and their construction company Areva was taken over by EDF to avoid going bankrupt.
But I do not live in France, I live in Slovakia and we have another nuclear plant under construction, Mochovce 3. Mochovce 3 construction was restarted in 2008, to be finished in 2014. It's 2023 and any time now it should be finally going productive, after a 15 year construction and about 300% cost overruns. And the energy company may have to be saved by the state as a result.
And these are not exceptions, it's the same for Hinkley Point C in the UK and probably other new plants at least in Europe as well.
So it's very strange when someone writes about stable and cheap nuclear energy production and somehow never mentions current huge issues with it.
Especially if you have alternatives, and it looks like we could build a lot of renewables and storage combined with say green hydrogen or ammonia. With lower risk and gradually. And not spend the next 100 years and countless billions decommisioning them.
- the econonmic situation right now
- a possible future where storage is better
- the general case that's being stated, which is that nuclear is currently the best base load tech, unless you like burning gas.
I'm only talking about the latter.
What if storage (or hydrogen/ammonia storage and peakers) is already good enough, but we are not building it because we are blinded by the empty promises of nuclear utopia? I guess we will see in a few years as the first efforts of this type go online.
We've pumped a huge amount of money and time into talking about and researching and building renewables, with a much smaller promise of return. Which is fine, but it seems very surprising to speculate that popular nuclear has overshadowed poor unpopular renewables.
Depends on your social circles or information sources I guess. What I get from mine (including HN) is that nuclear power is the correct technocratic solution to the world's problems. It has no downsides. Meanwhile renewables are ugly and not worth the investment. And I am only exaggerating a little.
> We've pumped a huge amount of money and time into talking about and researching and building renewables, with a much smaller promise of return.
I don't understand this, and also don't agree with it. The yearly new photovoltaic installed capacity is reaching hundreds of GWp. Even with a load factor of 15% it's adding much more capacity than we ever could with current nuclear technologies. And also much cheaper. The typically conservative IEA predicts new 600 GWp/year in 2030, but already in 2022 the world has added 268 GWp (according to BNEF) and will hit over 300 this year. Yes, the storage and smarter grids need attention. But overall renewables are absolutely worth the money and time they get.
They're wrong, but I understand completely where their fear comes from.
Environmentalism's greatest enemy has been environmentalists.
Teddy Roosevelt et al. were able to get more done because they played realpolitik, and realized that getting 50% of what you want, even if you have to hold your nose at some compromises, is better than getting 100% of what you oppose.
If anti-nuclear protesters were serious about ranking their worries, they'd be supporting the IAEA trying to cordon off the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station from the war ASAP.
If nuclear was everything it proponents claimed it to be, there would be at least one country on Earth going all in on them. Nuclear is useful in the power mix but it's value is way overstated. It is not an economical choice, if it was no amount of lobbying would stop them from being built. Coal usage did not decrease due to intense environment lobbying, but only when cheaper alternatives were available.
The combined money lobbying power of energy companies could almost certainly end world hunger. Probably not colonize the moon but certainly establish a permanent base.
Lest they find out that attempts to keep attention on reactors are a diversion from the real harms.
Uranium does not exactly get pooped out by sparkly unicorns either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...
You could also say: uranium mining is incredibly expensive, and we're not willing to pay the cost, so we import it from countries where the cost is paid by someone else.
It would take an artisinal miner years or decades to gather a kg of uranium. They'd produce more electricity on a bicycle generator.
Which is not to say that they're paid well or given PPE or that radon levels are monitored, or that the tailings dams are kept to any sort of safety standards.
If you use the pretty tortured metric "human lives lost per KWh energy produced" then yes (as of now). You know what would have an even better safety record according to that metric? Chucking the earth into the sun.
> nuclear doesn’t require we do business with cobalt slavers
Indeed we don't. We just ask the russians for it.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/europe-highly-dependent...
The only true fix would be a reactor and fuel design that can't melt down. A walk-away safe design that, even if you intentionally induced the worst disaster, still wouldn't pose a real threat to the public. Then it wouldn't matter if the operator was a cartoon villain determined to destroy the city.
This is the part that people still don't want to hear. They can't accept that their pet concern can be eliminated by approaching the problem differently and breaking their assumptions. They look for new concerns, but educating them doesn't help because when they run out of unaddressed concerns, they just circle back to old concerns that were already addressed. Their concern was never more than an excuse. They just want the answer to fit their preconceived notions.
For nuclear to be accepted, it needs better public messaging, because ultimately people are reacting emotionally rather than thinking critically.
A great start would be not consistently lying about everything until the lies are indisputably proven and then pretending it never happened every single time about everything for over 70 years.
Demonstrate a walkaway safe pebble bed reactor or similar that doesn't break down constantly or start leaking unsustainable levels of Kr-85. Remediate the hundreds of contaminated mines, spills and processing sites that the buck is being passed on. Stop demanding unlimited indemnity from any accident exceeding a pittance. Actually tell the truth about contamination events and levels entailed in standard practise ahead of time. Allow actually independent third parties rather than industry bodies to confirm claims on site, and estimate costs that are somewhere in the ballpark of reality with no backroom 'service' contracts. Stop pretending you've 'solved' waste by gathering a quarter of the money required and saying "we'll probably bury the SNF somewhere", don't worry about all the low level and intermediate waste. Demonstrate the existence of a viable fuel source or breeding program that isn't walking a tight rope on the edge of prompt criticality. Demonstrate a reprocessing process that doesn't push an entire continent's coastlines to 5% of safe limits whilst producing barely enough fuel to run about 2GW of reactors.
Then it's worth considering as something that isn't just another scam.
Until that point the oligopily of the nuclear industry should be rightly treated as a bunch of craven ghouls who are having a tantrum because they were held to account and didn't get to hoard billions whilst killing millions of people like the coal barons did.
This is an incredibly transparent attempt to frame a conversation in such a way that the only possible avenue of discussion is how long we have to sit on our thumbs and wait for a gen IV nuclear reactor to materialise whilst ignoring the absolute failure of any previous designs to deliver on their promise of cheap, clean, abundant, or safe power.
Your gaslighting is not as subtle as you think it is. Refusing to believe nuclear advocates isn't 'panic' or irrational when the lies have been so consistent for wellover three generations that assuming the opposite of what you say is a much better strategy for coming to correct conclusions than believing you.
It's very laborious explaining that to vehemently anti-nuclear people. Please read my other comment in this thread, because I'm not going to repeat myself.
And you're positioning dealing with this as necessary due to an imagined need that can't be better solved with alternatives.
And instead of acknowledging the industry's unbroken history of gaslighting and lies you are positioning anything other than credulous paying of the scammers to continue doing nothing other than grift as an unfounded panic.
Without specifying which non-existent design you are vaguely gesturing at, the objection cannot be made more concrete. One concern will be 'addressed' with a half lie about one technology, which then isn't allowed to come up when talking about a completely different technology where the half lie doesn't apply.
Gen III+ reactors have many many failure modes that 'can't happen' but require assumptiona and defense in depth princies that are regularly violated. MOX is a complete lie, especially with regard to Pu240 and Pu241 or meaningfully solving fuel shortages. There is nowhere near enough fuel for large scale expansion of them.
Molten salt reactors skate on the edge of prompt criticality and there's no process for cleaning the salt. They also leak constantly.
Sodium cooled Uranium breeders operate on the certainty of emitting more fission products into the ocean (or the Techa river) than fukushima did during reprocessing. Primary coolant leaks are also on fire in addition to being radioactive. They also catch fire constantly and skate on the edge of prompt criticality if used in breeding mode.
Neither has a strategy for dealing with the primary coolant after a plant is done or shuts early other than making the public pay to look after it for 50 years then putting it in a hole. Neither actually helps reduce Pu240 or Pu241 meaningfully. Neither can breed enough fuel to maintin a significant fleet of burner reactors.
HTGRs have yet to manifest and either no-one outside of the boys club will be allowed to make fuel for them or they will produce an order of magnitude more waste. The claims about having '3x' the fuel efficiency are based on 6x as much U235, so they actually run out of fuel twice as fast.
The lies about the rest of the fuel cycle are too numerous to summarize.
Look at this comment thread. You're the only one who's raised points against yourself. You surmised what you thought I would say, and then got mad at me for it. I keep telling you I wouldn't say those things, but you just don't want to hear it. You're arguing with yourself.
Firstly that Fukushima was a severity 5 event rather than a severity 2 event. Even chernobyl and mayak had most of the consequences narrowly avoided by acts of heroism and dumb luck.
Secondly that Gen III+ reactors already eliminate severity 5 events or whatever Gen IV reactor you're imagining will do so once it meets reality in spite of that being the exact same story we were given about Gen II and Gen III.
This can only happen if the physical assumptions about the reactor's normal operational state hold, which can only happen if defense in depth is followed and there is no complacency or corruption and there are no black swan events. This assumption is incompatible with a world in which there isn't constant and strenuous objection and externally imposed accountability to the nuclear industry and sufficient attention to cover all malfeasance in depth. It is only barely compatible with the world we have now.
Thirdly that the severity 2 events with likelyhood of 100% are non-existent, when they have been constant, and the ones that happened 70 years ago are only just having their financial and health consequences felt now.
Then on top of that you're bundling in a bunch of assumptions about upsides that don't exist, and framing any objection based on those as the same allegedly unfounded fear of the same type of failure.
You are the one who is claiming any objection is irrational fear and refusal to accept new information. Refusing to accept any objection that is different is entirely circular.
> Firstly that Fukushima was a severity 5 event rather than a severity 2 event.
What are you angry about this time?
A 5 is any risk we don't want to accept in the future. Unless you're ok with Fukushima and Chernobyl happening again, they're all a 5.
I'm trying to give vocabulary for establishing risk requirements. If you don't want the bad thing to happen, it's a 5. Doesn't matter if it should be a 10. 5 is the threshold of being unacceptable. If it's 5+, then it's just 5.
If the new proposal only changes the likelihood but doesn't reduce the severity, then it doesn't meet the requirement. That's it. It's just a framework to dispassionately discuss risk.
Gen IV technology? Has severity 5 risks. Doesn't meet the requirements. We agree.
Relying on operational controls? Can never be 100% foolproof. Only changes the likelihood anyway. Severity is still a 5. Doesn't meet the requirements. We agree.
We agree, but you're still arguing with me. Why?
If I take this definition of a 5, then reactor design (in the context of current fission concepts) is barely relevant, because the 5s start at the mine site (or in the case of breeders, in the reprocessing facility). Examples are Sellafield, La Hague, Kadapa, Serpent River, Rossing, Kakadu, Mayak and many others. One Fukushima is better than one La Hague. One chernobyl is preferable to a terawatt worth of La Hagues, Kadapas, and Sellafields.
At the other end there are unsustainable Kr-85 and other gaseous emissions during fuel handling for which there is no attempt at containment, fission product laden reprocessing effluent that is barely below safe thresholds for an entire continent's coast whilst only generating a few GW worth of fuel, long lived twice-cycled Pu240 and Pu241 for which there is no attempt at a clean reprocessing process, lost weapons grade plutonium, and (in the context of wantonly using as much energy as we please) waste heat cooking the planet directly.
Other 5s include at one end all small countries being locked into a small handful of fuel suppliers because plutonium separation and enrichment facilities are gatekept, or at the other end unlimited weapons proliferation.
Worth noting is in this context the current renewable industry has plenty of 5s but there are easier to see pathways to eliminating them (and many of them are eliminating themselves simply because highly polluting mines and slaves have a minimum cost marginally higher than abundant materials and full automation).
Some variation on a TRISO-style pellet based pebble bed reactor that somehow used natural uranium at high enough burnup that mining could be kept under control would be the vague shape of addressing as many of the 5s as possible. In this context there is still a near certainty of someone doing a Chevron and quietly dumping a few hundred tonnes of spent fuel somewhere it would begin leaking and be impossible to clean up in a few decades, as well as cumulative low level medium lived radioactive emissions with a similar risk profile (although different mechanisms and harms) to CO2 or methane emissions (ie. Harmless at low levels but terrible in aggregate).
It's difficult to imagine a scenario where the number of 5s in a fission reactor is preferable to the alternatives. You'd need a breeder that could take U238/Th232 and breed/burn all of the Am,Cm,Np,Pu until only fission products were left as well as some way of vitrifying all of the fission products including tritium and noble gases on site with no effluent whilst never having a weapons grade fissile/fertile ratio in any of the weaponisable elements. Even then there would probably be one or two quite nasty long alpha decay chains with at least one medium lived step due to the number of opportunities for transmutation.
Even if that last were solved, it's still inferior to solar for building a civilisation on due to waste heat.
Such a device is also far more scifi than an anuetronic direct conversion He3 fusion reactor which also solves that last to about the same extent solar can (but has a more difficult pathway to being built from abundant materials).
You thought you heard something you didn't like, you panicked really hard, and you refused to receive any new information I tried to give you.
There was no meltdown. I was outlining the history of why your cry bullying wasn't the enlightened rationality you were pretending it was. And why people correctly refuse to trust it for sound meta-reasoning even if they don't understand the technical details.
You've not even attempted to dispense any new information other than asserting anyone who disagrees with you for any reason is doing it for irrational reasons and all of the deal breakers are actually fine if they'd just see what the new tech is (but you also carefully didn't define it so it can't be rebutted other than loosely implying passive meltdown safety sufficed to answer every objection which you've now walked back without acknowledging).
At least the usual reactionaries have the decency required to posit a semi-coherent position.
You accused me of it twice without evidence.
First time, you thought I wanted you to believe people, and that since you didn't, you were panicked. I never said that. You did. The comment I linked explained to another commenter why I don't want them to trust anyone. I replied to you that I don't want you to accept anything that's unacceptable to you. And the panic refers to inability to engage in the conversation.
Second time, you accused me of not acknowledging past lies. But I had already said that the nuclear industry would have to address past bad behavior. And like I said, you shouldn't be trusting people anyway.
You argued with yourself. You gaslit yourself. You cry-bullied yourself. You had a melt down. I told you I wasn't saying those things. You said I was. Repeatedly. That's on you.
And why would you think that I have some super secret new information specifically for you? I don't know you. I don't know what you know or don't know. It was a general comment about how some people would rather throw a tantrum instead of talking like a normal person.
> The only true fix would be a reactor and fuel design that can't melt down. A walk-away safe design that, even if you intentionally induced the worst disaster, still wouldn't pose a real threat to the public. Then it wouldn't matter if the operator was a cartoon villain determined to destroy the city.
> This is the part that people still don't want to hear. They can't accept that their pet concern can be eliminated by approaching the problem differently and breaking their assumptions. They look for new concerns, but educating them doesn't help because when they run out of unaddressed concerns, they just circle back to old concerns that were already addressed. Their concern was never more than an excuse. They just want the answer to fit their preconceived notions.
You've claimed 1) that the only possible objection is risk of plant meltdown 2) that there are credibly deployable technologies where this is categorically impossible and not just an extension of defense in depth 3) that the claimed existence of 2 satisfies any objections to existing reactors and not just potential future ones and 4) that any objection that doesn't fit this framework is the fault of the objector's reasoning faculties.
1 2 and 3 are untrue, and 4 places the blame for reality not agreeing with this on anyone objecting and silences any further discussion. This is textbook gaslighting. You also left just enough ambiguity that you can have a little cry if someone calls you out on it and call them emotional for reading what you meant rather than what you might possibly have meant if we really stretch the principleof charity to breaking point.
> I literally told you that you were wilfully misunderstanding me. You disagreed. That's on you. You gaslit yourself.
I briefly entertained the notion that you had made a good faith misunderstanding and were just an incredibly poor communicator and attempted to engage, but you disproved that resoundingly by refusing to engage in good faith. Now you are attempting yet again to claim any disagreement is a purely irrational response. This is a second attempt.
You've also abandoned the clearly stated claim that walk away safety satisfies all objections and claimed that you agreed all along Gen 4 reactors and their fuel cycles posed unnaceptable risks.
This is a third attempt at gaslighting.
You also keep talking about how you address concerns and educate people, but you've done nothing but insult.
> The gaslighting was referring to the industry's messaging as a whole and you knew this
I guess "your" means "the industry"? I'll go add that to the dictionary right away.
"My" 4 claims are your 4 claims.
For 1, context was Fukushima, which was a partial meltdown. So I gave a matching example about a concern about a meltdown. You extrapolated that yourself to mean that the only risk that exists is meltdown. I don't think that. Should have been easy to clear up early on.
For 2, I guess we should just trust you that there will never be a solution and never talk about it again? Ironic, coming from you. But also, I want to point out how I agree with you here. Most proposals are just defense in depth. People talk in circles when they can't categorize a proposal as defense in depth vs elimination by design.
For 3, I can't see anything I wrote to suggest this. It looks to me like the only evidence you had that I might think that was your misunderstanding of 1 and 2. Either way, I don't think that.
For 4, I don't even know how you got there. But again, I don't think that.
You're still adamantly telling me what I'm thinking. I'm still telling you that I don't think those things. How can I be a poor communicator if you're the one who's deciding what I'm saying?
Look at this from my perspective. You tell me what I said, and then rant about it and accuse me of being a bad person. Every time I try to tell you what I actually think, you say "no, this is what you think, and now I'm going to rant some more and tell you how you're even worse now". The only person who has the power to stop this cycle is you. You have to stop fabricating what I'm thinking.
Again, you're missing the subtle bit in addition to having nothing other than insults to offer.
You understood what I said in a very different way than I meant it. I recognized that early on and told you so repeatedly. You willfully ignored me, and apparently continue to do so.
What can I do to clarify myself? You haven't asked me for clarification. You misconstrue everything I offer up because you view it through the lense of the initial misunderstanding. You ignore me when I explicitly tell you we need clarification. I'm out of ideas. What am I supposed to do?
I already explained I never said that, much less repeated it.
Clearly I'm not really a participant in this conversation. If you want to continue this conversation with yourself, go ask ChatGPT to debate you or something.
Some of the relevant German organisations discarded dangerous waste at a construction site and then shredded the paperwork. That happened due to organisational traits, nothing to do with nuclear physics, but if my concern is that organisations with those organisational traits shouldn't be doing things with potential catastrophic effects, then you can't just answer with physics. Shredding paperwork is real, and my concern about is a concern to answer, not to ignore. If you ignore it, blame yourself for ignorance, not me for refusing to listen to "new information that addresses my concern".
This is similar to the Challenger space shuttle. NASA had organisational traits that led to powerpoint slides with seven different font sizes, and "the shuttle might burn" was in the smallest font size. The shuttle eventually did, and partly because organisation's culture was one to suppress risks using the smallest of seven font sizes. TEPCO did similar things at Fukushima — there was more emphasis on how to document that all requirements had been fulfilled than on maintenance. Sometimes that led to low costs and discrepancy between documentation and reality.
Fukushima has severity 5 risks, and some people are willing to accept them as long as they think the likelihood is 1. But not you, and that's fine. Me neither, btw.
This is the problem that new technology is trying to address. Eliminate the severity 5 risks.
But a lot of people are resistant to taking stock of what's been eliminated so far and what hasn't. That's the problem with the public discourse. That's the new information that people reject. They only think along the likelihood axis and can't recognize when the severity has been reduced.
Going back to your concern. TEPCO is an operator. They can only affect the likelihood, not the severity. That's why I don't want to debate you about them. I don't want to convince you to accept a severity 5. I want to ask you where you think we are in eliminating the severity 5s.
Bury it in geologically stable areas.
At some point: it will cool down on its own, or technology will be developed to re-use it in an economically-amiable fashion and we can bring it back up. We know how to re-process it [1] but no body really wants to pay for that.
As it stands: before we start worrying about what happens to nuclear "waste" 500+ years in the future, we have to get through the next 100 years and all the issues that climate change is causing right now.
Merkel as a quantum physicist, a PhD at that, knew how to read statistics and forecasts. her exit from nuclear was an incredibly wise and far sighted political measure. I hope we'll be wise enough to stick with it.
But along with her erratic nuclear policies she left highly crusted public authorities, a failed energiewende towards renewables, a strategic disaster in terms of russian gas and a dysfunctional army among many other things. She always presented opportunism as a legit style of doing politics ("Politik der kleinen Schritte") oftentimes leading to absurd compromises and systematic short-sightedness.
Her conservative party started copying US Republican tactics which harms the German system even more because it is much relying on compromises between political camps.
For me the only remarkable attribute about her is her willingness to do anything to stay in power. I'd bet she didn't even know what for.
Nuclear is failing not because of resistance from hippies or whatever. It's failing because it's far, far, far too expensive, by more than an order of magnitude vs. other renewable choices. There's zero value in spending Euros on a reactor when we could build a bazillion wind turbines and hydro pumps and battery farms for that cash. Nuclear might have a home at the very end of the process when we're trying to wind down the last of the gas peaker plants. But no, nuclear will never represent a significant fraction of renewable power generation. Never. No one wants to write that check.
It just doesn't work. You can blame your political enemies if you want, but that's not going to make a reactor appear.
We're already in serious trouble due to climate change, and our future looks increasingly bleak due to it becoming worse.
It's a big enough issue that the whole world should really be at war with burning fossil fuels right now, our best minds should be focused on solving this issue, yesterday.
What this article proves proves is that we're capable of solving really hard problems in very short amounts of time, "if the inventive is there". Clearly it was, I can't help but feel it has a little bit to do with profits and political motivations, which is why moving to renewables is happening (because it makes economic sense), but is the political drive and will to do more there? I don't think so.
This was a large project and completing it on time in 9 months is laudable.
A big fire can be bad, but is nothing like a detonation.
Germany already operates about 40,000 km of natural gas pipeline. This was a 26km extension in a flat and rural/industrial area. There was no engineering challenge here that they hadn't already pulled off hundreds of times before.
Doing anything like that in nine months is impressive. I haven't the faintest idea why anybody would say otherwise.
Did a "modern government" create this terminal or did a public company "simply" respond to market demand or other incentives like subsidies?
https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/klimaschutz/se...
So cutting the red tape actually means taking away freedom from the people, which is a serious matter and shouldn't be taken lightly (I agree though that the two sides of the problem need to be better balanced in Germany - in the end the main problem (usually) isn't the government, but a public opinion that's somewhere between indifferent to openly hostile towards change / progress).
Nukes are among the graftiest projects (alongside urban tunnels, some places). NB, even without the graft and even discounting public subsidy, they would be among the most expensive power sources, so there is never a good reason to build one.
Except they weren't really "built" in 9 months. Höegh Esperanza (the floating terminal), was commissioned in 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B6egh_Esperanza
In reality, oversimplifying wildly, it took 9 months to negotiate the contract and "plug" this preexisting terminal into the German gas network.
However, it's still impressive that our societies have tools like that available to handle unforeseen situations and crisis.
A farce of historical proportions.
1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/world/europe/nordstream-p...
Even the environmental effect was minor; the methane emission from the leaks had 1/5th of the GHG effect of my small country's, Denmark, annual GHG emission.
What is does do is reinforce the European dependency on Washington, as evidenced by this post.
1 - https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/russia-s-oil-...
Russia invaded in 2014...
70 is not less than 20.
I'm making you aware that Russia invaded Ukraine.
Sevestapol is from Ukraine, not Russia. As such, Putin (Russia) is the aggressor, not Zelensky.
And oil skyrocket because of Russian actions ( eg. Cutting off oil)
So yes, EU did pay the most money they've ever paid for gas to Russia, but that was a one-off situation, which is not going to repeat. Russia overplayed it's hand.
However, it just occured to me that LNG terminals have one big advantage over a Russia-Europe pipeline: There is exactly one country that can send gas through a pipline that starts in Russia.
There are many countries that can send ships to our LNG terminals.
If, how, and when we make use of that flexibility is another question completely, of course.
At some point we have to face reality that it was the west and most likely the UK and US in a joint operation as the no one else has such capabilities.
Once we accept that we need to ask ourselves (as Europeans) who is really on our side and who has OUR best interests in mind.
I don't blame the US for taking advantage of a crisis but we need to stop being so gulable to believe they won't as they have time and time again.
I didn't read about robots but divers that had to jackhammer under water.
Or not. Blowing up NS1 to pressure Germany to allow NS2 to open wouldn't be inconceivable, while also pushing up the price of gas through other pipelines. It's risky and stupid, but that also describes most of what Russia's been doing the last 9 months.
Implicit in the threat of “do what we say, or we turn the gas off” is “and we’ll let you keep the gas if you do”. Russia’s threats become completely empty and meaningless if the blackmailees know that the blackmailer can’t turn the gas back on.
The game theory becomes totally boring when both outcomes are “Europe doesn’t have gas”. The obvious strategy becomes “just support Ukraine because there is no penalty for doing so”. Which is the opposite of what Russia wants.
It also forces Europe to find other gas sources… after which, any future attempt to use gas for blackmail is less effective. Again, opposite of Russia’s interests.
Putin may be stupid, but he’s not that stupid.
Empty threats are Russia's MO and have been for literal decades now. They've threatened Europe with nukes so many times that it doesn't even make the news anymore when it happens. Also, NS1 was not the only operational pipeline and it would have been a massive win for Russia if Germany had flipped their decision on NS2 to ensure their own gas supply. And clearly if they're working on NS1 now, it wasn't damaged beyond repair.
> Putin may be stupid, but he’s not that stupid.
I don't know, it sure looks like it. Most of his recent actions seem to be best explained as short-term fixes to a massive strategic blunder. It's only human to try to read into things and assume there must be some greater plan to his moves.
And would those threats be more or less credible if Russia unilaterally destroyed all their own nukes (and proved that they had done so)?
> Most of his recent actions seem to be best explained as short-term fixes to a massive strategic blunder.
Uh huh. And how does this help him, exactly? Putin must be the dumbest person to ever play eleventy-seven degree chess with such skill.
> It also forces Europe to find other gas sources…
That was forced a while ago, the threat here is against those other sources.
I really don't get the whole "don't anger Putin" vibe, during the Vietnam War the USSR would send pretty much anything they could against the American forces. Even aircraft together with crews, as aircraft weapon systems really really require trained personnel. And no WW3 happened.
(also, I think you should have written "Vietnam is far away from Washington", it was the USSR in the position of today's NATO and America in the position of Russia in my analogy; and fair enough it is).
As for Ukraine, they will still have a hard time reconquering the area currently under Russian control. Resources on the Ukrainian and Western side are also limited.
And how should it conclude? Who should give up what?
Conclusion is return to at least Feb2022 borders, preferably 1991 borders. We have the international law for a reason, everyone agreed to this law (including the USSR) after WW2.
This leaves the question, is your proposed end acceptable for Putin? In essence your are saying, if I do not misunderstand you, undo the last year, at the very least. What makes you believe that Putin would judge the situation differently this time, i.e. that this situation does not warrant the invasion of Ukraine?
Sadly, given the delusions of Putin, this means having to prolong the war in Ukraine. Delivering yet more decisive defeats of the Russian military is likely to be the only thing that can shock him into realizing that what he wants is unachievable and he has to adjust his aims to reality.
What do you think this political aims are?
Don't know what the current aim is, could be simply a suppression of Ukraine through continuous damage so that it slowly becomes another Syria over the next decade.
There's also damaging "the evil West" in whatever way is possible, mostly by subverting the democratic processes. They did help with a few political movements (help, not necessarily start), we have evidence for that on both sides of the Atlantic. This goal probably didn't change.
You’re so anxious to proclaim this over, when the main course hasn’t even begun.
And, having read the Zalushny interview, you should know full well that what they need amounts to yet another army, their third in this conflict pretty much. And there’s no indication that they will get it.
They still do not have the necessary military force to conquer Kyiv, which is a necessary precondition for achieving regime change. However, even a conquest of Kyiv isn't necessarily sufficient to effect regime change; you'd need to demonstrate control of sufficient parts of the country to make a rump government or government-in-exile infeasible. That's likely to require controlling more or less everything east of the Dniper, Kyiv, and Odesa. Or basically everything outside of Western Ukraine around Lviv.
In short, Russia did not have anywhere near the military force needed to achieve even their most limited war aims if Ukraine were able to put together any kind of defensive force (which they did).
This leads to the next question, why does Putin want a regime change, after all regime change is not an end goal? What other avenues are there towards the underlying goals, i.e. how could he change strategy or where could be ground for a diplomatic resolution?
The alternative is the breakdown of the system of international borders and end of US hegemony. And nobody is in the western world should be taking these for granted in favor of a different empire, despite their well-trodden flaws.
The Russian Federation retains the right to use nuclear weapons [...] when the very existence of the state is put under threat.
I would think twice if hitting Russia as hard as possible - whether militarily or economically - is really in the best interest of everyone. It is certainly in the best interest of the USA, the weaker Russia becomes, the better, more energy to spend on China, but I am very unsure that hitting Russia as hard as possible is in the best interest of Ukraine.
And yes, I said what about, so let me be clear before you write anything about Whataboutism. I can accept a world with shitty rules where accumulating enough weapons grants you an unlimited stack of get-out-of-jail-free cards, but much worse than shitty rules are different rules for different players, that is truly unfair. Let's just tell Putin that he did a bad thing and then move on as if nothing happened. Or would it not be better if we opposed the USA - and any other country doing stupid shit - as vigorously as we oppose Putin?
I am not in a position to help the Iraqis today but I am in a position to help the Ukrainians, by advocating for their victory and by direct help out of my own pocket. In general those things should be considered separately, there is no simple connection between them. But yes America got away way too easily.
About nukes - the attacking coalition has simply never threatened the usage of nukes. You can also note that during the Vietnam war there was an American general that wanted to fix their military failure with nukes, and he was immediately dismissed from his job.
Back in the real world you have to make a tough decision - your ideals versus your wellbeing. You can keep pushing Russia, maybe it will eventually cave in, fine. But what if not? What if Russia eventually tells you in no uncertain terms, one more weapons shipment and we will go nuclear? Do you call and find out whether they bluff or nuke Ukraine? What if they actually do it? Are you willing to escalate from a proxy war with Russia to a war with Russia? Are you willing to make it a nuclear war?
The current damage and loss of life and health in Ukraine is already larger than a megaton bomb placed over a large-ish city.
Also, the US & NATO voiced publicly their planned response to the usage of a much smaller (kiloton range) nuclear device, namely the complete destruction of the Black Sea Fleet. They did so in the usual way of making former generals speak to the media.
It is also important to notice that it's not US/NATO/whoever's decision. The Ukrainians will fight with whatever they have available, a short talk with anyone in the country makes this crystal clear.
It could also be neither of these, but it cannot be both.
In the "real world", Ukraine seems quite willing to face the possibility of being nuked - if they were not, they would have already surrendered to the bully with the nukes. And it's the Ukrainians ultimately making the decision to keep defending themselves or not, regardless of this specious reference to "proxy war".
Furthermore, offensive nuclear use by Russia would most likely invite an overwhelming conventional retaliation by US and NATO forces, with the goal of preempting Russia from ever doing such a thing again. The alternative would be to just sit back and watch Russia conquer ever-more westward, while suffering the same ongoing "what if" worry.
The countries Russia seeks to assert hegemony over don't particularly want to be a part of that hegemony (even in Belarus!), and Russia doesn't have much in the way of carrots to offer those countries. Offering a diplomatic status that even freezes the status quo as de facto recognition only serves to legitimize Russia's use of invasion to get what it wants--note that this is the third war this century where Russia is invading another country to do this (the prior two being the Russia-Georgia war in 2008, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014).
Without any implications whether I agree or not and ignoring the means used in case this is what Russia wants and does, purely looking at the supposed goal - is this a bad goal?
1. By convincing its neighbours to allow it to be so
2. By forcing its neighbours to accept it as such
Russia's neighbours were not going to allow the former to happen for good reason, and Russia found its possible hegemony swallowed up as its former colonies joined the EU. Ukraine is just another one of these.
Carrot didn't work, so the stick became the only possibility for achieving the same goal. But the carrot never would have worked anyway. Ukrainians toppled Yanukovich precisely because Putin had him withdraw from the EU accession process. The EU has been the only path to prosperity for young people in Eastern Europe; with Russia lied only poverty.
So Russia not only didn't have anything to offer the countries it wished to become a hegemon of, it was also despised by the same countries because they had precisely lived under Russian hegemony within living memory.
The goal was bad because the means they are using were the only possible means. Once Ukraine joined the EU, it would have been lost to Russian hegemony forever.
But now I don't actually know why I went down this thread, I don't think Putin believes he should and can become a local hegemon.
As an outside observer, perhaps, but I suspect for those in Eastern Europe who lived under Russian hegemony in living memory, even this would be undesirable.
> But now I don't actually know why I went down this thread, I don't think Putin believes he should and can become a local hegemon.
It is a matter of speculation whether Putin actually believes in expanding Russia and its sphere of influence, or merely acts so, but it hardly matters if that's the way he's acting.
Cuba probably does not feel any better about the US hegemony, they are getting punished for no good reasons since 60 years.
It is a matter of speculation whether Putin actually believes in expanding Russia and its sphere of influence, or merely acts so, but it hardly matters if that's the way he's acting.
I think this makes a big difference because the possible solutions for this conflict will be very different.
Perhaps, and I wouldn't blame them either if they didn't want to be under US hegemony either.
> I think this makes a big difference because the possible solutions for this conflict will be very different.
Ukrainians will not accept not joining the EU; migrants will risk life and limb to board rickety deathtraps of boats to enter the EU.
Putin knows this, of course, and whether or not he believed in stopping Ukraine from joining the EU or only acted so no longer matters because this war aim is no longer achievable.
So he has settled at the moment for the consolation prize of the annexation of the four oblasts of southeastern Ukraine. Again, whether he believes in a Novorossiyan project or only acts as if so in order to come across as having at least gained something, anything from this war, hardly matters. The Ukrainians have little reason to stop their offensive at the moment. They likely believe (and I do, too) that they will be able to retake all of the land that the Russians captured last year, that they will be able to drive Russia back to at least the pre-February 2022 borders. If they are correct, there is no reason to settle for anything less than a return to those pre-war borders.
Either way, this is incompatible with both Putin genuinely wishing to annex these territories and Putin acting so but in reality just trying to scrape out a win.
If Putin is driven out of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, if the land bridge to Crimea is broken, if Ukraine can still join the EU, then he will have wasted untold resources and lives for nothing. No amount of spin can blind even ordinary Russians from realising that at that point, and whether Putin believes in this project or not, he has already inexorably tied his political fate and legacy to the outcome of this war.
And if Russia is pushed back to the pre-February borders and has nothing more to offer in negotiations, Ukraine may decide to push into Donetsk, Luhansk, and/or Crimea - and at that point, it becomes worse than just a waste, but a genuine loss.
The current aim may be to continie the war so as to defer the costs of failure. While the war continuing doesn’t guarantee that (see, fall of the Russian Empire), the return and demobilization of troops after a failed war isn’t without risks from those who opposed the war and those who supported it and are angry about the retreat and those who, whatever they thought about the war, are dissatisfied with the post-war conditions, which the war continuing can often defer.
However, this was probably a consolation prize after their decapitation strike failed, and may not have been their original plan. Russian ultra-nationalists do play up a notion of 'Novorossiya' which would include everything from Odessa to Kharkiv, however; this by now is utterly unrealistic, but Russia attempted to take both Odessa and Kharkiv early in the war. With the former, they were stopped at Mykolaiv, and with the latter they stopped short of managing to take the city itself.
They also lost the parts of Kharkiv oblast (which they did not annex) they had occupied around September or so. This opens them up to counteroffensives in Luhansk oblast (which they annexed), specifically around Kreminna (where there is ongoing fighting and a reported Russian withdrawal) and Svatove.
You can start with 'totally not a blockade':
> By using the term "quarantine", rather than "blockade" (an act of war by legal definition), the United States was able to avoid the implications of a state of war.
- After previous proxy wars that saw a country flooded with western weapons it was not unheard of for a new regime to turn around and sooner or later use all the weapons they got against western forces in turn (see Afghanistan for the most famous example). Governments do slowly learn the lessons of the past and are hesitant to give out too many weapons.
- Mobilization in Russia has seen hundreds of thousands flee the country and tens of thousands of young men have been killed or wounded. Even after the war ends and sanctions are eventually lifted, the demographic imbalances that Russia will face in the coming future will keep crippling its economy and army for decades. NATO doesn't care all that much about who rules the Donbas, but they do care about reducing the threat of Russia to its member states. Prolonging the war for another few years will see tens of thousands more mobilized Russians being fed into the meat grinder, making the future demographic problems that much worse.
- The Russian state falling apart and former provinces selling their nukes to the highest bidder would be a Bad Thing (tm), so we want to supply the Ukrainians with enough weapons so that they don't lose (and maybe win back the conquered territories) but not with enough weapons that they could conceivably make a big enough counter attack into Russia that it would fracture.
It's hard to see a case where the use of nuclear weapons would improve Russia's situation, especially where Ukraine is seeking to recover territory almost everyone other than Russia agrees is rightfully Ukrainian. The story changes a little more if Ukraine were striking at the heart of Russia, but that is not a realistic option.
You mean, pre-2014? They’ve already taken post-2014 “Russian” territory.
Ukraine is currently not close to retaking Crimea.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_annexation_of_Donets...
Nuclear weapons haven't even been used when Ukraine has hit Russias actual territory (in Russia) so why would they use nuclear weapons against Ukraine retaking its own territory?.
RE2) fair point, immoral but realpolitik, can't disagree
RE3) I'm talking about something in the order of what Zaluzhnyi recently asked in The Economist, a few battalions. This is definitely not enough to "conquer Russia", even a small part of it. The nazis used something in the order of a thousand battalions and still failed. Not to mention that I really don't see any political will in Ukraine to do that. Plus defensive nukes, Russian nukes are very very serious.
Russia will end up weaker and Ukraine will end up a bombed out shell of a country with rusting hulks from every other 1st world country scattering the countryside.
Ukraine isn't a black hole. Russia draining resources in Ukriane comes at the cost of Ukraine's own resources, in money and human lives, both economical, civilian and military.
The longer the war goes on, the more lives Ukraine loses, the more refugees (usually young skilled people) leave the country and the less chance they will return later to rebuild the country.
It's terrible for Ukraine to prolong the war.
the problem I'm saying is that the 1st world countries out there appear to be treating ukraine like a loss leader.
help them defend themselves. but that's it. No real action against Russia.. hell not really any sideway action against russia.
Assuming it was possible through increased arms sales/lend-leases/donations to tip the balance (it's not) - wouldn't a quick, comprehensive defeat followed by the accession of Ukraine to NATO and the EU be more of a destabilising black-eye for Russia than a slow-burn demographic time-bomb? Given that they've now seen first-hand the difference between being a NATO member and not, why would Ukraine then go on to burn the possibility of joining by then countering with an invasion of Russia?
If it was possible to end this quickly in Ukraine's favour without starting WW3 then NATO countries would have done so. At the very least so the the EU could go back to buying gas and oil from Russia.
A similar thing happened with the Sweden and Finland situation: NATO would prefer them to be a part of the alliance but had acquiesced to them remaining neutral. However when the war started and they decided they would actually prefer to join NATO now, the current members (except Turkiye, but even they didn't oppose it on military grounds) were more than happy to fast-track their joining procedures. Never waste a good crisis, as the saying goes.
I do think NATO could have done more if they really wanted to end the war quicker. As the original comment mentioned, the western countries have pretty large stockpiles of armored vehicles that could be sent over. There are also plenty of systems like ATACMS and cluster munitions that the USA has but has decided not to supply to Ukraine. The fact that NATO has so far declined to supply these weapons even though they could indeed be used to end the conflict sooner indicates to me that they are not interested in ending the conflict as soon as possible.
I agree that we can do more, but I don’t think we can do enough to turn the tides overnight without trucking in brigades of NATO forces and starting WW3.
But it was always planned on the stupidity of another country to escalate. And that's exactly what's happening.
In this situation you can't get rid of all the stale weapons, can't have a hundreds of new weapon contracts and can't have a perfect opportunity to sell LNG.
> At the very least so the the EU could go back to buying gas and oil from Russia.
This is not in the interests of one NATO country.
That wasn't a masterplan, but it's a result of decades of meddling in the politics of all states on Russian border. Yep, there was a disastrous blunder which allowed to the current situation to develop, but always remember what Soviets were 10 feet tall.
1. the war is being deliberately prolonged by US or NATO, despite the economic and political issues it causes domestically in many NATO countries, with the purpose of offloading some military equipment, selling a bit of LNG for a while and triggering a demographic problem some point in the future (one that didn't topple the USSR when it last occurred after WW2)
2. winning a war is hard and there's only so much hardware a country can use, and it's not clear at what point helping one country causes their opponent to turn to nuclear weapons
The first possibility involves nations acting against their own self-interests in service of a combination of small-fry trade and some nefarious bond villain style plan. The second involves some simple and observable facts.
> but it's a result of decades of meddling in the politics of all states on Russian border
I presume you are referring to Russia’s meddling in those states?
> This is not in the interests of one NATO country.
The entire EU would have been delighted if they were able to keep buying Russian gas at the price they did. They’ve just about managed to cobble together supplies to make it through the winter, and have bodged this floating LNG terminal quickly signalling what the future of EU gas imports probably look like. But make no mistake if they had a way to keep buying cheap Russian gas without throwing Ukraine under the bus they would absolutely have taken it. That ship has since sailed.
I presume you are completely oblivious on what US did in Ukraine in the last 30 years? Or it's a totally different thing, because evil Russkies and democratic Americans?
> But make no mistake if they had a way to keep buying cheap Russian gas without throwing Ukraine under the bus they would absolutely have taken it.
You are stating the reason here yet you are totally ignore it yourself. There is one country what doesn't depend on Russian gas and to which prolonging the crisis only provides benefits without downsides?
> raise Occam's razor
You need to compare comparable things. One thing is a Bond-like master plan. Other one is 'oh things hard' ignoring what this thing were baked for decades.
Yeah, because a federal state headquartered in Moscow would never fracture from the cost of a long slow war, only a quick clear defeat. (Please, please don't look at the last time a federal state headquartered in Moscow fractured and the war that set the stage for it.)
Western countries need to ask themselves: is funding a major proxy war against the second most powerful military in the world in our long term strategic interest?
Russia has a great domestic arms industry/natural resources and can resupply itself in isolation.
People need to realize that Russia's defense is primarily setup to defend its borders.
Any country other than the US would not fare well in a nuclear war with Russia, including China.
China hasn't been at war since the 70s. No one knows how well they would do in a conflict.
You simply cannot ignore nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are a great equalizer, that is why North Korea cannot be invaded from South Korea, despite South Korea having a much better "conventional" military.
Russia is a gas station that happens to have nuclear weapons, not the 2nd most powerful army in the world.
You probably heard about the sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. The Moskva was made in Soviet Ukraine, in Mykolaiv. Not in Russia. Shame they mismanaged it so much since then that just a few guided cruise missiles did the job.
The military budget of Russia is a far cry of the military budget of the Soviet Union. The scale is not even comparable, arguably the per-soldier performance went down as well.
I mean, why wouldn't it be? It's directly degrading an adversary and competing power. It's a lot faster than indirect means and it's a lot cheaper than going into combat ourselves. Sure, you could spin that as "imperialist Americans using poor Slavs as proxies" but really the "proxies" want the same outcome as America. Why shouldn't people with aligned interests work together?
Even if there wasn't some theoretical advantage to prolonging Russia's engagement to bleed them, or the risk of current tech falling into enemy hands, there just isn't the infrastructure in place to keep Abrams etc in the fight. Hell the fuel and ammo difference alone would be a logistical nightmare.
Ammo is already supplied in western standards (for example 155mm, even precision shells) in hundreds of thousands of tons.
This works fine for America because we invest heavily into logistics in the military, but other countries probably won't be helped by having to double up their supply to most tank operations.
And even if they get an Abrams that has half the range they'd take it at this point.
Afaik, while that's true for Abrams, it doesn't hold for Leopards. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can comment.
We're talking oldest Leopards and Marders here.
Also, it's not just about the vehicles in the Bundeswehr. It's about rallying the Rheinmetall clients to create a pool that can be donated from various European countries, for example adding the excuse to upgrade the european fleet to the latest Leopard standard. It has to start with political decisions, though. The Bundeswehr is fully behind this proposal (it was purposefully leaked to the press early on in the war).
Not questioning this but do you have a source for that?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/olaf-scholz-german-chance...
It doesn't say that the Bundeswehr was behind it, though. Just that "other top officials" were.
Probably those Leopards Ukraine gets will need to be stationed opposite the Belarussian border and near Kiev, and could not much alter the course of the war unless another invasion were attempted there.
They go out of their way to make everything diesel. two notable examples: there is a motorcycle reconisence squad and the us army had custom Kawasaki klr made with diesel engines for them. the lycoming company had a great deal of trouble making a small diesel engine for a little army drone.
The lycoming el-005 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW2T2lvQXBM
The reason is logistics, the army only wants to ship one type of fuel, and go out of their way to make that happen.
Happened with Western heavy equipment when the HIMARS and M777s were sent, happened with air defense with the Patriots, and I'm sure Bradleys will be sent next.
And for the offensive weaponry there is significant coordination among the Western parterns with many supplying equivalent weaponry at the same time (Germany supplied MARS II, which shoots the same rockets as HIMARS; as well as several PzH2000). Add on the the time needed for actually training the people..
But given that and that Poland initially agreed to the delivery and only afterwards started changing their tune, I don't think the PR angle is that far-fetched?
One thing I'd add is that Patriot != Patriot, this is a common name for essentially completely different weapon systems (air defense systems, but from different eras). Same as the S-300. So it could be that US is supplying some really old Patriots that would still work fine for taking down Kh-55 and Kalibr missiles. I don't think we know what exact Patriot battery configuration Ukraine will receive.
IIRC, since the war started, Ukraine has more than doubled its number of operational tanks, some from Soviet-era tanks from NATO member inventories, but mostly with captured Russian ones.
> I really don't get the whole "don't anger Putin" vibe, during the Vietnam War the USSR would send pretty much anything they could against the American forces. Even aircraft together with crews, as aircraft weapon systems really really require trained personnel. And no WW3 happened.
It came pretty close (also in Korea), but you’ll note that those were quite far from the US itself, and innthe Vietnam War the US still did escalate against neighboring countries, which is also something the US wishes to avoid Russia doing.
We're past that point since a long time ago.
Namely:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-19_Jupiter to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izmir_Air_Station in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%B0zmir
Now look at a map and compare the distance to the former territory of the Soviet Union and associates, and compare that with the distance of Cuba to the CONUS.
Whining pinschers...
Nowadays almost the whole of Europe is connected by international gas pipelines. Of course there are flow constraints, but it's hard to completely cut off any place. In theory one could send gas from Norway south through UK, Holland, Germany and Poland and then back up north through Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia all the way to Finland. Add the terminals dotting the map and it's a pretty resilient system. This is a nice resource. https://www.gie.eu/publications/maps/gie-lng-map/
This will not slow the green energy transition because hydrocarbons are still required for almost every technology in existence (including the ability to build PV panels).
In Appalachia we can set our tap water on fire because activists protest so hard against one last generation of nuclear plants that could have bridged the gap until solar energy became cheap enough to be ubiquitous.
These small but vocal groups were often funded by an odd mixture of dark money coming from former KGB operatives and fixers from the GOP who’d selectively boost useful policies to accomplish goals at odds with a happy, healthy populace.
Clearly, and this has become obvious on the global stage, if you have two equally sovereign powers making a deal and having aligned incentives (e.g. to build physical gas pipelines that cost a lot of money and can be blown up), then the more resilient approach that features decentralized and permissionless market access is that of LNG.
It's because LNG tankers are interoperable and they can technically come any moment from any new country. There's no direct platform-dependence on Russia for Germany anymore and with an extension of LNG ingestion capabilities, more diversity of supply will mean that gas now can't be leveraged as a power brokerage tool by a single country anymore.
It’s Putin’s, and a small group around him.
If the alternative to fracking is less energy consumption, then of course fracking is bad. But in the short run that means lowering the standard of living and politically that is a non-starter.
If the alternative to fracking is wind+solar+nuclear, then yes fracking is probably worse. But it will take years, if not decades, to build up the green power generation capacity to replace fossil fuels. We're on our way and we should be doing more of this, but we're not there yet.
In the current environment, Germany is reverting much of its energy generation from gas back to brown coal. This has far worse emissions than gas. As far as fracking goes, I'll happily accept a few earthquakes in the Dakotas over the ecological disaster that is coal.
All of the choices here are bad. We still need to pick the least bad one.
If you include fugitive methane from fracking it's almost a wash. It really is that awful,
I've been to small events in my local area where fracking has been damages water catchment areas. A professor from a nearby university came to give a talk on the damage it's going, why and how on earth would he be sponsored by Russians?
He showed us evidence, photo, statistical evidence which we could verify ourselves just by going for a short hike on the damage it was doing.
So honestly, I think you're wrong.
(In West Texas, at least; I don't know enough about the oil industry in the rest of the country to comment about it.)
(Though still several times less than imports from US.)
In hindsight, I do buy into the argument that NATO grew too much to the east, and there would have been wisdom in creating an "DMZ" between NATO and Russia. The growth of NATO left Putin feeling trapped. It would have been better to slowly move Western resource sources to better sources and friendlier countries.