#nuclear policy

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America’s nuclear arsenal to cost $946B over next decade, government report reveals - Breaking Defense

The estimated total rose by 25 percent over the last two years, according to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

i'm not sure if this is the best use of a trillion dollars for a state so deeply in debt, but there's little point in pretending that anything else is as responsible for allowing the deficit to continue

[weeedmannn]

India's strategic deterrence continues to strengthen, reinforcing national security and regional stability 🇮🇳

A credible defense posture, backed by technological advancement and preparedness, remains vital in safeguarding the nation's sovereignty and ensuring peace through strength.

[morlock-holmes]

The thing I don't get about opposition to nuclear is not the distrust of the experts who tell us it's safe, it's that it often comes from people who claim to believe that global warming could destroy human civilization.

But even multiple cases of ineptitude on the scale of Chernobyl wouldn't come even close to destroying human civilization, so isn't Nuclear power clearly still preferable even if you deeply distrust the experts?

PS - And honestly a bunch of Chernobyl disasters are really unlikely.

[corvid-420]

Scheduling error lol - Season 3 off to a great start!

We’re live, showtime in 14 minutes!

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thing about nuclear energy policy is you really can't consider it in isolation. like yeah at face value it really does produce less waste than other methods of energy production. it would be nice to be able to leverage these considerations to affect energy policy as if they exist in a vacuum but they flatly do not

in reality there is a bidirectional flow of fissile materials from reactor fuel production to bombs and back again. not so much back again ever since megatons to megawatts ended and we stopped buying spent warheads to run the reactor fleet, which has more to do with the expiration date on the icbm arsenal than anything else

the demand ratio has significantly changed in recent years between reactor fuel and bomb production, because we are resuming production of bombs, because the shelf life of the existing arsenal is ending. and both of these problems rely on the same mining, milling, refining, and reprocessing production chain. the effect being that the size of the global arsenal has stopped decreasing. when we started talking about building reactors again it's because we've already stopped talking about disarmament. inseparable topics. you do know they used a reactor to produce the wwii bombs, right?

if i wanted to phrase this in the most obtuse ridiculous or extreme terms i would say well actually 🤓☝️ all waste is nuclear waste because clearly all trade is influenced by nuclear policy doctrine. i would love to live in the imaginary world where we get to pick energy policy on its own merits without accounting for the structure of the government administrating it. but we don't!

notice how the list of countries with reactors without arsenals is very short in comparison to the list of countries with reactors and arsenals. notice the 100% overlap between the top 5 and the un security council. how curious and inexplicable these facts must be to the garden variety nuclear energy advocate. i suppose that's why they always ignore them?

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You: Radiation Poisoning DNI

i mean i was looking up radiation warning in free stock image icon repository for a reason

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once upon a time there was an empire that ran on a magic fuel source that no one could talk about. but they only used it to produce about 15% of the energy budget at best, and the rest went into very expensive boondoggle macguffin weapons that were designed for ostentatious display and to never be used

they built roads and tacos bell around these weapons and the senators and representatives from these areas always defended the weapons in congress, because they had brought road and taco jobs to town, which was very difficult because they couldn't talk about them. they loaded the weapons into boats and planes and kept them constantly deployed in the air and at sea so that they could issue a preemptive first strike any time anyone didn't agree to sign over their country's resources to the empire, which was also difficult because nobody could talk about it. once a year one of the weapons would fall out and get lost, and nobody could talk about it

they insisted -- without talking about them -- that the weapons and the power plants were very complicated and only very well trained experts were qualified to have learned how to talk about them without talking about them, but they used the academies to train them to only say good things about the empire

after about eighty years of this all of the infrastructure necessary to distribute essential goods and services was failing because it had never been maintained, and no one could talk about it because they had forgotten how to talk. everyone kept putting their money in the stock market because for their whole lives, the industrial average tended to trend upwards in the long term, and by never talking about it they had successfully erased the hundred thousand years of history that would tell us that empires don't last very long

one day a man threw a ball into the air and it fell back down, and he said "that's strange, things are only ever supposed to always go upwards forever in the empire," and from that day onward nothing ever fell down again. and everyone floated away into space, which made them happy because explosive decompression was kinda fun. like being a kid again

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i've touched on this topic before, and it is one with extremely wide margins of error on account of broad variability in theory and a pretty abject lack of precise situational data

but we're waging the most pointless war in history (a title with no shortage of candidates), all for the specter of a thousand pounds of enriched uranium in iran

the us consumes 100 million pounds of enriched uranium per year to fuel its 90 or so reactors, which is about half of global consumption at 200 million pounds. the nuclear industry often quotes a figure measured in billions of years for reactor fuel supply, but this is based on the capability of breeder reactors, of which there are exactly zero operating power plants at present

the us arsenal of about 5000 bombs is estimated to contain about 1 million pounds of enriched uranium, or about 200lbs per bomb, although again this varies greatly per each due to intended design yield and age (this is divided into about 1500 warheads awaiting dismantlement, 1700 deployed and 2000 in reserve)

the global supply of uranium ore -- were we capable of mining and enriching every last speck of it, which we are not, and if none of it goes to remanufacturing warheads, which some will -- would last about 90 years at present rates of consumption. due to the fact that the vast majority of uranium ore is and will remain unextracted, a supply shock is forecasted in about a decade

the manhattan project required about 20 million pounds of congolese uranium ore, which was exceptionally enriched in its natural state at about 20%. this manufactured two 150lb warheads to be detonated over japan (as well as prior and subsequent tests). the manhattan project would not have been possible without uranium from congo. when einstein and szilard starting writing letters to advocate for development of the bomb, they wrote to a belgian cabinet minister first (due to its colonial control over the congo until 1960) before they contacted roosevelt. the vast majority of naturally occurring uranium is less than 1% pure, and only possible to enrich with a robust and preexisting industry to process it

iran has never manufactured and was never going to manufacture warheads, even aside from the bombs we've been dropping on their enrichment facilities for decades and aside from israel's campaign to assassinate nuclear scientists. i am contradicting iaea analysis for the un, because it is plainly obvious to me it was politically motivated and not grounded in trivial if obscure scientific fact

i've touched on this topic before as well, but the un was convened in direct response to the advent of the bomb, and the five permanent members of the un security council are the same five countries with the largest nuclear arsenals

the only reason russia and subsequently china were able to develop nuclear weapons was because the rosenbergs leaked the design of the bomb from the manhattan project to the ussr, having correctly surmised that a unipolar nuclear armed body geopolitic would swiftly become unlivable. they were executed without trial

this has been the entire, openly stated, purpose built design and intent of the un since day one. to ensure that only allies join the security council. if they could have prevented russia and china from joining this group, they would have. this is why iran has not been allowed to develop a nuclear energy program. because it is an adversarial state to the us

this delicate balance of power was established by what history considers the greatest minds and diplomats. i've criticized them individually as well, but the point i'd like to make today is that this balance was so delicate it took one fucking idiot (puppet, supported by a coterie of abysmal, greedy and power grubbing cronies, which is to say ordinary capitalists) to destabilize it