There’s nothing I can say about this. Russian bad guy Putin has pissed off Russian mercenary and bad guy Prigozhin, and now we’ve got what looks like a full-blown civil war, with Prigozhin marching on Moscow, while the Ukrainians stand in awe as their enemy looks to be killing themselves.
I don’t know how this will end! No one knows what will happen! People will die and cities will be devastated, but beyond that, it’s Godzilla vs. Ghidorah.
I think NATO might be flying bags of popcorn into Kiev, but otherwise, I’m just going to sit back and watch incredulously. Hmmm, I might have some popcorn around the house, myself.
Don’t even try to predict what’s going to happen. This is chaos, remember.
I’m just going to repost my last update.
Offsite today to have fun on the water so I’ll miss some (or all maybe) of the action.
Update this morning PDT.
Lipetsk is 288 miles from Moscow and Wagner is now over halfway between the Ukraine front and Moscow.
The Russian army attacked Wagner several times and Prigozhin claims they hit their base with a large rocket killing lots yesterday.
Russia is a cruel and brutal society where things are often settled by who kills who first.
It’s obvious Prigozhin ended up on a “Falls out of a window” list and decided he has no choice but to fight it out.
Unconfirmed reports are that large numbers of private jets are leaving Moscow. The oligarchies decided it was time for their summer vacations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyiv#Name
Ironically I forgot to pack a bag of my beloved SkinnyPop for work. Sucks! Might pop some when I get home.
Basically a heel just turned on an even worse heel as often happens in wrestling. Usually during a wrestling match nobody gets defenestrated. Who goes out the window first?
The Kursk sub disaster happened almost 23 years ago which gives you an idea how long Putin has been in power. So glad Dubya peered into his soul for us. Sure Dubya came into power under shady circumstances, but at least he was actually term limited. Tsar Putin is the poster boy for that.
Meant shucks instead of sucks, but a happy error.
When you hire mercenaries, you have to wonder what happens if the other side offers them more. And you’d better treat them right or they will turn on you. This seems to be the latter case but it makes me wonder if the NATO allies decided it would be cheaper to buy off the Wagner Group than fight them.
Yeah, nobody will know what will happen, we don’t even know what is actually happening.
Some people speculate that Prigozhin has support from people inside the regular military or the government, otherwise his attack on Moscow seems rather foolish. But maybe he just believes soldiers and citizens will rise up an follow him?
I’ve read that police and military don’t seem to eager to engage Wagner, but does that mean they support his goals or do they simply not have enough forces close by (for now)?
The only thing I feel confident in predicting is that people will suffer and die and the situation for the people in Russia (and possibly elsewhere, conflict inside Russia would be devastating for grain exports) will get worse.
How nice this world would be without people like Putin and Prigozhin … and the millions that seem to follow and support them.
I think I should have picked up that popcorn at the store. Can just leave it in the window for the fireball to pop.
First, I disagree with PZ, it’s an insurrection and mutiny, not a full on civil war. Otherwise, the cities Wagner passed through would be aflame.
No Russian response thus far, other than girdling Moscow and a few other strategic points with reserve forces and likely, a trebling of the guard on nuclear strategic forces.
One equation currently being gauged in D.C. is, we know what to expect of Putin in control of the Russian nuclear arsenal, we have no clue what to expect of Prigozhin, but my suspicion is, it ain’t good.
That means considering and preparing for a preemptive strike against Russian ICBM and submarine bases, then a possible pause to see their response as a gauge of intent. And hope that dead hand doesn’t activate.
Remember now, nukes make us safe and have entirely stopped wars from happening.
This message brought to you by Duke Nukem.
Yeah, one thing all forget, this is a nightmare scenario, a potential coup in a nuclear armed nation.
One upside is, I’m in an area ringed by communications nexus points and military depots. Probably won’t have time to notice how bright it got outside.
Or it could be that now that the whole Russian army is tied up with the Ukrainian counter offensive, the only guy with an army thought of stealing the whole cake.
I predict (yeah, PZed, I know it is KAOS) that Fox Newz will soon be explaining that the Russian army is ‘woke’.
Prigozhin is claiming his forces are turning back from Moscow, “to avoid bloodshed”.
Rather uncharacteristic of him, save if he’s gotten a sweetheart deal.
Oggie: Mathom @ 10, don’t you mean that the Russian army was distracted by Pride events being held in Ukraine?
That and “woke” crap sounds more like Fox’s arsenal of rectally procured reporting.
In very recent videos, Prigozhin said that the reasons for the war are a lie and farce, and said that casualty numbers are like 10x or 100x what are reported in Russian state media. With respect to post #1, I am not going to pretend my prediction is anything but a wild guess, but from that alone, it might be better with Prigozhin in charge of the nuclear weapons compared to Putin.
@8 The possibility of nuclear war has made me wonder how up to date the Russian target list is. Just behind this hill here used to be a rather extensive US military base, including a “special ammunition storage”. The whole thing began shrinking in the 90s and was closed in the late 00s, but I’m not sure if the Russians noticed.
Trotsky famously described the initial successes of the Russian Revolution with an anecdote: as the masses rose up, the Tsar ordered a cordon of Cossacks to guard his palace. A rebelling worker approached the line of cavalry and looked the nearest horseman in the eye; the Cossack smiled back, the worker ducked under his horse, and the revolutionaries seized the palace, and the empire.
Prigozhin apparently hopes this will happen again – a slim prospect that one social media channel can outweigh the combined pressure of the complete Russian propaganda system. I wouldn’t want to make that bet – but so far the reports I’ve read indicate the tv talking heads are nattering almost randomly, as if waiting for orders that haven’t arrived.
@13 Prigozhin has been singing in Putin’s propaganda choir until telling the truth seemed to bring himself an advantage in the struggle for power. I don’t see a reason to think he would be better than Putin – he and his private army have shown that they are nothing but brutal, sadistic fascists.
mordred
I don’t think it’s correct to simplify down people so much. I do think Putin really envisioned himself as the great restorer of the greater Russian empire. Prigozhin doesn’t seem to be quite so ideologically wed to that outcome. Again, I consider this barely better than wild mass guessing, but this is what this thread is for, yea?
Also: It seems Putin’s private jet has left Moscow for an unknown destination. Of course the official channels claim he is still in the Kremlin, but I would actually be surprised if that was true.
Prigozhin has control of central Rostov, on the logistic artery to Ukraine.
When he found himself outmanouvered, he moved to potentially block the logistics and maybe force Moscow to a backroom deal.
Here is a three-hour podcast by my favourite milbloggers.
https://youtu.be/AAMsQnms3qs
mordred @ 14, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the only thing that did keep receiving adequate funding was the strategic rocket forces. Later, intelligence funding got massively ramped up again.
So, I suspect that their target list is fully up to date. Nukes are expensive and rather short in number to be expended on empty targets.
birgerjohansson @ 19, I was suspecting something like that, hence comments elsewhere about a potential sweetheart deal. Given allegations that Wagner forces are turning back from Moscow, once they’ve threatened the city, but not closed on it yet, yeah.
mordred @ 18, that’s SOP for Russia and the US, likely for all modern powers now. Capitol under threat, evacuate the head of state to a secure location. Russia has similar capabilities to ours in protecting their president, both airborne and ground.
The Russians are just as stupid as the rest of humanity, which means they’re also equally bright. It’s just a human trait to keep on doing stupid shit like warfare.
If true, it sounds like Putin capitulated, and it’s Prigozhin who calls the shots now. Only a weak leader would call someone a traitor on national TV only to strike a deal with then a few hours later. There’s talk that the deal involves most of the Wagner Group heading for Africa where they can continue to rape, pillage, and slaughter in peace, and I can only surmise that Prigozhin will be going with them, permanently, as part of that deal, since having him stick around in or near Russia would only expose Putin’s weaknesses even more.
It’s disappointing that this did not drag on longer. It would have been to Ukraine’s benefit if the Russians had been kept busy fighting themselves.
Less than 24 hours of insurrection is pretty fast. Everyone is now going to be curious what the deal is that they made, and how long it’ll stick.
Wagner showed that Russia is basically undefended. That’s going to have … interesting consequences. I mean, the “free russian league” and friends also showed that by using a couple hundred men to seize border territory without much reaction, but any rebel group who can scare up a couple thousand soldiers is being told they will have free rein to conquer some bit of territory.
It is telling that the Russians found two buses and a truck with money in it and Prigozhin admitted that it was his, claiming it’s for payroll.
Well, we’ll see. Things could still shift, Putin could renege or attack, Prigozhin could change his mind and decide that he wants to become Czar.
It ain’t over until the fat elephant farts.
If by “better” you mean “nicer”, then I doubt anyone would disagree. By all accounts, Prigozhin is a vicious bastard.
That said, would the world be better off with a newly empowered Prigozhin, rather than a fully entrenched Putin? Either way, having the bastards fight each other is probably a good thing, no matter what the outcome.
Somewhere out there on the interwebs (Daily Kos?) is a video of a Ukrainian soldier sitting on the tailgate of his truck eating from a huge pile of popcorn.
I haven’t dug into the report, but I just saw a headline that the president of Belarus has negotiated an agreement with Prigozhin and Prigozhin announced they were “standing down.” Be that as it may, I would guess there’s still a lot up in the air. If Putin pushes to prosecute Prigozhin, it seems likely Prigozhin will push back. Meanwhile, Prigozhin has publicly aired the failings of the war and the rationale behind it. This won’t make him any friends in the Putin cricle but I would guess a lot of Russians probably find Prigozhin’s assessment to resonate with their own…assuming of course that they get to hear it at all. In any case, the events of the last 48 hours demonstrate how precarious the situation for Putin and his pals.
RE: Ukrainian popcorn video.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/24/2177343/-Wagner-with-nukes-Russian-senior-officials-flee-to-St-Petersburg
About 3/4 the way down the page, under heading: “This is some next-level trolling.”
Vausch at Youtube says the boss of Wagner may be in the process of cutting a deal with Putin, avoiding having Wagner integrated with the ministry of defence and eventually pulling the Wagner group out of Ukraine to do more profitable war-lording down in Africa.
If this is the outcome, the whole business was just an old-fashioned feudal power struggle by people who kill for money.
Not renting the nukes bit. They can try, but spetsnaz guard the Russian’s nukes. Wagner might have a tough row to hoe against them.
Well, there is one major upside of great significance. Not a single headline with Trump in it.
Maybe I should have a party.
Good news for Ukraine.
Maybe not so good news for people in Africa, if the Wagner thugs continue their activities down there.
Weeeell, it seems this particular tiff between mafiosi ended wothout bloodshed, just some more under-the-counter dealings thanks to a third mafioso helping to grease the wheels.
Who knows how this gawdawful mess will develop, but it seems this fella had it nailed before it began:
Excellent delivery form someone who had his fill of this sort of crap…
So the Wagner Group is being disbanded (or at least is signing contracts with the Russian military, not sure if that’s the same thing) and Prigozhin gets to keep his life, going into exile in Belarus for some unstated period of time.
Sounds like the immediate crisis for Putin has been resolved, but this has seriously weakened his standing in the eye of potential rivals, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a major clampdown on future dissent, however mild, or to see someone else emboldened by Prigozhin’s gambit, perhaps even Prigozhin himself, if he feels betrayed in any way.
Matt G: I presume you mean the video of Magyar’s Birds? They’re a drone unit that was active in Bakhmut, and remains active, inventing new drone tactics every month that have been extremely effective.
They’ve moved up from spotting for mortars to fitting small guided bombs capable of destroying light armor.
What scares me about “Wagner group getting teh noooks” (which now looks to have been deferred) is the same thing that scares me about “India and Pakistan having teh noooks” — grossly inadequate command and control.
For all of the faults of the Russian military hierarchy — and they are many, and as a cold warrior (however much my “primary” duties focused on a different region) I studied them extensively then and have seen little sign of substantive change since — its members are professionals in the application of violence in support of state operations. For whatever merits there may be of the Wagner Group’s hierarchy — I haven’t seen any, or seen any signs of any — its members are… not. They are, instead, driven by cost-benefit analyses that neglect long-term consequences (primarily because “those are the client’s concern”). But when the long- and short-term consequences include “far more effective at denying territory than salting wells, and lasts for thousands of years”…
A civil war in Russia? That’s not gonna happen. Prigozhin is a head of a mercenary/contractor force; he’s not a political actor with a political base, like Navalny; and he’s (AFAIK) not aligned with any political agenda and has made no visible attempt to rally any segment of the civilian population. And the Russian people have (so far at least) shown absolutely no taste for bloody internal civil war or revolutionary violence. Either Prigozhin is flipping out due to anger and frustration, or he’s making scary noises to badger Putin into buying him out somehow (and the bit about him moving to Belarus kinda suggests the latter).
Also, why the AF would Prigozhin even want to try to seize control of any part of Russia’s nuclear arsenal? Even if he got a bunch of nukes and managed to rewire them into his own C3 system, it would only scare everyone else into isolating and opposing him. Threatening to nuke Moscow, or any other target inside Russia, would make him a “terrorist,” not a “man of the people.”
tacitus:
The Civil War is no longer official, for you, then. :)
BTW, back in early June, Shoigu issued a directive that all ‘volunteer detachments’ must sign military contracts by July 1.
Perhaps consider whether this incident is somehow related to that directive, given the timing.
You sure have an interesting take on things.
Me, I think it’s a bit simplistic to think Putin is weakened (sorry, seriously weakened) by the state military taking over those forces and exiling Prigozhin to Belarus. Which of course is in no way beholden to Russia, right?
On another note, nobody here has speculated about whether the attacks on Wagner forces were false-flag stuff. But then, that’s not the sort of thing the Russians do, right?
You do know that people live in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, right? Especially air-bursts which are used for maximum damage. Very different from a nuclear reactor accident.
https://www.newsweek.com/are-hiroshima-nagasaki-still-radioactive-nuclear-1751822Please see also:
http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/plutonium-bernard-cohen.htmlThe dangers of radiation presented in most mainstream media is exaggerated a million-fold. (The dangers of nuclear weapons – by contrast – are not so exaggerated.)
And on the off chance that you’re referring to the nuclear winter, that’s also been mostly discredited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winterPS: What hasn’t been discredited from large scale nuclear war is the deaths of tens or hundreds of millions of people from the initial explosions, and the deaths of most of humanity in the aftermath from starvation because the global economy is destroyed.
Diversionary crankery @40 noted and dismissed.
“Crank”. Yep. That’s why Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ghost times now, amiright? Salted for a thousand years, right?
Why are you so dogmatically attached to the idea that nuclear power and radiation must be this unimaginably horrific thing even though all of the evidence points the other way, much of which I regularly cite? Why do you call me a crank? Do you think any of the things I’ve just said are wrong? I just don’t get this religious opposition to what should be uncontroversial facts.
Everyone knows nukes are just a big “boom!”, and then everything is peachy fine after that. Radiation bahdiation!
GerrardOfTitanServer @ 40, it’s a lot more complex than that.
For the Castle Bravo test debacle, the men firing the device were trapped for the entire day within the deepest dug in section of the shot cab bunker, when fallout shifted over their location. A week later, the radiation was low enough to allow cleanup crews in to lower the radioactive fallout level much lower.
Can’t say the same for occupied islands, where dozens were sickened by radiation sickness, birth defects soared, thyroid cancers abounded in their children and those islands remain uninhabitable today, as any food still is contaminated.
Of course, Castle Bravo turned into a nasty ground burst, as the yield was double and change what was anticipated
It still doesn’t explain why we shouldn’t be concerned that a loose cannon civilian and a civilian he is, tried to get to nuclear weapons to seize them. I suspect the intent was to just sit on them, as all Russian devices are now under a system similar to our permissive action link system. Hotwiring them would be like trying to perform a root canal through the rectum.
Fortunately, those are guarded by Alpha group spetsnaz. A confrontation between them would be equivalent to our infantry taking on special forces.
I’ll wait and see, there is that July 1 suspense date for contracts, see if that got deferred or is on schedule. If it’s on schedule, Putin bought him off and his group will be folded into the Russian army.
As for John Morales, it very well may be a false flag, but then you’d have to explain how Wagner got hold of a missile that could reach their camp and use it.
Although, it does sound like a trick I’d use to get both sides fighting each other. Although, once they were in full swing, the more sensitive location they’d head to, such as Moscow or the district command, I’d have also used Russian weapons to pop a few of the lead elements of that convoy to clinch the deal.
Then, pop a brain grenade, pop some popcorn and watch the satellite footage.
wzrd1
So, it seems like you posted that as a rebuttal to what I said. Of what I said, what do you think you rebutted? I don’t see it.
Betcha this is wrong. I don’t know offhand regarding that particular location, but I do know that most of the initial exclusion zone around Fukushima is safe to use to grow food now. They do testing regularly. Most of the grown food is well within safe levels, and that’s from a reactor accident which releases far more long-lasting radiation compared to a nuclear bomb, and it’s also much more recent compared to your example. I would be very surprised if what you say in this quote here is true.
wzrd1:
Look at the source for that claim; look at the evidence for that claim.
You’re taking it as a fact, which is begging the question.
Look at the timeline from when Shoigu’s directive happened and when this supposed incident occurred. His troops were only ever a proxy force, and pretty much depended (and depend) on the actual military to sustain them.
Byzantine, these things are.
Can’t remember if I’ve adduced this before here, but it’s quite informative analysis from 3 months ago. It’s a bit more complicated than a tiger by the tail type of thing, and there are more actors than the MSM reference.
Just caught up with the headlines.
.1. Superficially It doesn’t look like Prigozhin achieved all that much.
OTOH, he may well have markedly improved his and Wagner’s future.
Russia was trying to get rid of Wagner and Prigozhin. Even going so far as to have the Russian army attack Wagner including a missile strike a few days ago that killed many.
.2. Now at least he survives and part of Wagner survives at least for a while.
Who thinks the Russian leadership makes deals and keeps to the terms?
When the USSR fell, the USA, UK, and Russia signed a security agreement with Ukraine in return for 2,000 nuclear weapons.
We all know how that worked out.
.3. AP News. “Head of Russian private army Wagner says more than 20,000 of his troops died in Bakhmut battle. AP News.May 24, 2023”
That is out of 50,000.
Doesn’t look like the mercenary business is all that great a career move here.
And after all that, Wagner got a cruise missile hit on one of their bases.
No wonder Prigozhin is having a bad June.
Wow, Raven. You really are credulous.
(Remember our last discussion?)
GerrardOfTitanServer @45
Wzrd1 was correct. The island referred to is Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Castle Bravo test took place in 1946 and as late as 1998, IAEA recommended against resettling because of the lingering radiation:
…all of the evidence points the other way, much of which I regularly cite?
Yeah, about that…most of what you cite doesn’t support the claims you want us to think they support, and sometimes they flatly contradict your claims. If you’re not an obsessive axe-grinding crank, you’re a knowing liar. Do you really want to remind us of that with yet another threadjacking?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atollhttps://isis-online.org/risk/tab7So, I do have a math degree from a top university in America, and so I think I am able to conclude that 12.4 is bigger than 6.39. Does that mean we evacuate Denver?
Your source
https://web.archive.org/web/20130801190516/http://www-ns.iaea.org/appraisals/bikini-atoll.aspThat is also very probably harmless, and also barely above the exposure that everyone in Denver receives.
On what basis do I say this this is very probably harmless? Well, Denver for starters. Also Dr Bernard Cohen’s studies on radon exposure. Also the MIT mice study that showed that 1 Sv / year of certain ionizing radiation is harmless to a certain breed of mice. Not 1 mSv / year. I said 1 Sv / year aka 1000 mSv / year.
https://news.mit.edu/2012/prolonged-radiation-exposure-0515Wzard1 is not correct. That level of background radiation (via food intake) is very probably harmless. There is a widespread misunderstanding of the dangers of radiation in the public. The dangers are often exaggerated a thousand-fold and sometimes a million-fold. Here’s one example where it’s likely that the danger is being exaggerated by a hundred-fold. They’re worried about 15 mSv / year when it’s very likely that a hundred times that is harmless. Am I sure? No. More testing is needed. However, the best evidence indicates that this is the most likely outcome by far. I am close to sure that we shouldn’t be worried about 15 mSv / year background dose, just like I am close to sure that we don’t need to be evacuating Denver.
I’m going to correct misinformation on this topic whenever I see it. If you want to call that threadjacking, so be it.
I notice again that you refuse to engage in specifics. (“Again” from the previous time that we talked about this.) Again, you just give vague general accusations. There’s nothing that I can do with that besides saying “nuh-uh”.
You mock me for being wrong when talking about a highly volatile situation and then you come out with this idiocy? Honestly, if you want to discuss this nonsense there’s plenty of low effort threads on any number of conspiracy sites you can lurk on.
tacitus:
Do you feel mocked? “The guilty fleeth” and all that, I suppose.
As for a highly volatile situation, I get that’s how you see it.
As for discussing it here, well, this is the specific thread for it. On topic, even.
Here, let me refresh your memory: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/06/23/would-you-take-this-job/#comment-2184031
You: “Meanwhile, it’s official. The Russian Civil War has begun.”
Me: “No, it isn’t, and no, it has not.
Bit of theatre, sure.
Mutiny, probably. Though not by regular forces.
Civil war? Nah. Not yet, and most fucking certainly not officially.”
(That was indeed OT, and premature certitude)
You evince a profound misunderstanding of the concept of a lurker, here.
One cannot both be a lurker and discuss stuff.
GerrardOfTitanServer @51
So the IAEA’s recommendations were incorrect according to your research? What is your explanation for the ongoing health problems of the Marshall Islanders that is a result of exposure to nuclear fallout?
[participating in Gerrard’s ineluctable threadjack, but WTH]
Walter, I doubt you are familiar with Gerrard, so let me either predict or preempt:
What you cited has a lot of [better source needed]s sprinkled there. More than enough for him.
This topic is his very raisin date.
Walter
It’s really simple. The IAEA paper made its recommendation simply on a number, a number which today is less than the number of same measurement for people in Denver.
Why are people getting sick in the Marshall Islands today but not Denver? Given that the current radiation rate today is 6 mSv / year, this means that the elevated cancer rates must have other causes. Here are some suggestions.
People alive today who were exposed to much higher doses and dose rates in the past. I’m not saying that earlier exposures were harmless. They were much higher amounts of radiation in the past. High exposures can take a very long time to cause cancer. Decades.
For lung cancer and oral cancer, the most likely explanation is the much higher rate of smoking. Smoking causes cancer.
Re breast cancer. One thing might be lack of testing. Ex:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1073274821997497
There are many ways to explain this data. It’s beyond me why you immediately jump to something, 6 mSv / year, that we know is harmless based on Denver and the MIT study. Well, it’s not beyond me. I know that you have been consistently lied to for decades from special interest groups (green energy NGOs) who probably receive most of their funding from fossil fuel companies.
chaos:
Walter Solomon
I strongly encourage you to read these two sources, and then go to all of the mainstream citations that they cite, and read those sources too. You’ll likely be amazed by what you find and how much you have been lied to.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world
http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/plutonium-bernard-cohen.html
Quoting from the paper above:
.
Greenpeace, Friends Of The Earth, etc., have consistently lied to you because that’s what their fossil fuel donors wanted them to do.
https://environmentalprogress.org/the-war-on-nuclearRemember that the very first anti-nuclear group, Friends of the Earth, was started with a large grant of money from an executive of the company that would become BP.
https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/Again, who are you going to believe? The scientific community? Or the Green special interest groups who are probably funded by fossil fuel money? Greenpeace et al are not the scientific consensus.
And if you think I’m being overly conspiracy theorist, maybe you’ll believe preeminent climate scientist Dr James Hansen.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110729_BabyLauren.pdfThe best ending to a civil war one could hope for: a few destroyed camps, a few downed planes and non-work holiday in Moscow on Monday. The citizens are still not allowed to go anywhere, though, because of a lockdown.
GerrardOfTitanServer
I didn’t think this would turn into discussion about nuclear power. I’m neither against nuclear power nor, for that matter, nuclear weapons. Furthermore, I don’t believe a nuclear detonation is enough to turn an area into a uninhabitable wasteland but it seems quite clear that nuclear weapons negatively affect the health of those in close proximity to the detonation years down the line long.
Do you personally believe the various test ban treaties are wise or do you believe there isn’t much to worry about from detonating nukes?
John Morales
I noticed. In fact there were more in that single paragraph than I’ve seen in entire entries on Wikipedia and I read the site often. Makes me wonder if Gerrard was the person who placed them there.
Of course. People directly exposed to the initial detonation or the immediate fallout can receive very large doses which can significantly raise cancer rates later in life. However, there is no evidence of many of the other claims in this thread regarding nuclear power, nuclear bombs, and radiation, and the Marshall Islands are not uninhabitable.
I think the answer is: Mostly no effect on human health. I want to say that clearly there is some benefit to human health because with a ban in place, the militaries of the world wouldn’t force move oppressed peoples off their land to use them as test locations, such as the people of the Marshall Islands, and there wouldn’t be a small number of oppressed people harmed by the testing. However, for example, was anyone on the US mainland hurt from atomic bomb testing in the Marshall Islands? No, and I say that with some pretty strong confidence. Not from fallout. Not from bioaccumulation in fish.
A separate consideration is the full international political impact of the ban. That’s something which I am not equipped to comment on.
I think the only wikipedia page I have ever edited was the “volatile variable (programming)” page because I keep hitting people in my job who think that volatile in C and C++ is a threading primitive, and it really annoyed me.
Also, are you complaining about me citing my sources on what is a controversial topic? WTF? You’d rather I just throw out these seemingly conspiracy-theorist claims without evidence that I’m citing the mainstream scientific consensus and citing public financial documents?
There’s no way to win here. You’d complain if I didn’t cite anything.
jo1storm @61:
Can you be more specific? Offer some citation?
Because, far as I can tell, the event is now over and normality (well, such as it was before the event) in terms of citizen movement is restored.
What lockdown?
Or do you mean emigration type of stuff?
[OT]
Gerrard, I know that you are singularly focused on defending your position, but be aware that I reckon I was wrong. May not have been, but very unlikely.
You’re quite focused. Perhaps even hyperfocused, may I suggest.
This is how it went:
I addressed Walter @56 noting “What you cited has a lot of [better source needed]s sprinkled there.”
Thus the retort you quoted.
Anyway, Walter was ruefully acknowledging what he quoted had an unusally dense number of such caveats. Not resiling, but acknowledging that single point.
About which I was wrong, since you ignored it.
I hope that makes it quite clear that no, it was not complaining about you citing your sources.
For competeness, what you quoted #65 was a sardonic joke based on the fact that their presence there is entirely to the benefit of your case, whether more or less significantly so.
In no way an insinuation about you.
Basically, an instance of intellectual honesty, is what it is.
Gotta love how only Bikini Atoll gets looked at.
https://inis.iaea.org/search/searchsinglerecord.aspx?recordsFor=SingleRecord&RN=33037418
Rongelap atoll was and remains badly contaminated, but those islanders and their homes don’t count for some reason.
Thyroid tumors are down since they were not allowed to return to their homes, living as castaways without their own homes.
https://inis.iaea.org/search/searchsinglerecord.aspx?recordsFor=SingleRecord&RN=29008880
I guess that Kuboyama Aikichi got better after he died of acute radiation poisoning on board Daigo Fukuryū Maru.
You forget, fallout isn’t ground level, it gets projected into the stratosphere, to fall out over a significant distance. It’s refusal to recognize that that’s fucked downwinders out of any compensation or medical compensation for the cancers that they contracted from atmospheric testing here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders
Oh, the fallout map from the Nevada test site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders#/media/File:US_fallout_exposure.png
I’ll post something on topic here.
This from the BBC pretty much sums it up.
.1. The Russian government was trying to get rid of Prigozhin and Wagner and they didn’t want to disappear.
.2. FWIW, the consensus among observers is that Prigozhin is a dead man walking. The Russians rarely live up to their agreements and have killed many people for far less than what Prigozhin has done.
What is keeping him alive is being surrounded by…Wagner mercenaries.
.3. Wagner did manage to shoot down 3 Russian helicopters though.
You really need to look at your sources, raven.
(citation?)
[and I don’t mean the bbc article you cite, which says nothing about those alleged 3 helicopters — https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-66006142 — and I cite it because you did not]
You really need to learn how to use a search engine.
It’s been reported by numerous news sources.
That doesn’t mean it is right but at least it isn’t just reported by anonymous single sources on obscure web sites.
A lot of the claims of Wagner shooting down Russian helicopters is coming from…Russian sources.
@67 Google it. Even damn yahoo news (not known for theiraccuracy) has written about it under a headline:
“Moscow gives citizens Monday off and urges them not to travel around the city”
How else would you call that except lockdown? Police hour lasting a whole day maybe? There are still armed police and military puncts all over the city, on every entrance/exit, controlling eho goes where.
It was helicopters and communication plane according to my sources.
Saw the reports, all reported by Wagner sources. Other reports, the Wagner convoy was bombed on its way to Moscow by Russia.
And still other reports on the entire mess was entirely bloodless.
Of course, neither party would lie…
It’s like a game of liar’s poker, but no one will show their hand.
But, it’s telling “Wagner shoots down more Russian helicopters than Ukraine has”, I guess that January never happened.
https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-shoots-down-three-russian-ka-52-alligator-helicopters-30-minutes-military-says-1776277
Almost as accurate as Vietnam body count math.
Although the schadenfreude is understandable, the world will be much worse off if Prigozhin replaced Putin. Prigozhin is much more dangerous.
raven:
And you really need to learn how to discriminate and sort the wheat from the chaff.
(This is a misinformation war, and you’re wallowing in it)
Indeed. And the Hindustan Times, another well-known propaganda machine. And similar.
—
jo1storm:
lessee… https://t.me/mos_sobyanin/5709?fbclid=IwAR3dKMAXBkFA2emXtCeuC266KP7ecgcfI0A8uhCnIekv3ZXOA288rZeZ8nU
(Jun 25 at 01:15, translated by Google, since I don’t read Russian)
Ass-covering.
(Do you even get that the video @58 was filmed in Moscow a few hours ago?)
rietpluim, well, that’s your opinion.
Putin has proven himself over the decades to be a consumate political operator. And he might have succumbed to a sense of destiny and grandiosity and been sorta isolated during the COVID lockdowns — remember the ridiculous distances? — and become paranoid and bought into the narrative that it was time and so forth, and engaged in this disastrous war to which he has committed his regime.
Prigozhin is just not in his class, and Putin is still trying to play the long game.
He’s only 70, figures he has a few more years yet.
@60. GerrardOfTitanServer : “Again, who are you going to believe? The scientific community? Or the Green special interest groups who are probably funded by fossil fuel money? Greenpeace et al are not the scientific consensus.”
For fucks sake, this repeatedly debunked, ridiculous crap again GOTS?
Seriously, Fossil fuel companies and Green groups are enemies and the last thing the Fossil Fool lobby would do is fund Green groups that, y’know, strongly oppose and think we need to leave behind Fossil Fuels (incl. uranium) and switch to Renewables. Just becoz they also oppose nuclear power – which many on the reichwing & mining corps are pushing – doesn’t mean they are remotely close to being on the same side!
Also Green groups, incl. Greenpeace, are on the side of the scientific consensus and listen to science here. Sigh.
This sort of bulldust is why people – me and others here – think you are a crank and a tedious monomaniacal, mendacious, repetitive bore who isn’t worth arguing with. Because we’ve been through this and debunked this cherry-picked, misleading, fat out wrong crap from you so many, many times before.
@John Morales #80 – Putin is evil, but there is still some rationality in him. I’d rather not see him replaced by a war lord who orders his soldiers’ heads to be smashed in with a hammer as disciplinary measure. Also, while Putin’s army was failing, Prigozhin’s was actually making some conquest.
Oh, with GOTS you’re always one sneeze away from a rant about how the ebil Greenies are in league with Big Oil. He’s always quoting James Hansen as well, neglecting the fact that Hansen’s expertise is precisely in climate science, not in energy production.
Prigozhin appears to have significant popular support in Rostov-on-Don, which people are not afraid of showing. We don’t know, BTW, if he has actually gone to Belarus – the information that he would seems to come from just one source, Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov.
Further to #83, another of GOTS’s favourite sources on the ebil Greenies is, or was, Michael Shellenberger, a self-styled “ecomodernist” and fanatical nuclear fanboi, who, unlike Greenpeace and other environmental groups, does not accept the scientific consensus on climate change, claiming its dangers are much exaggerated – and also thinks homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness are exacerbated by “progressivism”. He denounces “wokeness” and “critical race theory”.
KG @85: Another is George Monbiot. A mixed bag.
Rob Grigjanis@86,
True. Monbiot (who as it happens I knew slightly when we both lived in Oxford in the late ’80s to early ’90s) is in many ways an admirable figure, but rather prone to latching on to some tech idea which is going to save us all – I haven’t actually seen anythnig from him about nuclear power recently, but at one time it was CCS, and most recently replacing agricultural food production by growing algae in tanks. He also fell in a big way for the denialist scam around leaked emails from climate modellers.
So GerrardOfTitanServer since we’re doing ths yet again ad nauseam here :
Which seems more is likely, that big Corporate Fossil Fuel & mining lobbyists are funding and supporting :
A) Greens enviro group whose ideology (philosophy?) is totally opposed to theirs and who want to shut them down and phase them out ASAP
Or B) that those same Fossil Fool & mining lobbyists are pushing for nuclear power whose advocates are generally aligned with their ideology and where they have vested intretsts eg uranium mining?
Your answer and reasoning for it please GOTS?
Also who do you think fund s and abcks nuclera reactor esp fission reactor power?
Some reading and links :
https://newmatilda.com/2019/12/17/nuclear-fantasies-down-under-the-political-and-economic-problems-with-old-money-power/
For Oz esp but more widely in general too I think :
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/nuclear-power-stations-are-not-appropriate-for-australia-and-probably-never-will-be/
Plus :
https://www.nirs.org/fukushima-3-former-leaders-say/
GerrardOfTitanServer
That wasn’t a complaint but an observation. Furthermore, it had nothing to do with you unless you wrote that Wikipedia entry. How vain are you?
wzrd1
Let me look into it more, but I bet there is practically zero evidence AFAIK of harm to “downwinnders”. It’s a scam on the same evidentiary footing as “vaccines cause autism”.
StevoR
It’s not debunked that fossil fuel money continues to be a large funder of green groups. It’s incontrovertible that the first green group, friends of the earth, was started with a large donation from a fossil fuel exec, source above. It makes perfect sense because the fossil fuel execs know that fossil fuels cannot replace renewables but nuclear can, and therefore green advocates like yourself are great “useful idiots” because whenever you come to power, you shut down nuclear and replace it with fossil fuels. Many examples in America. Germany also.
We had this discussion before, and I noted that all of the pro nuclear persons and advocacy groups that I’m aware of go to great lengths to publish their list of funders and to not take any money from nuclear power industry. By contrast, your favored special interest group in Australia, that private think tank, does not publish a list of their sponsors.
They are not. They regularly publish lies about nuclear power, and regularly say that we can do it without nuclear power when the scientific consensus as reported by the IPCC says the only plausible pathways include more nuclear power than today.
Let me find later this one time that Greenpeace paid for the publication and translation of some Russian source that said a million people died from Chernobyl. They did it in a way that made it seem like it was peer reviewed by the western academic source, but the western academic source said it was not peer reviewed, and when you look at the paper, it’s pseudoscience because it counted up every excess death to arrive at the one million number, including causes of death that have nothing to do with radiation.
I seem like I crank because I’m like Clair Patterson fighting against the massive disinformation campaign funded by fossil fuel money. Greenpeace et al are complicit in this campaign.
PS: uranium is not a fossil fuel.
KG
And the people in energy production via the IPCC reports also say we need a lot more nuclear power. Only special interest groups say otherwise and the odd scientist and expert who more often than not is being funded by fossil fuel money, e.g. Mark Jacobson.
I’m also sympathetic to Michael Shellenbergers views on homeless people. And he is right that some sources exaggerate the dangers of climate change. Climate change is already awful enough. No need to exaggerate it. That’s all he says. Unfortunately, most of the rich western world might not be that impacted, and it’s going to be the poor parts of the world that suffer. It can’t lead to human extinction, and it’s unlikely to lead to the collapse of human civilization. It might lead to the deaths of billions of people, and that’s good enough for me to make it my number one concern.
If you want really crazy stuff he has said, look at what he says about how the spread of nuclear weapons is a good thing.
Notice how I’m linking to him as a source in this thread. Notice how that when I linked to Monbiot, I said it was because he was a convenient source that linked to the best primary source scientific material on the topic, and not because he himself was an authority.
@91, you lose to peer reviewed studies.
Grossman, C M, W E Morton, and R H Nussbaum. “Hypothyroidism And Spontaneous Abortions Among Hanford, Washington, Downwinders.” Archives Of Environmental Health 51.3 (1996): 175-176. MEDLINE with Full Text. Web. 7 May 2015.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200303000909/https://www.kpbs.org/news/2012/jan/27/nation-recognizes-nuclear-test-downwinders/
Simon, Steven L. “Radiation Doses To Local Populations Near Nuclear Weapons Test Sites Worldwide,” Health Physics. 82(5):706-725, May 2002
Cancers among Residents Downwind of the Hanford, Washington, Plutonium Production Site. By: Grossman, Charles M., Nussbaum, Rudi H., Nussbaum, Fred D., Archives of Environmental Health, 00039896, May2003, Vol. 58, Issue 5
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/radiation/fallout-pdf
There are many, many more citations, both federally produced and independent studies.
wzrd1
You know what? I was wrong in my bet. I was wrong. Thank you for the correction. Some of those people did receive substantial doses their their thyroid from I-131. I was wrong. The above-ground nuclear test ban is apparently very useful for human health. Ground bursts are nasty relative to air bursts in terms of residual radiation.
However…
Having said that, most of your first paper focused on extremely small doses that are very probably harmless, such as 0.001 Gy. Again, let me put some perspective on that.
https://atomicinsights.com/making-sense-from-radiation-protection-controversy/Not everything in peer review is true. For every paper that you cite that relies on LNT, I can cite another paper that argues against LNT. Ex:
https://clinmedjournals.org/articles/ijrit/international-journal-of-radiology-and-imaging-technology-ijrit-2-014.pdfMoreover, I can do something you can’t – I can cite direct, experimental evidence that LNT is false. That’s what this MIT experiment did.
https://news.mit.edu/2012/prolonged-radiation-exposure-0515Those mice were completely unharmed by 1000 mSv / year dose. If that extrapolates to human for all kinds of ionizing radiation under the current “effective dose” modeling regime, then the likely only harm to downwinders was from the radioactive Iodine 131 exposure which was almost entirely through milk and dairy, and which would have been trivial to prevent: Just don’t consume dairy for 3 months after the incident. Just like the Chernobyl accident, btw. With just that policy being followed, the number of cancer deaths from Chernobyl would have been maybe 50.
There’s a fair bit of evidence that the BEAR reports, the current source for scientific support of LNT, were unduly influenced by fossil fuel money.
https://atomicinsights.com/evidence-suggesting-lnt-fabricated-purposeful-effort-hamstring-nuclear-technology-development/So, again, thank you for the correction. However, most of what you are saying (and citing) is still wrong.
I notice again that you refuse to engage in specifics.
We’ve already done that in every previous thread you’ve tried to clog with your endless text-walls, and YOU KNOW IT. Fuck off, liar.
Raging Bee,
I’m sorry you feel that way. I hope you have a good day.
GerrardOfTitanServer, there are two things I chuckle at. The zero radiation is good theorists, who ignore that the planet is fairly radioactive, hence, are we. I’m a trifle hotter than those from my same area who are younger, but I was born during the atmospheric testing era, specifically, a literal week after Tsar Bomba was detonated.
Thankfully, they removed the tamper, halving the yield, as the fallout would’ve been horrific, as that bomb type would’ve been phenomenally dirty. 50 megatons of cleaner bomb vs 100 megatons of dirty bomb.
But, what elements the fallout consists of is of importance. In the Castle Bravo test, there were fission products and neutron activated calcium carbonate, the problem elements being the calcium-41, strontium-90 and cesium-137, plus the thankfully short lived iodine-131. The calcium, strontium and cesium being affinitive to bone.
Which is where the problems begin, as 99000 year half-life and 37 year half-life elements in the bone decaying tend to wreak more havoc.
The dose makes the poison is well and good in basic toxicology, but route and administration also are important. In this case, one has long term internal exposure of short half-life elements. One a gamma emitter via electron capture, one a gamma and beta emitter, the last a beta emitter, all quite energetic in the 0.5 MeV range and higher. Which shows, as you still entirely ignored the much higher cancer rate in the exposed cohort.
Nothing happened, ignore that cancer is not only disingenuous, it’s bullshit. Perhaps, you should publish your screeds, making them available for peer review. I always enjoy good comedy.
A few years back, we lost a major navigational landmark around here. The plume from TMI, as the plant is in cold shutdown. It was shut down, as it was cheaper to use natural gas to generate electricity.
The plant still stores tons of expended fuel assemblies. One of the greatest wastes in our nuclear energy program, as that fuel could be easily reprocessed and returned to a reactor. But, costs are high, as nuclear reactors are maintenance intensive beasts.
@91. GerrardOfTitanServer : I notice you did NOT answer my question of :
Which seems more likely, that big Corporate Fossil Fuel & mining lobbyists are funding and supporting :
A) Greens enviro group whose ideology (philosophy?) is totally opposed to theirs and who want to shut them down and phase them out ASAP
Or
B) that those same Fossil Fool & mining lobbyists are pushing for nuclear power whose advocates are generally aligned with their ideology and where they have vested intretsts eg uranium mining?
presumably referring to the Climate Council of actual Climate Scientists. Nonsense from you that again we’ve been over many times beforealong with your IPCC says we need nukes crap :
Source : https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/faqs/
The Fosil Fool lobby tried to destroy the Climate Council which was originally a govt body, there’re not funding it.
Just because they say things that don’t agree with doesn’t mean they lie regularly and that one cherry-picked example from you is very unconvincing.
It might not be a “fossil” as such but its certainly in that non-renewable, limited environmentally damaging mined from a limited supply in the ground one.
[StevoR, Gerrard can’t help himself about this topic, as I noted above.
I think you can]
Meanwhile… [moderate grue]
This is happening as I and everyone who is watching thought.
Prigozhin is a dead man walking.
Russia is a place where conflicts are solved by who kills who.
They’ve executed millions for far less than what Prigozhin has done.
Reports are that the Russian army is already executing soldiers who decided to support and follow Prigozhin.
We might well see another round of purges with thousands killed or sent to the Gulags. Again.
Or more simply, Prigozhin is about to meet Kuzma’s mother.
Basically, being taught a brutal lesson.
So yeah, purges are likely. If I was in Russia right now, I’d be walking in the streets, as it’s likely to be raining people “falling out of windows”.
Prigozhin will likely end up with high velocity lead poisoning or receive a gift of Novichok cologne, with a side of polonium caviar.
Wasn’t it Prigozhin who said that Russia should become like North Korea in order to fight more effectively? However loathsome Putin is, I’m rather glad that Prigozhin won’t be calling the shots in Russia.
Which is good advice for us, even though he didn’t mean it.
What has North Korea accomplished in the last 70 years?
More or less nothing.
They wave their nukes around while almost all of their population lives barely above subsistence levels. Unless there is a famine in which case a million or so people die.
They haven’t fought anyone since the end of the Korean war.
I suspect if they did, their army would fold up pretty fast.
He already has lots of blood on his hands, both the Russian convict human wave attackers and Ukrainians.
When I heard he was moving to Belarus, well, there goes the neighborhood.
wzrd1
Again, I accept your corrections (with the caveats I gave). Again, thank you for the corrections.
I didn’t.
Calcium-41? I don’t recognize the 37 year half life offhand. Did you mean Cesium-137 with a half life of about 30 years?
I know you know that a longer half-life means it’s less radioactive. Calcium-41 with a half life of a thousand times longer means it’s also a thousand times less radioactive meaning you would need to ingest a thousand times more material for the same dose and dose rate (assuming same rates of bio-accumulation etc). Cesium-137 is a little scary. Calcium-41 is a lot less scary.
They’re really not. The problem is super cheap natural gas in America (something that won’t last very long) combined with a dozen different direct and indirect subsidies to nuclear’s competitors. If we removed these unfair subsidies and regulatory structure, and also implemented even a modest tax on greenhouse gas emissions, only nuclear and hydro would be financially viable.
…
StevoR
This is false. Look at what happened in Germany with their Green energy policy. They shut down nuclear, expanded coal mininig, and built a new coal power plant (Datteln 4). When Greens obtain enough political power, they shut down nuclear power first, and replace it with fossil fuels. There are many other examples. For example, Australia where it’s illegal to build nuclear plants but it’s legal to build coal and natural gas plants.
It’s a private organization whose source of funding is scret.
This is not nonsense. This is what the IPCC reports say – there is no pathway to reducing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere without more nuclear power than today.
In a breeder reactor, everyday rock, e.g. average granite rock, has more useful energy in its uranium and thorium content compared to the same volume of coal or oil times 20. We’ll run out of sun before we run out of nuclear fuel. And don’t tell me that breeders don’t exist. Russia has operated at least one of the BN model plants in breeder mode for a decade. They’re real.
Uranium mining is also far less harmful to the environment than solar and wind. Solar and wind require at least 5x more material, e.g. steel and concrete, than a comparable nuclear power plant. That’s assuming infinite free storage for the solar and wind. Dealing with intermittency means that solar and wind will require orders of magnitude more materials and thus more mining.
“In a breeder reactor, everyday rock, e.g. average granite rock, has more useful energy in its uranium and thorium content compared to the same volume of coal or oil times 20.”
Gerrard, there’s a thread just for you!
↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/06/27/im-not-opposed-to-tearing-it-all-down/#comment-2184795
Meanwhile, an interesting perspective:
GOTS@91,
You have never, and cannot, produce a smidgen of evidence that any green group takes fossil fuel money, or has done for decades. Relying on a payment to Friends of the Earth over half a century ago is just plain dishonest – but that’s absolutely typical of you.
OK, you’re as much of a shit as Shellenberger. Can’t say it surprises me. But the last sentence I quote there is absolutely risible at a time when large parts of North America are choking on the smoke of Canadian wildfires due to climate disruption.
What is your source for the claim that Mark Jacobson is funded by fossil fuel interests? What funding precisely has he taken from which fossil fuel interests? Since you are completely unspecific, why should anyone believe you when your nuclear fanboi fanaticism is so obvious? Putting “Mark Jacobson fossil fuel funding” into a search engine produced nothing. Jacobson opposes any fossil fuel use, and blames air pollution from fossil fuel and biomass burning for a large number of deaths annually. Are his alleged fossil fuel funders happy with that? There is by no means such a strong consensus as you claim that nuclear power is a necessary component of getting rid of fossil fuels (IPCC reports are by no means the final word, and are in large part the result of political compromises). And the Ukraine war reminds us once again how dangerous nuclear power plants are in the face of unrelated disasters due to natural causes or human agency. Do we want such plants in those parts of the world where wars are plausible in the next few decades (that means everywhere, of course)?
https://atomicinsights.com/stanfords-universitys-new-natural-gas-initiative/https://atomicinsights.com/following-the-money-whos-funding-stanfords-natural-gas-initative/https://atomicinsights.com/stanford-climate-scientists-promote-100-renewable-revolution-using-fossil-fuel-money/And more. It’s well-known that Jay Precourt is providing large amounts of funds to Jacobson’s university to fund Jacobson’s research. The program / department at the university is even named after Precourt (“Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy”). Jacobson is also a “senior fellow” in this “Precourt Institute for Energy” program / department at Stanford.
From the link above, quoting the 2015 “The Stanford Natural Gas Initiative Corporate Affiliate Program”:
Back to you:
He’s a shill. The net result of his work is increased buildout of solar and wind which necessitates the increased use of natural gas peakers, plus his attacks on nuclear power lead to reduction in use of nuclear power which also increases use of natural gas.
Moreover, he’s a guy who fakes data in his papers, does SLAPP lawsuits against his scientific peers when they publish corrections to his lies, and who commits other kinds of academic fraud such as responding to critiques to his work by stealth-editing live hosted versions of his supplementary material and then responding as though the now-deleted material was never there. Mark Jacobson is scum. He’s a fraudster and huckster. Shame on Stanford for not revoking his tenure and canning his ass long ago, but I guess they like that Precourt money too much.
You probably want citations for those claims, so here we go.
I refuse to believe that Jacobson could have developed his original 100% WWS paper without noticing the glaring flaw in the paper re no limitations on hydro output except for the total energy output per year. Aka no considerations for reservoir capacity. No considerations for max flow rates. No considerations for the installed turbine power capacity. There is no way that this happened except by willfully ignoring it which is tantamount to faking his data, or reckless disregard which amounts to the same thing. I refuse to believe that this was an innocent mistake. I refuse to believe that Jacobson thinks it’s plausible to increase turbine power capacity by 15x at each spot (and it’s not possible because of reservoir capacity limits and max flow rate limits). Here’s a summary of the 20+ scientists that published a critique.
https://www.vibrantcleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/ReplyResponse.pdfFor that, Jacobson sued the academic publisher and the lead author in a clear SLAPP suit, which he later withdrew.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/03/when-scientists-sue-scientists/In a separate instance, a blogger / journalist was poking around Jacobson’s hosted supplementary material for his paper, and he found some excel spreadsheet which suggested that the additional green jobs of Jacobson’s plan would be temporary jobs and not permanent jobs. This is particularly ironic because Jacobson often critiques others for conflating temporary and permanent job creation. In response to this critique, Jacobson stealth-editted this live hosted version of his supplementary material to remove the columns regarding temporary job creation, and accused the othre person of making it all up using the exact phrase “data faker” IIRC. (As an aside, I think this might even rise to the level of criminal defamation per se.) And then Jacobson basically admitted that the original data was there and that he stealth-editted it.
https://naturalgasnow.org/charlatan-fractivist-mark-jacobson-caught-coverup/https://twitter.com/mzjacobson/status/684435537323675648https://twitter.com/mzjacobson/status/687345063437795328The one that is beyond the pale for me is when he wrote an article for Scientific American. In it, he claimed without context or citation that nuclear produces 25 times as much CO2 as wind. He is quoting his own academic work where he writes that nuclear produces 9 to 25 as much CO2 as wind. That paper is a horrible quote-mine of another one of his papers. Basically, in this paper, Jacobson evaluates plans according to a very short time horizon, claims nuclear takes a very long time to build, assumes coal will be used until the nuclear construction finishes, and attributes the CO2 emissions from this coal power to nuclear power. Imagine reading the Scientific American article, which presented the claim matter-of-factly, heavily implying it was emissions from actual nuclear during steady-state operations, and later learning that it was really coal power plant emissions. Worse, in this paper, Jacobson practically assumes that increased use of nuclear power will lead to a periodic recurring limited nuclear war, and starts calculating how much CO2 is released when a whole city burns. He has an entire long paragraph listing out the constituent materials of a city and how much CO2 that they release when burned. He then adds these emissions to the nuclear power column, which makes up a portion of the “25 times as much CO2 as wind” claim in the Scientific American article. Imagine reading that Scientific American article and then later finding out that the CO2 emissions attributed to nuclear actually come from coal power and from an assumed periodic recurring nuclear war!
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdfhttps://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnPolicyPt1.pdfhttps://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/ReviewSolGW09.pdfPS:
Sigh. Quoting me from above:
Whoops. Accident on the quoting in the first quote. My reply is in the quote-block. Sorry about that.
PPS:
Yea. A hyperlink to a study written by the known academic liar and fraud Mark Jacobson. I shouldn’t even have to say anything more to dismiss this paper other than note that the lead author is Mark Jacobson. That is enough.
So, why do you trust Mark Jacobson, senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy, more than the IPCC?
Again, this insane focus on safety. Nuclear power is already the safest and cleanest form of electricity generation.
Separately, nuclear power would still be better for us and the biosphere with 1 Chernobyl accident every year compared to continuing to use fossil fuels. The Chernobyl accident killed at most 4,000 people, and if you exclude LNT numbers, it killed about 50 or 100 people. That’s it. This represents the vast majority of deaths from radiation from nuclear power (excluding nuclear weapons), and it is equivalent to the deaths from just one single hour from airborne particulate pollution from coal power worldwide. (Airborne particulate pollution kills 1 million people per year according to the WHO, which is about 111 deaths per hour.) And that’s not even counting the potentially more severe dangers of climate change! It is absolutely insane or grossly ignorant to focus on the dangers of nuclear power while we are still burning massive amounts of coal worldwide.
Again, we would be better off with one Chernobyl accident every year compared to coal. That is how safe and clean nuclear power is.
Countries that burn coal instead of use nuclear power are committing holocaust levels of deaths on our people. It is completely atrocious and completely indefensible.
Correction: Airborne particulate pollution from coal kills 1 million people per year according to the WHO, which is about 111 deaths per hour. All human sources of airborne particulate pollution kill about 7 million people per year according to the WHO, about half of which is from indoor sources of airborne particulate pollution.
So, yes, I want nuclear power everywhere. I don’t want to deny the benefits of a better life to the poor, war-torn, and non-white parts of world, as you seem to imply that we should by denying them nuclear power because they’re not ready for it, or it’s too dangerous, or some other pathetic racist and colonialist argument.
You can say that because you aren’t going to die 5 years earlier than normal from heart and lung complications from airborne particulate pollution. You’re not going to die from massive heat-waves in India. You’re not going to die from starvation from lack food because of lack of clean water, irrigation, inorganic fertilizer, tractors, fuel for the trucks, etc. You live a privileged life where you will be spared from the worst effects of climate change. These poor, non-white people in the global south and other poor areas of the world are going to suffer the consequences because of your absolutely resistance to the safest and cleanest form of energy production on the insane basis of safety concerns.
Ah yes, hope eternal.
“Transmutation of the elements, unlimited power, ability to investigate the working of living cells by tracer atoms, the secret of photosynthesis about to be uncovered,–these and a host of other results all in 15 short years. It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter,–will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history,–will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds,–and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. This is the forecast for an age of peace.”
(from a 1954 speech by the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis L. Strauss – https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1613/ML16131A120.pdf )
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Meanwhile, not so much news about the full-blown civil war in Russia.
…plus his attacks on nuclear power lead to reduction in use of nuclear power which also increases use of natural gas.
If nuclear power could be made cost-effective, then no one’s attacks on its use would stop it from replacing fossil fuels. You can preach all you want about how ideal nuclear power is, but if you can’t make it work consistently down here in the real world — and apparently very few people can make it work consistently anywhere for any length of time — then it’s really not an option, so we all have to stick to expanding use of solar and renewables instead. Don’t like it? Tough shit, take your complaints to the people who actually build and operate nuclear power plants, not to us.
Raging Bee
Nuclear is not cost competitive because of a dozen different direct and indirect government subsidies, including various regulatory tricks, including:
General excessive safety regulations based on LNT.
Direct subsidies to individuals installing solar, e.g. handouts and better loan terms, and unfair net-metering rules that allow households with rooftop solar to leach off their neighbors aka “cost shifting”. The brute fact is that roughly 80% of the costs to supply electricity to your home are fixed and do not depend on how much electricity you consume day-to-day. In other words, it costs about 80% as much to supply 1 KW to your house for 1 day per year compared to supplying 1 KW to your house for 365 days per year. What are you paying the grid for is a high degree of redundancy and resiliency which cannot be done with home rooftop solar plus battery at remotely comparable prices. Rooftop solar home owners (without batteries) leech off the system when they pay less than 80% compared to their similar neighbor without rooftop solar. There’s a lot of leaches on the system.
Direct subsidies to large companies for installing solar and wind, e.g. renewable energy credits.
Laws forbidding competition, e.g. Australia and Germany’s policy to outlaw nuclear, but also “renewable energy portfolio standards” of various US states
Carefully crafted regulatory structures that favor solar, wind, and gas and that unfavor nuclear, e.g. requiring purchases according to hourly spot prices instead of using long-term purchase agreements, merit order rules that favor solar and wind, etc. Imagine a simple scenario where you have a nuclear power plant providing cheap energy to a city. Someone moves in, stalls grid-scale solar and connects it to the grid, which is cheaper than nuclear for about 6 hours per day. Under these rules, the grid operator must buy electricity from solar, which decreases the revenue for the nuclear operator, and thus the nuclear operator must increase their price for the rest of the day to recoup their costs which are almost entirely fixed (e.g. they don’t save money by reducing power output for 6 hours per day), and this cost increase is passed on to end consumers. The net result is that adding solar to such a grid will increase the costs for rate-payers. Which is precisely what we see everywhere there is large penetrations of solar and wind.
Freeriding that solar and wind operators do not need to pay because of the current carefully crafted regulatory structure, such as grid inertia, blackstart capability, capacity payments (primarily to natural gas), transmission costs. In some areas already, natural gas operators earn more money from capacity payments than they do from actually selling electricity, and this is due in no small part to solar and wind on the grid. Grid inertia is a huge concern already in some places such as Australia, and it’s going to cost a lot of money to fix this, and those costs are going to be pushed onto the end consumers instead of being pushed on to the freerider solar and wind operators.
These problems are compounded by certain safety regulations on nuclear which I have little doubt were designed to favor natural gas. Nuclear power plants can be build to load-follow, as evidenced by France, but many nuclear power plants around the world were not, such as in the USA. When these nuclear power plants shut down, they cannot restart for a period of several hours up to a day, depending on the exact design and the volume of xenon in the system. They need to wait for the xenon to decay away. So, in some markets where spot prices already go negative, nuclear power plant operators have to choose between accepting negative prices, or shutting down and lose out on the potential revenue after the sun goes down because they can’t restart so quickly because of xenon.
This is further exacerbated by NRC rules which AFAIK require them to seek approval for restart even if the cause of the shutdown was entirely known and trivial, e.g. shutdown because of negative spot prices. This can cause further days of delay where nuclear power operators are losing money.
On top of all of this, there is some evidence of market manipulation, collusion, among natural gas operators in some areas, where they flood the market with extra electricity during certain times to drive down prices to force their nuclear competitors offline so that in the following hours and days they can reap higher prices.
I know all of this is horribly complicated, and you’re probably not paying attention, but these are the reasons why nuclear power cannot compete today. The deck is rigged against them.
In a proper fair and competitive market without excessive safety regulations on nuclear, nuclear is the cheapest option except for unusually cheap natural gas and perhaps coal. It might also be that nuclear is the cheapest.
To clarify my earlier point re 80%: If you look at a breakdown of conventional grids, only a very small portion are in variable fuel costs. Most of the costs are in fixed non-fuel O&M costs, capital costs, decommissioning costs. Transmission costs in particular are about half the cost of your electricity from the grid, and adding solar and wind don’t make transmission costs go down. Rather, adding more solar and wind usually increases transmission costs. This is another big reason why electricity prices go up when you install more solar and wind. This is why the cost of solar and wind doesn’t matter – solar cells and wind turbines could be plentiful and entirely free, and it still wouldn’t help. Most of the cost for supplying electricity to you cannot be replaced by solar and wind.
While I’m thinking about it, there’s also the issue that ramping up and down thermal generators like natural gas, coal, and nuclear, results in less efficient fuel to electricity conversion, which raises costs for those operators, which are reflected in higher prices, which again are passed on the to end consumer.
This factor can also increase pollution from coal and natural gas. IIRC, this ramping up and down caused by adding more solar and wind has been shown to increase total airborne sulfate pollution. This ramping up and down caused by adding more solar and wind also increases CO2 pollution, but generally AFAIK the effect is less than the effect of needing less electricity and CO2 emissions are still generally less with more solar and wind. Still, I know a lot of people and a lot of studies look at electricity sales in terms of joules or watt-hours as a proxy for CO2 emissions, and this is troublesome because it’s probably undercounting emissions for systems with a lot of solar and wind.
Gerrrard: First, if you’re advocating getting rid of safety regulations, then go fuck yourself — you’re clearly not acting in anyone’s best interest, and this demand will only further undermine nuclear power’s credibility in the eyes of an already long-skeptical public.
And second, if you want to get rid of subsidies for local and homeowner development of solar or wind power, then again, go fuck yourself — the immediate result of the loss of such subsidies will be a serious slowdown in development of solar or wind, and more people falling back on fossil-fuels while we wait yet another decade or three for nuclear power to fulfil it’s longstanding, long-unfulfilled promises.
Funny how you’re blaming nuclear power’s problems on damn near everyone EXCEPT the nuclear power industry and its lobbyists. Your childish irresponsibility on such an important subject gives you absolutely no credibility. (Which could be why, as you alleged earlier, none of your sources get any money from the nuclear industry — they’re nothing but a toxic embarrassment.)
Update 167 – IAEA Director General Statement on Situation in Ukraine
(https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-167-iaea-director-general-statement-on-situation-in-ukraine)
Very important to have the cooling water supply and the external electrical supply to keep the plant safe.
A bit of a worry when the plant is in the middle of a war zone.
(Not a civil war, in this case — boring old war of conquest)
One cannot imagine the terrible potential consequences of a solar PV plant or a wind farm not having access to plenty of water and electricity.
It was in the news, even: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-spy-chief-accuses-russia-mining-cooling-pond-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-2023-06-20/
Not the dam, the cooling pond.
So, if chaos reigns in Russia, then if this is true we might see just how safe the plant is without its safety systems active. And how trivial the consequences.
@ ^ See : https://www.dw.com/en/zaporizhzhia-what-would-happen-if-there-was-an-accident/a-63686362
So far thankfully a what if.. Al Jazeera also has this article on that too :
Source : https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/11/what-happens-if-ukraines-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-explodes
Really hope we don’t end up finding out what happens if this blows up or melts down for real…
Raging Bee
I’m advocating getting rid of only very specific safety regulations while keeping most of them. For example, I am suggesting that we stop trying to eliminate cobalt from steel in nuclear power plants because that’s a really big expense for no benefit. For more information, see:
https://atomicinsights.com/cost-increasing-results-of-accepting-the-linear-no-threshold-lnt-assumption-of-radiation-health-effects/…
StevoR
Please stop citing pseudoscience from special interest groups funded by fossil fuel lobbies. Seriously, this is no better than citing a flat-Earther or “vaccines cause autism” person.
Instead, you can find the United Nations report on it, UNSCEAR, and also the World Health Organization report on it, both of which claim that the upper limit of number of dead from radiation from Chernobyl will be no more than 4,000 people, and that’s worst case based on LNT. Without LNT, the number of dead is likely around 100.
From same source:
Again, we have incontrovertible evidence that it does not. Again, see the MIT mice experiment that I cited upthread. We also know a lot more today than we did 50 years ago about the body’s biological defenses to radiation, and this knowledge also indicates that there is going to be a threshold effect.
From the same source:
So, zero deaths? Great. I’m glad we’re in agreement.
Next source:
Obviously. Nuclear power plants cannot explode like nuclear bombs. It’s physically impossible. Even if you tried to engineer one to blow up like a nuclear bomb, it’s impossible. The danger is always the release of radioactive material.
me too.
And of course I want to remove those subsidies that do nothing except transfer money from the poor to the rich. They cause an additional significant cost on the poorest of households for no benefit. The electricity bills of poor people in some areas is going up double, triple, etc., because of these sorts of useless policies. I’d rather we use progressive taxation (instead of regressive taxation) in order to fund plans that will actually work, e.g. hydro and nuclear.
I’m just stating facts. The biggest problem is that most of the left-leaning public has been hoodwinked by the fossil fuel industry to fight against the only real competition to the fossil fuel industry via funding green NGOs, green academics, and green political parties, and by playing up to a major undercurrent in the left that is anti-corporation which has somehow morphed into anti-industry and a certain kind of backwards-looking regressive romanticism of pre-industrial lifestyles.
It’s really sick because the consequences of the actions of these deluded left-leaning persons is to hurt the poorest people in the world and make no significant progress on combating climate change, including the cost-shifting from unfair subsidies for rooftop solar, ongoing hunger in Africa from the opposition of leftists in the west to fertilizer and modern agricultural techniques, to the millions of deaths per year from entirely preventable airborne particulate pollution, and the potentially vast consequences on the poor parts of the world from climate change.
I’m just stating facts.
That’s what “race realists” always say. Actually, you’ve repeatedly been found to be MISSTATING facts, jumping from a plausible assertion to obvious bullshit, and making claims that are flatly contradicted by the sources you yourself cite.
Poisoning the well, eh? Can’t refute my arguments and so you say I’m as evil as a racist for no apparent reason. Stay classy.
That’s not what I said and you know it, liar.
The implication was obvious even if not explicitly stated.
Argumentation according to Raging Bee: when you can’t refute the arguments of your opponent but you just know they are wrong, label them a racist.
On-topic:
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PS Gerrard, you’ve been refuted thousands of times.
(Stuck in a time loop with your little stash of cherry-picked articles — it’s been a decade, maybe you should, you know, see if anything at all has changed since those days)
Another viewpoint, genuine in my estimation (I have seen multiple videos):
More opinion/analysis:
From Atomic Insights’ article on Stanford’s University’s New Natural Gas Initiative, linked by GOTS@108:
So all your crap about Jacobson being funded by fossil fuel companies. is nothing more than guilt by association. If you knew anything about university funding, you’d know it’s practically impossible to find any position anywhere for which similar accusations of taking money from unacceptable sources could not be made. I haven’t had time to go through all your other claims against Jacobson – and wouldn’t dismiss them without doing so, but considering how shaky this one is, I wouldn’t accept them without doing so either.
On environmental organisations being fossil-fuel funded, your link from Environmental Progress has the following list (my responses in brackets):
Corporate & Energy Interest Funding for Anti-Nuclear Groups:
Sierra Club :: Has taken $136 million from nat gas/ renewables interests that stand to profit from the closure of nuclear plants. [Turns out $26m of that was from gas, stopped in 2010.]
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) :: Has minimum of $70 million directly invested in oil and gas renewable energy interests that stand to profit from the closure of nuclear plants. [No documentation of this claim, no breakdown into fossil fuels vs renewables. There is information that NRDC invested $66m in Black Rock’s “Ex Fossil Fuels Index Fund”, but no documentation I could find that this fund does, as claimed, invest in fossil fuels. Maybe you can provide some. ]
Environmental Defense Fund :: Has received minimum of $60 million from oil, gas, & renewables investors who would directly benefit from EDF’s anti-nuclear advocacy. [Receiving money from investors in X is not the same as receiving money from X.]
WISE International :: Funded by renewable energy interests that stand to profit from the closure of nuclear plants. [So, no funding from fossil fuels identified.]
Environmental Law and Policy Center (ELPC) Funded by natural gas and renewable energy interests that stand to profit from the closure of nuclear plants. [The sole amount appears to be £10,000 from a “natural gas, renewable, storage” company. Probably your strongest point.]
Greenpeace :: Works to kill nuclear power around the world and refuses to disclose its donors. [So, no funding from fossil fuels identified.]
Friends of the Earth :: Works to kill nuclear power around the world and refuses to disclose its donors. [So, no funding from fossil fuels identified.]
Overall, pretty weak sauce – mostly, opposition to nuclear power seems to be considered proof of funding from fossil fuel interests, which obviously, it isn’t. More later.
Just worth pointing out once again that the most recent donation to either from any “fossil fuel donor” you’ve been able to identify is from 1969. So I’ve no hesitation in calling you a liar on this point. Greenpeace International, and its European and UK orgnaisations, claim not to take any money from companies or governments, only from individuals, trusts and foundations. Can you produce any evidence to the contrary? FoE is a federation of national groups, and I don’t know how much they are overseen by FoE International, the financial statements of which are available here. FoE USA does accept corporate donations, but makes the following claim:
Do you have any evidence that it has broken this commitment? Or that FoE International takes money from fossil fuel companies?
When you descend to absurd and offensive claims that I am making racist or colonialist arguments, it’s clear you haven’t a leg to stand on. I don’t want new nuclear power stations anywhere – though I don’t agree with closing existing ones as long as the alternative is more fossil fuel burning – and one reason for that is that it’s quite clear no country is free of the risk of war over the next decades. You simply ignore the case of the current war in Ukraine and the risk of serious radiological pollution from the nuclear power plants there if they are targeted by the invaders. And would it really be of benefit to the inhabitants of Sudan, say, to have the two sides in their current civil war fighting over nuclear power plants?
more later