Middle East: the Future May Have Changed

The GBU-57, or the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb

President Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites:

President Trump, speaking to the nation late Saturday, called the strikes "a spectacular military success" and said Iran's nuclear sites were "completely and totally obliterated." Trump had ordered the attack abruptly, hoping it would catch Tehran off guard.

The sites attacked—Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan—represent the core of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. ​The U.S. bombers that attacked the nuclear sites dropped bunker-busting bombs called GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators for the first time in warfare.

Just this once I hope that President Trump had turned off his sales-pitch mode and is not exaggerating an accomplishment. If Iran's nuclear-bomb capability indeed has been "obliterated," the future of the Middle East has been changed.

Microsoft Sees the Light

The Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 single-handedly killed the nuclear power industry in the U.S. After Three Mile Island construction on nuclear power plants halted, and existing plants were decommissioned.

Today nuclear energy is undergoing something of a renaissance. Many green-energy advocates are realizing that ambitious carbon-free energy goals cannot be met by wind and solar power, let alone be "on all the time" when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

Many tech companies, including the largest and most well-known, joined the alternative energy marching band, IMHO, because it was easy to, since their fortunes weren't tied to fossil fuels like legacy manufacturing and transportation companies.

After 2020, as the race to acquire electricity for artificial-intelligence data centers accelerated, the virtue signalling dampened down.

Big Tech needed power, and ESG (environmental, social, governance) projects did nothing to help and even inhibited that objective.

Three Mile Island will be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center (WSJ)

In a sign that the worm has turned, Three Mile Island, the bête noire of fission haters, is being revived to power Microsoft's data centers.

A deal between Constellation Energy and Microsoft will restart Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, the site of the country’s worst nuclear accident, to help power the tech giant’s growing artificial intelligence ambitions.

Under the agreement, Constellation would revive the plant’s undamaged reactor, which was too costly to run and closed in 2019, and sell the power to Microsoft. The plan signals the gargantuan amount of power needed for data centers for AI, along with the tech industry’s thirst for a carbon-free, round-the-clock electricity source needed to meet climate goals.

Constellation expects to spend around $1.6 billion to restart the reactor by early 2028. Microsoft has signed a 20-year power-purchase agreement with Constellation, the companies said Friday. The deal would help Microsoft pair its 24-7 electricity use with a matching source of nearby clean power generation.

It's nice to know that one of our most successful companies is able to discard green-power fantasies when the virtue-signalling impedes basic objectives.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.---1 Cor 13:11

Climate Change: Prioritized Appropriately

(Image from Seeking Alpha)

A not-unexpected headline: AI Poses ‘Risk of Extinction’ on Par With Pandemics and Nuclear War, Tech Executives Warn

Tech executives and artificial-intelligence scientists are sounding the alarm about AI, saying in a joint statement Tuesday that the technology poses an extinction risk as great as pandemics and nuclear war.

More than 350 people signed a statement released by the Center for AI Safety, an organization that said it works to reduce AI risks.

Some of the smartest people on the planet signed the statement. Other tech luminaries like Elon Musk and Bill Gates have previously expressed concern about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

The AI discussion has been going on for a while and is above your humble blogger's pay-grade, but he did notice a significant omission: climate change isn't even listed as a top-three extinction risk.

Now that COVID-19 (pandemic), Russia-Ukraine (nuclear war), and ChatGPT (AI) have shown everyone what they should really be scared about, the nightmarish projections of teenagers are being prioritized appropriately.

Earth Day, 2022: Going Nuclear

Even Democrats are having second thoughts about
closing Diablo Canyon in 2025. (Chron photo)

On Earth Day, 2022 there are signs that the decades-long freeze against nuclear energy is over.

Biden launches $6 billion effort to save nuclear power plants

The Biden administration is launching a $6 billion effort to rescue nuclear power plants at risk of closing, citing the need to continue nuclear energy as a carbon-free source of power that helps to combat climate change...The program was funded through President Joe Biden's $1 trillion infrastructure deal, which he signed into law in November.

Question Asked: Can Coal Plants Turn Into Nuclear Reactors? [bold added]

the main issues are that you have these coal plants that are closing down that have an experienced workforce. So you could tap into the workforce, you could save some jobs, and help out local economies. And that you would reuse the site in a sense that you have these valuable grid connections that are there and that you could do something with that. And then that you would be replacing coal essentially with a cleaner energy, that nuclear is a no carbon way to make electricity. So the idea behind modular nuclear reactors is that they are smaller and faster to build.

Bill Gates’ TerraPower aims to build its first advanced nuclear reactor in a coal town in Wyoming

The Kemmerer plant will be the first to use an advanced nuclear design called Natrium, developed by TerraPower with GE-Hitachi.

Natrium plants use liquid sodium as a cooling agent instead of water. Sodium has a higher boiling point and can absorb more heat than water, which means high pressure does not build up inside the reactor, reducing the risk of an explosion...

Natrium plants can also store heat in tanks of molten salt, conserving the energy for later use like a battery and enabling the plant to bump its capacity up from 345 to 500 megawatts for five hours.

The plants are also smaller than conventional nuclear power plants, which should make them faster and cheaper to build than conventional power plants. TerraPower aims to get the cost of its plants down to $1 billion, a quarter of the budget for the first one in Kemmerer.

Nuclear power plants designed a half-century ago are being matched against today's solar and wind power technology. Comparing all non-fossil-fuel sources of energy for their current safety, cost, and reliability is a much more honest analysis.

The One Part of Ukraine That Russia Doesn't Want

Chernobyl has been shut down since 2000 (WSJ photo)

Headline: Russia Hands Control of Chernobyl Back to Ukraine, Officials Say

The Russian troops began leaving in phases on Tuesday, and the entire Russian deployment had left the area by late Thursday. That concluded a five-week occupation of the defunct plant that began on the first afternoon of the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, when Russian troops arrived at the plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident...

The recent situation at the plant has been the subject of intense speculation since the Russians overran it. Ukraine’s intelligence agency claimed that Russia was preparing a false-flag attack on the exclusion zone—the 1,000-square-mile, mostly uninhabited area around the plant—to blame Ukraine as a pretext for escalating the war. Russian state media said Ukraine was close to building a plutonium-based “dirty bomb” at Chernobyl. Neither side provided evidence for its claims.

All of Chernobyl’s reactors have been shut down since 2000, but the plant still employs thousands of staff to keep cool water circulating over thousands of spent fuel rods kept in four-story-deep basins lined with steel and reinforced concrete.

The Red Forest's dead trees have been removed
but the radiation remains (TNR)

According to Ukraine, the Russians didn't leave because of Ukrainian military action:

Several hundred Russian soldiers were forced to hastily withdraw from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine after suffering “acute radiation sickness” from contaminated soil, according to Ukrainian officials.

The troops, who dug trenches in a contaminated Red Forest near the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history, are now reportedly being treated in a special medical facility in Gomel, Belarus. The forest is so named because thousands of pine trees turned red during the 1986 nuclear disaster. The area is considered so highly toxic that not even highly specialized Chernobyl workers are allowed to enter the zone.

News from either side is untrustworthy, but so far there is no negative evidence or counter-argument to the conclusion that the Russians "won" Chernobyl without knowing of its dangers.

But how could they not know of the most (in)famous nuclear accident in history? The degree of organized stupidity in one of the most formidable militaries on the planet is very difficult to believe.

Where Are the Adults?

From "How did US markets fare during the Cuban Missile Crisis?"

Kennedy always made sure Khrushchev had a face-saving way out. “Every opportunity was to be given to the Russians to find a peaceful settlement which would not diminish their national security or be a public humiliation,” his brother Robert Kennedy wrote. “I am not going to push the Russians an inch beyond what is necessary,” the president said.

It doesn't require too much imagination to envision nuclear weapons going off when the Russian invasion stalls. Yes, defend Ukraine, but stop with the tweeting, taunting, and beating your chests, and offer the Russians a face-saving way out. Americans supposedly elected adults to run the government in 2020. Now act like adults.

Diablo Canyon: the Ground is Shifting

Diablo Canyon (Chron photo)

In California environmentalists won the debate over nuclear power long ago. New construction was halted, and existing plants were decommissioned. The last nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, is scheduled to be closed in 2025.

Second thoughts have arisen about the shuttering of Diablo Canyon. The belief in the "existential threat" of global warming has become widespread, and eliminating 9.6% of California's energy production, especially since nuclear power is carbon-free, seems foolish.

The danger from earthquakes has not diminished, but the relative importance of carbon-free generation has increased, especially given California's ambitious targets for zero-carbon electricity production.

Stanford and MIT researchers have proposed two additional reasons why Diablo Canyon should remain open, reasons that did not seem important in 2018 when the plant was ordered to be closed. [bold added]

Intriguingly, the study suggests adding a desalination plant to the site to address water shortages in our drought-prone state. A desalination plant powered by Diablo Canyon could produce as much fresh water as the controversial project to build a tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the study says.

Diablo’s nuclear power also could be used to produce more of the hydrogen-based, zero-carbon fuels the state will need to transition to carbon neutrality. Stanford and MIT found that hydrogen produced by Diablo could cost up to 50% less than hydrogen produced via solar and wind power, and would require much less land...

Such possibilities weren’t on the table when the 2025 closure was approved back in 2018. Other realities have changed as well. Drought conditions and water shortages have increased, blackouts have become more common, and California and the world have learned more about the value of reliable nuclear energy in stabilizing the electric grid during the shift to renewables.

Also significant is the fact that present and former members of Democratic Administrations do not support the shutdown.

Leading federal officials, including current Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and her predecessors (notably the Nobel Prize-winning Stanford physicist Steven Chu) are pushing to keep the plant open.

Progressives have dominated coastal politics, but their visible failures in crime, education, and homelessness and housing have tarnished their aura of invincibility. Now some Democrats are pushing back against unbending anti-nuclear policies. I can feel the ground shifting.

No Savings for a Sunny Day

"Lake" Oroville on July 22, 2021 (Chronicle photo)

The Lake Oroville hydroelectric plant has been shut down due to the drought:

It was the first time the Hyatt Powerplant at Lake Oroville has been shut down because of low lake levels since it was constructed....Hyatt is the fourth-largest hydroelectric energy producer in California, authorities said.

It was only four years ago that there was so much rain and snow during the winter that the water pouring over the Oroville Dam threatened the collapse of the spillway.

Oroville in 2017

The failure to add water storage capacity to save for a sunny day--and to upgrade existing dams and reservoirs--is another consequence of a Progressive governance that wasted multi-$billions on a high-speed rail system and decommissioned reliable, carbon-free nuclear power plants.

The inability to provide adequate water, not to mention electrical power, is a feature of a developed society, and it's a reasonable question whether California fulfills even that basic definition.

It was the Toddler's Fault

There are some people and organizations whose power over other people's lives is so great that we are forced to pay attention to their every utterance, for example, POTUS, the Pope, and the leaders of China and Russia.

It's easy to forget them after the Cold War ended, but the Strategic Air Command has the ability to destroy the world.

A Sunday night tweet alarmed some people and puzzled everyone else. [bold added]

Chuckle? Hide in a bunker?

The social media world wasn’t quite sure what to do when the Nebraska-based U.S. Strategic Command tweeted out a bit of gibberish Sunday night on its official Twitter account....

Thirty minutes later, StratCom issued a follow-up tweet apologizing “for any confusion” and asking that the previous tweet be disregarded...

the Command’s Twitter manager was working from home when he stepped away from his computer with the Twitter account open.

You can guess what happened next.

His child, who is described as “very young,” sat down at the keyboard and started playing with the keys — and then, somehow, hit “Send.”

Good thing the toddler couldn't access the arming and launch codes, right? Right!?!

Happy New Year: Time to Face Our Fear

I make it a point never to laugh at a person because of his lack of knowledge. The balkanization of culture insures that there is very little knowledge that Americans, or more broadly Westerners, widely share. (I have my own knowledge gaps, for example 21st century pop music.) Nevertheless, I had to laugh at an educated Brit's response on a TV game show.

Well, this did me in pic.twitter.com/njBVwTjb3W

— L Johnston (@FinalBullet) December 26, 2020

King Ghidorah, Megalon, and Mothra are among creatures to have fought which enduring film character in films made between 1964 and 1992?

"Lassie."

Being totally unfamiliar with kaiju is nothing to be ashamed about, but naming her as the principal slayer of movie monsters shows that one is totally unfamiliar with Lassie, too.

Speaking of the answer to the question--after a year of contending with an enemy too small to be seen with the naked eye, and inspired by the above, I spent a couple of hours this morning watching Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

Taking full advantage of special effects technology that exploit today's high-resolution screens, the producers made Godzilla and his fellow monsters truly terrifying. The most powerful weapons, i.e., nuclear bombs, that humans can throw at Godzilla only make him more powerful.

If a fire-breathing, mountain-sized monster is coming toward you, you're allowed to be scared. However, in the New Year resolve not to be afraid of something that can be warded off with a flimsy cloth mask.

MP v 2.0

A small group of scientists and billionaires have formed a "Manhattan Project" to defeat the coronavirus.

They call themselves Scientists to Stop Covid-19, and they include chemical biologists, an immunobiologist, a neurobiologist, a chronobiologist, an oncologist, a gastroenterologist, an epidemiologist and a nuclear scientist. Of the scientists at the center of the project, biologist Michael Rosbash, a 2017 Nobel Prize winner, said, “There’s no question that I’m the least qualified.”

Tom Cahill (WSJ photo)

Tom Cahill, 33-year-old venture capitalist with a bioscience PhD from Duke, hosted a conference call on the status of COVID-19 research in early March. The call was quickly oversubscribed and birthed the aforementioned group to address the multifaceted problems posed by the virus.

Much of the early work involved divvying up hundreds of scientific papers on the crisis from around the world. They separated promising ideas from dubious ones. Each member blazed through as many as 20 papers a day, around 10 times the pace they would in their day jobs.

The group's objectives are ambitious:

We envision a first wave of therapies using existing drugs that will establish a beachhead in the fight against the virus (testing in April-May 2020, use immediately afterwards). A second wave of potent new antibody drugs developed specifically to neutralize COVID-19 offer a promising combination of speed, safety, and likelihood of being effective (testing in June-August 2020, use afterwards). A third wave of vaccines for long-term victory over the virus will offer seasonal or multi-year immunity to COVID-19 (testing in March 2020-March 2021, use afterwards). In parallel, reopening of businesses and schools to restore our society and economy (implementation in May-June 2020, lasting until the threat has passed) will use science-driven symptom reporting, virus testing, and personal protective gear to minimize future COVID-19 outbreaks and additional loss of life.

Those involved with the creation of the atomic bomb--Oppenheimer, Seaborg, Feynmann, Fermi--became some of the most famous names in 20th Century science.

If the 21st century version of the Manhattan Project achieves its objectives, then its participants, who by the way have forsworn monetary enrichment or politics, will rightly deserve the accolades that will come their way.

Tariffs: Never say Never

Conventional wisdom: tariffs hurt those imposing them.

What if someone violates a written agreement? The dispute-resolution process is a matter of common sense. First, the parties should talk to each other. Perhaps one wasn't aware that it had breached the agreement, or the other mistook a permissible act for a violation. If talks fail, the lawyers get involved, with a mixture of threats and offers to renegotiate. Finally, the courts decide.

But what if there are no courts (with the authority to impose their decision)? Then the parties must come up with a solution that has a reasonable chance of being adhered to voluntarily.

Such is the situation that the United States is facing vis-à-vis China. It's very clear that China has materially violated the WTO agreement it signed 17 years ago.

What is needed is a change in Chinese behavior to conform to the rules Beijing accepted when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

The most important issue is the demand that U.S. companies transfer their technology to Chinese counterparts as a condition of doing business in China. American businesses that want to produce or sell in China are often required to enter into a joint venture with a Chinese firm that then has access to U.S. technology....

The Chinese government acknowledges that WTO rules forbid making the transfer of technology a condition for access to a nation’s economy. But it argues that the practice is “voluntary” because American firms aren’t forced to do business in China—their other option is to stay out of the country. American companies and officials say it’s a form of extortion because U.S. firms should have access to the Chinese market, as they do to markets in Europe and elsewhere, without losing their intellectual property....

Other trade issues should be easy to resolve. The U.S. would like China to reduce its excess capacity in steel and other industries and to stop selling the resulting products on the global market at below cost, in violation of WTO rules. Mr. Trump’s tariffs on steel are a way of putting extra pressure on China to accelerate its reduction of excess capacity.

President Trump's imposition of tariffs and China's retaliatory response have raised the specter of a trade war that has spooked financial markets.

In high-school American history we had it drummed into our skulls that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 brought on the Great Depression. Free-trade-good-tariffs-bad is more widely accepted than motherhood and apple pie.

Questions:
1) How come the Chinese don't buy into the free-trade mantra, i.e., they are so stupid that they impose tariffs and other tariff-like barriers to imports? Don't the Chinese see that's why they [sarc!] have been so unsuccessful?
2) Assuming talks have failed to change Chinese behavior, what are steps, preferable to tariffs, that the U.S. could take?

By the way I still am hopeful that the skirmish over tariffs is part of the overall strategy to denuclearize North Korea.

No Island is an Island

The mistaken button-push was a reminder how the world impinges on the Island State.

that sense of remove is shifting, as Hawaii plays a more central role in political brawls that put it in the spotlight. Last year, Hawaii’s attorney general successfully sued to block President Donald Trump’s first travel ban. Now come the regular missile siren tests.

Hawaii's geographic situation has provided no protection from history. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (1941) precipitated the American entrance to World War II, and, of course, Hawaii's annexation (1898) by the United States represents the ultimate intrusion. Strike that last sentence; a nuclear missile would be worse.

Buttons Are Back

(screenshot of mobile phone alert from USA Today)

Today's false alarm may inspire a few chuckles from those who are thousands of miles removed--in other words, the rest of the world--but to Hawaiians it was no laughing matter. Trapped on an island and with many homes being of lightweight construction, they instantly became aware of their vulnerability.

Celeste Russell was driving near the 7-Eleven in Waimanalo.

“There was a red light and people were beeping their horns for people to go through it, instead of stopping, because obviously, they wanted to get home themselves. So it was bad,” she said.

After the alarm went out, 32 youth flag football games scheduled throughout the day at Mililani Mauka Community Park were canceled, with some families leaving their tents and running to their cars....

United Airlines cleared its lobby at Honolulu airport and sent passengers downstairs to the baggage claim area. Workers at Pearl Harbor were scrambling to get off the base.

(Image from alamy.com)

The reason for the false alarm? "a state employee accidentally hit the wrong button on a computer." For all their recent bluster, we have been assured that neither Mr. Kim nor Mr. Trump have "buttons" that could trigger a nuclear war. Maybe not, but here's one important button that needs to have better controls.

In first grade we practiced diving under our desks when the monthly air-raid sirens went off, an action that would be helpful under very limited circumstances but better than nothing, I suppose. Today Hawaiians discovered that nothing's improved in 60 years.

No Brakes

(Graphic from University of Cambridge)

Discoveries are generally greeted with cheer, but, if the invention is powerful enough the reaction is often fear (for example, Oppenheimer's reaction when he witnessed the destructive force of the first nuclear explosion).

We may be facing such a turning point in history with the development of artificial intelligence, married with the speed of quantum computing. To this humble blogger it's not at all comforting that the leader in quantum computing is Google, possessor of one of the largest data troves on individual behavior.

In a small lab outside Santa Barbara, Calif., stocked with surfboards, wetsuits and acoustic guitars, [physicist Hartmut] Neven and two dozen Google physicists and engineers are harnessing quantum mechanics to build a computer of potentially astonishing power. A reliable, large-scale quantum computer could transform industries from AI to chemistry, accelerating machine learning and engineering new materials, chemicals and drugs.

“If this works, it will change the world and how things are done,” says physicist Vijay Pande, a partner at Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has funded quantum-computing start-up Rigetti Computing.

Two years ago Google changed its corporate motto from "Don't be evil" to "Do the right thing." Two comments: 1) the history of the world is replete with villains--even mass murderers--who thought they were doing the right thing. 2) I much prefer an ethic of restraint--not to do evil--than one that purports to guide the powerful, for who really will tell them what they're doing is wrong?

It's a new generation who may not be familiar with Lord Acton:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely

Year 72: The Mushroom Cloud's Silver Lining

(Image from Atomic Heritage Foundation)

Horrible though it was, Hiroshima probably saved more lives than it took. As I wrote two years ago,

There's a good chance that I owe my existence to the bomb. My father, who celebrated his 90th birthday in June, would have been part of the invasion of Japan. (Dad served in the post-War occupation.)

Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated the bomb's awesome destructive power to such an extent that nuclear weapons have never again been used in wartime. The fear seems to be receding, however, and our vacation from history may be ending.

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” ― J. Robert Oppenheimer