War in Ukraine

#19,829
#19,829
It's bold, it's brave! It's so crazy, it could just work.
But to JFK and Reagan, it just made sense and both men backed up Russia after making the same threats we hear today, with Reagan eventually standing on the USSR' s grave.

I thought NATO should have put a defensive force of perhaps 2500 troops from each country in E. Ukraine while announcing to Russia it is a peacekeeping force that will react defensively to invasion. IOW, if you come in you're going to have to roll over 75,000 allied troops of 30 nations. I think that would've stonewalled Putin and was an opportunity to end the nuclear blackmail.

With Russia cutting off gas lines and accelerating use of indiscriminate munitions, threatening supply transports from Western nations, I wouldn't be against that now, placing allied troops in Kyiv and other cities while UAF takes the offensive. Short of that, Western nations should supply Ukraine with planes, tanks, missiles and whatever material & logistics they can to not just wage a good fight, but push them out of the country.

Reagan Russian joke:
I heard one about a fellow who went to the KGB to report that he lost his parrot. The KGB asked him why he was bothering them. Why didn't he just report it to the local police?

"Well," he answered, "I just wanted you to know that I don't agree with a thing my parrot has to say."
 
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#19,833
#19,833
luthervol said:
You better believe it is. It has to be 103 before it gets to 102. It has to be 102 before it gets to 101.
And it's especially good when the "doctors" warned that your fever might climb as high as 117.
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Off into the weeds again , no dr is going to tell you that your fever could climb to 117 . I doubt you are hearing what they are saying at 104 .
 
#19,844
#19,844
Burhead said:
I agree. I would not be surprised if the Polish went in sooner rather than later. Especially if/when the fighting gets closer to the border.
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The Pols are one of the few countries in Europe that are worried about Russia. They are also one of the only countries that are ready to take the fight to mother Russia.
 
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#19,845
#19,845
NCFisher said:
Wind, solar and tidal - or whatever - have a host of challenges. Chief among them are requiring symmetrical, on-demand power from a plant powered by hydrocarbons, hydropower, or nuclear. The obstacles to nuclear are primarily political and regulatory.

Why is mining for material necessary for alternate energy production acceptable but not hydrocarbons? Don't we have to assess the total energy expended and environmental impact from mining, processing, energy production and end of life disposal and renewal of both to legitimize 'green'?

The U.S. is not a large producer of these materials. Manhattan Institute claims green machine energy needs require 10X more mineral extraction for the same output as hydrocarbon. I don't know if that's legit so let's say it's half; are we prepared for a 500% mining increase in this country? According to the left, as this most 'progressive president ever' promised, that answer is 'no'. What countries are mining these materials? These questions dismantle a host of green arguments, particularly these claims:

1.) We won't have to send U$D abroad - we either will or enormously increase U.S. mining
2.) We'll have energy independence and won't have to rely on wicked countries for it - same as #1. And the wicked countries are the largest producers of what we'd need.
3.) A better environment and stopping climate change - no, this is where green advocates deviate to 'Think Local and Ignore Global', NIMBY just means outsourcing the nastiness you don't want to see; "Yay! - green!". Or that one is so hypocritically cynical to choke other countries but preserve their own. Vast plumes of smoke and metric tons of toxic wastewater don't think local, but rather act global, don't they?

Green farms are damnable blights on the landscape and rapine of environmental habitat. T. Boone Pickens Pampa Wind Farm in TX panhandle would have covered a land mass of 400,000 acres - or 80% of the Great Smoky Mountains N. Park. - to power 1.5 million homes. When the wind blows.

There are around 140 million residences in the country; we'd need 37 million acres of wind farms just to power U.S. residences. Then there's commercial power for business. And you still need symmetrical, full-demand capacity hydrocarbon, hydropower, or nuke stations

I think It indicates climate and environment are not the actual concern, but is an anti-capitalist, quasi-Marxist primitivism bent on chopping the legs out from under the U.S. and the West generally. For decades, we've been seesawed from one climate emergency to another. It was cooling, it was warming - climate change do not occur in such a brief time span; man is impacting it. We know better than that now. People should read on 'abrupt climate change', in which enormous global shifts have occurred in as little as 1-2 years, and have done so multiple times. Climate alarmists still use the argument, though.

I think instead of chasing our green energy tail, we should continue to abundantly deploy the mature hydrocarbon technology we have and and focus on efficiency gains, and deploying nuclear, the greenest energy. While we're doing so, green energy can continue to trundle along entertaining itself on it's own dime.
That is not incompatible with being good stewards of the earth.

Green Energy Reality Check: It's Not as Clean as You Think | Manhattan Institute (A very lengthy article)
Among the material realities of green energy:

  • Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society.
  • A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones.
  • Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.
  • Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.
  • By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.
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Thanks for that term "symmetrical, on-demand power". Nuclear plants aren't very good for load following. The most responsive in the US are the Babcock and Wilcox plants because they use once through steam generators rather than U-tube steam generators like Westinghouse and Combustion plants. U-tube steam generators basically are slow responding and produce steam that's just at the saturation point - they use moisture separators to "dry " the steam. B&W steam generators are counterflow straight tube - primary coolant from the reactor comes in from the top and feedwater flows up from the bottom, so you by design have a region of superheated steam at the outlet to the turbine. That allows the turbine to be more responsive and have limited load following ability. It also means the steam generator has less inventory and can boil dry quickly like at Three Mile Island (B&W plant). Either case requires varying reactor power, and that's virtually not done - they run a near full power because maintaining the correct flux distribution is not a simple matter (unless things have changed a lot since I retired). It really leaves either fossil fueled or hydro plants for load following. If hydro plants are also used for river navigation and flood control, their response can be complicated, so it really gets back to something like NG plants for peaking.
 
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#19,846
#19,846
USF grad in TN said:
Russians face running out of food and war could be over in weeks, Ukraine says
Claims that they will run out of supplies in 3 days.
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Might be true, I have my doubts. Puddin could air drop supplies the way we did in Vietnam. Come in fast and low to drop supplies, using a C-130, we even did a touch and go drop during a hill battle. Basically, the plane did touch down, with open rear cargo door, and supplies slid out as it raised its nose to take off without actually stopping. Of course, the Ruskies might well be in a Murphy's Law dilemma. Namely, what can go wrong did go wrong. Which would serve Puddin right.
 
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