Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats
- Thread starter GasBandit
- Start date
So MOST of the time it doesn't. And when it doesn't, you either would have to have stored it from "plus" days, or get it with on-demand sources. Not to mention the destruction mentioned in the article caused by the "gale-force" winds (that's from the article).
Nuclear. If only LFTR development hadn't been stalled because you can't (or it's really f'n hard) to make bombs from it.
Wind and solar, as expensive as they are, are still vastly cheaper than LFTR reactors, and that's just in initial cost, not long term running, maintenance, and most costly perhaps - fuel retirement.
http://www.windpowerengineering.com/policy/environmental/will-thorium-power-cheap-wind-power/
That article just talks about the cost to start one up, it ignores the long terms costs.
The only reason we have nuclear power plants at all is because they were used to make plutonium.
I don't think enough people understand that.
http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/plutbomb.htm
Our current plants are designed, optimized, and purpose built for the process of creating plutonium for nuclear weapons. One of the reasons people are pushing LFTR is because it can't be used to make nuclear weapons, but then you run into a curious problem:
If you aren't making nuclear bombs, nuclear power is more expensive than every other common power source.
And to top it off, nuclear is very risky, even once you choose a safer reactor design such as LFTR.
Want an eye opener? We have nuclear plants already built that are shutting down because they are too expensive to maintain, nevermind build, for the amount of power they put out. It's cheaper to shut down a plant than it is to run it for electrical production. And some of this is due to aging, but suggesting that it's cheaper to build a new 8 billion dollar nuclear power plant when refurbishing or upgrading, or adding a new reactor to an existing plant is ridiculous. Particularly when no one wants a new plant in their back yard.
It's just simple economics. Unless you are a nuclear power and need, or needed, the ability to produce weapons grade plutonium, then you simply don't have nuclear power plants. With rare exception, if you have nuclear power plants, you almost assuredly have nuclear weapons.
NASA just recently asked the US to restart plutonium production so they can make ore deep space missions which will require nuclear power sources. They only want 2kg, but this involves so much regulatory, treaty, etc burden that I'm still not sure they have it, though they made the request awile ago. Looks like they may start getting some soon: http://www.universetoday.com/100875/u-s-to-restart-plutonium-production-for-deep-space-exploration/
Anyway. Just a reminder.
Nuclear is expensive.
http://www.windpowerengineering.com/policy/environmental/will-thorium-power-cheap-wind-power/
That article just talks about the cost to start one up, it ignores the long terms costs.
The only reason we have nuclear power plants at all is because they were used to make plutonium.
I don't think enough people understand that.
http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/plutbomb.htm
Our current plants are designed, optimized, and purpose built for the process of creating plutonium for nuclear weapons. One of the reasons people are pushing LFTR is because it can't be used to make nuclear weapons, but then you run into a curious problem:
If you aren't making nuclear bombs, nuclear power is more expensive than every other common power source.
And to top it off, nuclear is very risky, even once you choose a safer reactor design such as LFTR.
Want an eye opener? We have nuclear plants already built that are shutting down because they are too expensive to maintain, nevermind build, for the amount of power they put out. It's cheaper to shut down a plant than it is to run it for electrical production. And some of this is due to aging, but suggesting that it's cheaper to build a new 8 billion dollar nuclear power plant when refurbishing or upgrading, or adding a new reactor to an existing plant is ridiculous. Particularly when no one wants a new plant in their back yard.
It's just simple economics. Unless you are a nuclear power and need, or needed, the ability to produce weapons grade plutonium, then you simply don't have nuclear power plants. With rare exception, if you have nuclear power plants, you almost assuredly have nuclear weapons.
NASA just recently asked the US to restart plutonium production so they can make ore deep space missions which will require nuclear power sources. They only want 2kg, but this involves so much regulatory, treaty, etc burden that I'm still not sure they have it, though they made the request awile ago. Looks like they may start getting some soon: http://www.universetoday.com/100875/u-s-to-restart-plutonium-production-for-deep-space-exploration/
Anyway. Just a reminder.
Nuclear is expensive.
GasBandit
Staff member
Huh. That directly contradicts the conventional wisdom I'd been taught about nuclear, that it was expensive to build but cheap to run.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx
The nuclear power industry has done a very good job selling the idea of nuclear power, but every single contract to build a new plant since 1973 has been cancelled long before it is built. We're not building new plants. We're shutting down old plants.
If they were profitable you'd see investors clamoring to build them.
Without the profit of plutonium (and production purportedly was halted on that in 1988, only to be restarted on a small scale for space exploration), nuclear power plants are really only around today on the off chance that we need more plutonium. No one's going to build a new one.
I suppose eventually we might see an LFTR plant come on line, but so far all the proposals, investments, and plans have come to nothing. Lots of people losing lots of money, particularly because the first few plants will cost 10-30 times over the estimate, and won't work as well as they're supposed to. They are essentially big prototypes.
If they were profitable you'd see investors clamoring to build them.
Without the profit of plutonium (and production purportedly was halted on that in 1988, only to be restarted on a small scale for space exploration), nuclear power plants are really only around today on the off chance that we need more plutonium. No one's going to build a new one.
I suppose eventually we might see an LFTR plant come on line, but so far all the proposals, investments, and plans have come to nothing. Lots of people losing lots of money, particularly because the first few plants will cost 10-30 times over the estimate, and won't work as well as they're supposed to. They are essentially big prototypes.
This doesn't ring true to me.
Canada has nuclear plants but not nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan and China have built the reactors we designed, but did not use them to build their nuclear weapons.
So that's four countries (and theres a few more) that built these things exclusively for electricity generation. It seems likely the US would still have built theirs, too, even without the plutonium production side effect. At least, likely enough to make that "only reason" claim seem like empty rhetoric.
You just listed four countries that have or had nuclear weapons, and that produced plutonium in order to obtain nuclear weapons. Canada is the only one that chose to dismantle their nuclear platform in the late 80's and now claims to have no nuclear warheads.
I don't assert that every nuclear power plant has been used or is capable of producing plutonium. It's possible that Canada obtained all their plutonium from the US or other countries, and have never used their reactors for its production. I don't know how many reactors in the US were used for production of plutonium. A lot of this is not public knowledge.
New reactors are coming on line - TVA is bringing a new reactor online right now, but it's an expansion to an existing plant. The expansion started in the 1970's, but ran into many, many problems. When oil prices went way up and we were seeing $3-4 per gallon of fuel a decade ago for over a year, a lot of people started investing in nuclear, and it experienced something of a resurgence. Then the housing bubble burst, a mini recession started, and while some of these projects have licenses to start the long path of making a nuclear power plant, many are stumbling and can't get enough investment to move forward.
Distributing our plutonium production capacity around the US was a deliberate choice, though, during the cold war. Our plants were partly built on the premise of cheap electricity, but that premise is faulty, and they were only really put into place to cement our ability to respond enthusiastically to the conditions created in the cold war.
I think nuclear power can be cheaper than many sources of power, and obviously looking forward to a post-oil economy they may provide a significant support before we figure out fusion, but they really are relics of the cold war, and if they were only built using no government support, had no military value, and had to live or die based on their own profit, we would simply not have as many as we have in the US. Probably very few, after Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island taught us just how risky they are. They only account for 20% of our electrical capacity in the US. It's significant, but if they were cheaper we'd have more. They're not.
Only by their own will. If they ever needed to, it's been estimated they could make atomic bombs within weeks, if not days. However, Japan needs the nuclear power plants for a different reason: it doesn't have the free space to place a bunch of coal and oil plants in major areas like the Tokyo megaplex and even if it did, it would need to import virtually all of the oil and coal needed to run those plants. Nuclear energy is a much larger part of their energy means than many other countries, which is why the public-demanded nuclear ban after Fukashima didn't stick: the rolling brownouts during the hot summer made miserable for everyone.
We have treaties, licenses, etc, and broad ability to inspect those plants to make sure they aren't being used for weaponization programs. For countries with little other sources of power, nuclear makes a lot of sense. Take Belgium for example - electricity is twice that of the US, and significantly above its neighbors. So without the natural resources to supply their own power, nuclear makes good sense. Further, their energy policy promotes nuclear as cleaner than other sources, and so they've convinced their citizens that their higher prices are better for the environment (which is true) and so people aren't clamoring for lower cost energy.
There are, of course, going to be exceptions to my generalization. While it's easy to assume my statements are "this is a fact for everyone everywhere" the reality is that I'm speaking very generally, and, to a degree, being US-centric. That said, we wouldn't be using this nuclear reactor design, and it wouldn't have gone this far without the military uses. Companies are developing new reactor types, and trying to sell them, but energy is so cheap, and the military value so small that few are pursuing them.
It's also important to consider the ramifications of large scale nuclear power plants. A distributed power system with many smaller plants is a lot more robust to natural, man made, and other types of disasters. Nuclear power plants are most efficient in very, very large sizes. There's a bit of "eggs in one basket" there, not to mention that the longer you have to transmit power, the less valuable it is due to transmission losses. Countries in Europe and Asia with very high population densities make a better case for nuclear power plants than the US. So in many cases the economics do balance out the inefficiencies.
Japan is a very interesting case, but I don't really have time to go into it. Being the only country on Earth to experience the atomic bomb and still embrace nuclear power is quite extraordinary...
Both are wrong, and we need to return to harnessing horses as the ultimate power source.
Horse-power for horses only!
At this point, we're probably better off harnessing fitness centers, and also making exercise mandatory for all (able-bodied) citizens.
--Patrick
Hey the world isn't going to run solely on vinegar and baking soda. We need alternatives, and we need 'em now!
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
Well grats on invoking one of the internet's oldest memes.
That's pelting your opponent with phalluses in Mortal Kombat, right?
Also the fact that the DEA is for all intents and purposes a branch of the Sinola Cartel. Legal Marijuana would cost them 25-40% of their revenue; just legalizing it in Colorado had a major impact on their cash flow.
GasBandit
Staff member
Yeah, this is gonna go over well.
Surprising nobody, China militarizes the islands in the SCS they promised they weren't militarizing.
Surprising nobody, China militarizes the islands in the SCS they promised they weren't militarizing.
And who's going to do anything about it?
Nobody, really. I'm sure they'll get a strongly worded letter, though.
GasBandit
Staff member
The Phillipines are the most majorly aggrieved party in the South China Sea dispute, but they have no navy to speak of. They would have to rely on their ostensible allies, the USA, to confront China. But we're not exactly high on each others' friends lists right now.
The whole "militarize artifical islands" thing still seems odd to me. They aren't Chinese territory. They can't be used to legally extend their claims on the South China Sea. Is it just pandering to the people at home?
GasBandit
Staff member
I don't think they care about "legally." They can be used to pragmatically extend their influence on the region.
Yeah, and the Crimea isn't Russian territory, either, so militarizing it won't legally extend Russian claims towards the Black Sea, either.
MAD is all well and good, but, just like during the Cold War, everybody knows full well no-one will escalate that for or that strongly for some piece of land nobody important cares about. Sure, Syria or Iraq, they can get invaded or attacked or bombed. No-one, including the USA, wants to become formally hostiel towards a bigger player. Russia and China can pretty much do whatever they want in smaller areas where the USA isn't dominant, and who's going to toch them? Nobody.
But Russia has reasons to want Crimea on its own. Do these islands have any intrinsic value?
But that influence is illusionary; they can't bully US allies because they can't beat our navy... and the longer they keep pressuring their neighbors, the easier it's going to be to dictate terms to our allies. It's a Catch-22; the very thing China thinks it needs to do to extend it's influence is eroding it's influence. Unless Jinping actually believes we'd hang our allies out to dry and lose our containment like Putin seems to think we would in Europe.
Honestly, I'm just waiting for the UN Security Council to fall apart at this point. Or World War 3 to begin.
Have you not noticed that's exactly what you're doing? Ukraine's an ally. Turkey's an ally. One's been invaded and steamrolled. The other we've all openly said we don't like anymore, and that we think they're heading towards dictatorship. The Baltic states are allies, but Russia's got huge troop concentrations along the borders and nobody bats an eye.
The UN has become as toothless and ignored as the League of Nations was. The USA may have the strongest and best-equipped army in the world, but as has been pretty conclusively proven between Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Crimea, Tsjaad, Sudan, etc etc, that alone doesn't mean much anymore. You can't fight on 10 fronts all at once. You can't just go in and establish dominance - heck, that's failed every time since at least Vietnam. Every new proxy makes it clearer and clearer that just raw power doesn't mean much. Military might is useless without the "hearts and minds", and they aren't following.
So, yes, I'm expecting WWIII to come soon, too. Turkey's falling into the Russian sphere of influence, no-one in the West wants to fight or to give up the economic benefits of building our wealth on the backs of poor semi-slaves elsewhere. Africa is mostly under Chinese control and sure as hell most countries don't care a fig for our Western values. The middle east is a lost cause drowning in their own problems and exporting those to the West. Most of Asia's up for grabs between Russia and China. South America is...;well, pretty insignificant, really, at the moment.
GasBandit
Staff member
Basically what Bubble said, to a large degree. China doesn't have to fight us, they just have to make our pitiful excuse for a state department think they would try, and we'll buckle like a belt because that's all we've done basically for 8 years (and from the looks of things, will continue to do for another 4-8 years).
We may have the strongest military on earth, but we don't have the will to use it unrestrained. We haven't really won a war (outside of little gilbert and sullivan adventures like Granada and Desert Shield) since WW2. You know what won WW2?
Massive.
Civilian.
Casualties.
We may have the strongest military on earth, but we don't have the will to use it unrestrained. We haven't really won a war (outside of little gilbert and sullivan adventures like Granada and Desert Shield) since WW2. You know what won WW2?
Massive.
Civilian.
Casualties.
Last edited:
To be fair, a candidate saying "we need to raise the defense budget, up the readiness of the army, and be prepared to engage in yet another armed conflict somewhere in the back-end of the world" might as well not put his name on a ballot. It's not (just) political lack of will, it's the population who's never seen war and doesn't see why they (and we, most certainly) should bother.