The article mentions that the call centres in Myanmar were targeting Chinese and Americans, so although the call centers are very far away the people they are scamming might be a lot closer. Its a very international problem.)
Various components in the Gripen, particularly the engine which Volvo licensed from GE, are from the US and the US has a veto on them. It is currently blocking sale of Gripen to Colombia, for example.
You've got to be kidding. Reverse engineering the GE F414 for local production and maintenance is just completely impractical, or maybe impossible. It would be faster and cheaper to adapt something like the Eurojet EJ200 to fit into the Gripen.
Are you saying the Europeans or Chinese cannot reverse engineer an aerospace engine for mass production? I have no particular preference where it’s done, any sufficiently advanced country will do.
I suppose any afterburning turbofan engine will do if it fits? Again, not particularly opinionated. Just get out from under US control using the path of least resistance.
Yes, I am saying that the Europeans or Chinese cannot reverse engineer a turbine engine as sophisticated as the F414. Having some examples in hand doesn't tell you much about how it was built, nor does that give you the source code for the embedded control software and diagnostic systems.
The Chinese have been trying for years to reverse engineer older Russian turbofan engines and still can't get them quite right. And those are a level below the F414 in complexity.
You don't need the source code for the embedded control software and diagnostic systems. If you're pirating the whole engine design anyway, just copy the binary from the example you're copying.
(Then just make sure not to hook it up to any radio transmitter under the engine's direct control, so it can't call home to the American manufacturer and be disabled remotely.)
Why try to copy an engine which would enrage the US when you can simply replace it with an engine, a newer engine, that you already produce in Europe and Europe has soverign control over and can offer the Swedes the _right_ to produce etc? Just go talk to Rolls Royce in the UK or Safran in France.
After the original Rolls-Royce Ltd. went bust the British government bought up all it's assets and set up a new company in 1971. The automobile division was spun off as a separate company and sold off a few years later.
The engine company is Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc and ain't a subsidiary of anyone. It's the second largest manufacturer of aircraft engines after CFM.
BMW owns the modern car company and licenses the name and logo from the engine company.
okay, but 8 of the top 10 shareholders (and four of the top four) in Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc are American. I'm not really sure "ain't a subsidiary" is quite what you make of it. I was incorrect, but i hedged, i guessed that the aircraft engine parts wasn't owned by ford, but i was not sure.
in the context of this discussion, if all american investors pulled out of Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc because they were tasked with copying an american engine... could Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc make that engine?
This is what american isolationism means and will look like.
Rolls Royce is also responsible for building and maintaining the nuclear reactors used in Britain's missile launch submarines.
If things really got so bad that American investors began intentionally sabotaging the operations of foreign companies, it would probably be forcibly nationalised by the British Government.
What do you mean by "pull out"? If investors sell their shares then the company including all assets and employees still exist, it just has different owners. The actual obstacle to any separation from US control isn't financial but rather some level of dependence on US parts suppliers and licensed technology.
Yes, without help from the US the rest of the world is about 230 years behind in warfighting technology.. Patriot missiles were first successfully deployed against a US drone aircraft in 1965.
Patriot systems were in use to shield Kyiv et al to great success.
I know it sucks to hear this, but if the US goes isolationist, there's not much anyone can do.
During the cold war, Soviet Russia realised that NATO Air Force was becoming superior in numbers to their own, and would probably dominate the air domain in a conflict with them. So they pivoted their focus to missiles and anti-ballistic missile (ABM) shields to neutralise this western advantage. And, for a period, their missile and ABM programs did have a big lead over the west. After the USSR disintegrated, the west managed to catch up with them.
As for Ukraine, they have the S-300 ABM, the Buks and Osa-AKM for air defence. (The Russian made Buk was one of the first systems able to intercept cruise missiles and US-made Lance tactical ballistic missiles, Harm anti-radar missiles and other airborne and ground-based precision weapons). Though quite old, they are still formidable and is one of the main reasons Russian Air Force has a low key role in the current ongoing conflict. (That + the NATO AWACS).
The problem Ukraine had was that they ran out of missiles for these platform and that's why the US provided them with the Patriot system. But since America did not have enough spare Patriot missiles, East Europe and the US also modified the Buk platform to fire the radar-guided AIM-7 Sparrow and the semi-active radar-guided RIM-7 Sea Sparrow, as well as the heat-seeking AIM-9M Sidewinder air-to-air missile.
Less than eighty years ago Germany was at least on par with, or arguably ahead of, the USA in “warfighting technology”. (Werner von Braun ring a bell?) So “230 years” is mathematically impossible; even if the rest of the world had stood still since then, it couldn't be more than eighty years behind. (Which it didn't, so it's far less.)
the plane this topic is about is 50 years old. the missile defense system that was protecting ukraine is 65 years old.
We give everyone our junk after the US Marine Corps is done with it, and they get it 20+ years after the army, navy, and airforce consider them "obsolete".
Yes, two hundred and thirty years to even compete with the US. Please note, this is if the US goes full isolationist, and pulls all military forces worldwide back to the US and US territorial waters.
For example, people are talking about Rolls royce "reverse engineering" american engines, or the chinese. Another idea was using Saab planes. If saab planes are so great, why were they using american F-16s?
these aren't my numbers, but my experience with linking the sources of my data isn't great on HN.
I think the idea of free trade is that more wealth is made through comparative advantages and trade, meaning everyone contributes less "blood and backs" and gets more wealth in return [1]. Not sure how this applies to military assistance, but it seems likely Japan and EU would not have the peace dividend they've had since WW2 if US wasn't subsidizing their defense.
Rather try to get some cooperation with French industry (who already have a complete engine without US strings attached), or British Industry (which has a workings engines, but as far as I understand with some US strings attached.)
its not about hard power necessarily, but soft power. If the EU united politically and made these harassment attacks consequential then they would stop.
E.g. perhaps something along the lines of prison for captains who were 'derelict in duty', rewards to crews who grass and seizing ships that, by dragging anchors 'by accident', have proven themselves unseaworthy etc.
I believe something like this will happen, sooner or later. For now, it's not easily to organize as the crew can always use the excuse "oh, this was unintentional" but charging them with the cost of repair plus additional penalty could be a good starting point.
> but charging them with the cost of repair plus additional penalty could be a good starting point.
Good luck enforcing that. The "shadow fleet" ships all operate under flags of convenience and ownership is hidden behind layers upon layers of shell companies.
The problem is, the oil tankers are single wall, shoddily maintained, probably contaminated with all sorts of nasty stuff and with barely any history records. These things are effectively floating time bombs - assuming you can find a buyer for the seized cargo given the lack of paperwork in the first place, you need to sell the ship for scrap because it's nowhere near seaworthy (remember: single wall, no Western insurer will handle that), and that costs a loooot of money if you are a Western country and can't just haul it off to Alang [1] or whatever place and let others deal with the fallout.
Is there a use case for that? If it is about bypassing parental restrictions or just blurring images because the user requests that feature, the pool of potential buyers seems small and likely too risky to engage.
It's also about blocking spam. Don't know why that's buried in this particular article, but many sources have pointed to that as one of the primary use cases for the new system tool.
Its an 'arms race'. As crabs adapt to the current crop of cuttlefish ruses, the cuttlefish also adapt to overcome again.
An aside, but the recent book by Dawkins "The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie" is fascinating and explains how you can look at an animal and understand the environment of its ancestors. You can read it as a kind of massive autobiography of the species and detect waypoints on its evolutionary journey.
Accidents happen, you cannot eliminate completely the risk, but that is fine as long as you minimize the risk. People died because of wind power [1] but since the event is quite rare we don't ask ourselves "how do we stop wind-power-related disasters".
In the case of Fukishima, only one person died directly because of it. About 2000 more deaths can be related to the nuclear accident, for example because they were displaced and living in worse conditions [2]. Since this is the kind of event that every few decades (we have to go back to Chernobyl for something similar) I would say that it is not a reason for worrying.
For comparison, that is 1/10 of people that died in Japan because of the Tsunami that caused it, and it is less than the number of people that die every year for traffic accidents in Italy, so if I was Italian (wait, I am!) I would be more worried about the road traffic than a nuclear accident.
As one of the worst Nuclear accidents in history (caused by one of the largest earthquakes to hit Japan along with a tsunami), an awfully small amount of people died.
If anything, Fukushima shows how safe Nuclear actually is.
Nuclear power is extremely cost effective, even with the current plants.
The individual plants are currently expensive, because they are large and produce huge amounts of power. Since that means you only have a fairly small number of plants, that means the risk is higher than preferable.
However, even with existing designs, building a common design multiple times and overlapping the build times brings down risk, build-time and costs tremendously.
The German Konvois were built for DM 5.8 billion in less than 6 years, and we were just getting started.
China is currently building their version of the passively safe Westinghouse AP-1000, the CAP-1400, in 5 years for $ 3.5 billion.
Nuclear is being vastly outcompeted globally for new installations of power capacity by renewables. It's not even close. The only inference that can be drawn from this is that renewables beat nuclear in the market, that nuclear is the loser technology economically.
Even in China, two orders of magnitude more PV comes online each year compared to nuclear (nameplate power, adjust by a factor of maybe 4 for levelized power).
Nuclear advocates defending the fantasy you are espousing here have to resort to universal conspiracy theories to explain away this unpleasant reality. But how are supposedly omnipotent greens and public fear supposed to be hindering nuclear's rollout in China?
Nuclear may benefit from experience, but that means that as rollouts are scaled back, experience decays away and nuclear gets more expensive. Below a certain (and probably pretty large) rate of installs, nuclear just regresses. It's not clear even China can avoid this at the current install rate.
If that's the only inference you can draw from that, you're not paying attention.
First, you need to compare actual output, not installed capacity. Once you take into account capacity factors, it's not looking so good any longer.
Second, if it were true that nuclear is being "out-competed", then nobody in their right mind would expand their nuclear capacity. Yet almost everyone except a few crazies and countries that are too small are doing exactly that: expanding their nuclear capacity.
Let's see who has decided to get into nuclear / reverse exits / expand capacity:
1. Italy just decided to reverse their exit.
2. Japan had decided to exit, and actually shut down their plants. They are now restarting those plants.
3. South Korea had also decided to exit, but not shut down any plants yet. They have reversed that exit. And are expanding.
4. Poland has decided to start a nuclear program, first 3 reactors are ordered, budgeted and construction has started at the site. There are a lot more planned. The vote for financing the new projects was nearly unanimous in parliament.
5. The UK is so incredibly unhappy with Hinkley Point C that they have just started work on 2 more reactors at Sizewell C, have sited another 2 in Wales and have a policy of expanding nuclear capacity by a factor of 4.
6. The US effectively built no new new plants since the TMI accident. They are now reactivating everything possible, are even planning to finish the two AP-1000s at Virgil C. Summer and have a goal of tripling their nuclear capacity by adding another 200 GW.
7. Sweden has reversed their exit and wants to build 10 new plants
8. The new government in Belgium has reversed their exit, has extended at least one (or was it two?) plant by another 10 years, is trying to save a few more that are/were due to be decommissioned and is looking to build more.
9. France had a ban on expanding their nuclear generating capacity beyond the currently installed capacity. This was lifted in March of 2023 with > 2/3 majority in parliament.
10. The Netherlands originally wanted two new nuclear reactors. They have now decided on 4 large reactors, in addition to the single small one they currently operate. This will be a 10x expansion of their nuclear capacity.
11. India is on track to triple their capacity by 2031.
12. China is currently starting 10 new reactors a year, and the rate is still increasing. Why aren't they doing more? Well, one reason is that nuclear power plants last for a really long time, currently estimated at least 80-100 years for most of the well-maintained plants. If you build 10 per year and they last 100 years, that implies a fleet of 1000 reactors. That's a lot of reactors!
France made this mistake, they built around 50 reactors in only 15 years, due to vastly overestimating electricity demand. The result was that they the nuclear industry they built up had essentially no plants to build for a good number of decades, and so that know-how and capability was lost and had to be re-acquired at great cost (see Flamanville 3).
Countries have learned from this and are pacing themselves. No need to rush.
13. The Czech Republic is betting on both large reactors from South Korea (the APR-1400, IIRC) as well as SMRs from Rolls Royce. In fact, they took a 20% in Rolls Royce.
14. Switzerland has begun the process of undoing their exit decision
15. Even Norway and Denmark are considering nuclear
16. The UAE, with ideal conditions for solar (desert), has recently completed a 4 reactor power plant, and is considering adding more.
... and so on and so forth ...
Why are all these countries expanding nuclear? Is the entire rest of the world stupid? Crazy? Only Germany knows what they're doing?
No.
What they know is that a nuclear + renewable mix is significantly cheaper and more reliably than any attempt to do 100% intermittent renewables, even if that were feasible, which is more than uncertain.
It is only (mostly?) in Germany where this crazy notion that nuclear and renewables are mutually exclusive has taken hold. They are not. They complement each other.
If you don't see the money being spent, then you're not paying attention, particularly since you then (incorrectly) chastise the poles for ... er ... spending money
The first Polish plant is not a "single reactor". It is 3 reactors.
It seems like you are dreaming up a fantasy not matched by reality.
The poles haven’t spent money, that is an application for the EU commission to review the subsidies.
Not a single final investment decision is taken.
Even the French are postponing the EPR2 program due to the horrific costs. Now it might begin in 2026, if they can politically agree to the mindbogglingly large subsidies.
With no final investment decision taken. Like I said.
It is a program championed by the previous hard right authoritarian government with not as enthusiastic interest by the current polish government.
> And French nuclear is not subsidized. Unlike renewables.
Why do you keep making stuff up which is easily findable? Is accepting reality that hard?
The EPR2 program hinges on absolutely massive subsidies. The French auditing agency said that even assuming insanely low capital costs and profit margins it makes a large loss.
Taking real figures it just becomes stupid.
The French auditing agency recommended to postpone the EPR2 program due to the low value and incredibly high costs.
What they said about EPR2 is that they were refused the information to even make an estimate of its profitability. Translation (using DocLingo) from page 25:
"In its 2020 report on the EPR sector, the Court recommended
that EDF 'calculate the projected profitability of the Flamanville 3 reactor
and the EPR2 and ensure its monitoring' (recommendation no. 6).
EDF has deliberately and persistently refused to provide the Court
with information on the projected profitability and production costs,
which leads to considering this recommendation as not implemented.
work.
Based on the information at its disposal, the Court's calculation
predicts a poor profitability for Flamanville 3. For its part, the EPR2
program is still characterized by the absence of a finalized estimate
and a financing plan."
Any claims of profitability of EPR/EPR2 should be taken with heavy skepticism, given that the official auditors have been stonewalled.
Just like everything else you've written so far, this is also patently untrue.
The French auditors said that Flamannville 3, the solitary EPR prototype, will be "marginally" profitable. This is one of the most catastrophic builds in recent history. And it will still be more profitable than any of the intermittent renewable projects in Europe.
EDF does in fact, receive subsidies from the French government. For their renewables projects. Not for their nuclear projects. Which pay for all this nonsense.
Compared to the EPR, the EPR2 is vastly simplified, for better buildability. The complaint there was that they were moving too quickly for the auditors, as they didn't have all the documentation they would like to have.
Compare this with the absolutely devastating report of the Bundesrechnungshof, the German auditors, on the failed German Energiewende.
Just don't build the plant next to Vesuvius. The biggest recorded earthquake in Europe was 7.1 magnitude, compared to 7.4 that caused tsunami that hit fukushima.
No I didn't say that but extreme weather as a result of climate change is another major risk factor.
Look at what happened here in Spain in Valencia only a few months ago. Unprecedented in the region's recorded history. Yet it keeps happening more and more.
But I can see how the way I worded it suggests I meant that yes. I should have been clearer. What I did mean to say is that recorded history is like a microsecond in geological time and I wouldn't put too much confidence in predicting based on that short period.
But they are two different risks. Over exacerbated by climate change, the other indeed not.
You can't. The problem with nuclear is that it needs to be properly maintained forever. If you get an irresponsible government or power company that cheaps out in 30 years, oopsies, you're going to irradiate the local area.
It's a lot like trusting your private data to a company. Sure, Google in 2007 is pretty great, but maybe you have some doubts about their integrity in 2025. Too late, they have what they have, forever.
You can build systems to fail safe, so that lack of proper maintenance leads to the plant becoming safely inoperable, and only grossly-improper maintenance would cause a fallout incident.
Is this guaranteed to work? The Chernobyl disaster was caused by grossly-improper maintenance, so… :shrug:. No matter how many physical safety mechanisms you have, a determined mechanic could remove them – but at that point, it becomes deliberate sabotage, which is rare, detectable, and not unique to nuclear power plants. (You could probably kill more people by destroying the right dam in the middle of the night.)
... and with every other energy source. The only difference is that some spread the damage out enough to the point where people stop caring vs. (somewhat) larger but incredibly rare incidents that make headlines.
And that's before you take into account second order risks like people dying because they can't afford to heat properly during winter.
The damage from Fukushima has been so small that it wouldn't make it past regional headlines if it didn't involve the scary word "nuclear".
Solar panels fail pretty safe. I guess there's fire risk? Wind turbines are generally located in areas where rapid unscheduled disassembly would be harmless.
Nuclear power plants don't need to be built at scale. I reckon we could get away with a few thousand in the entire world. And by "grossly improper", I mean things that are more expensive than correct maintenance, and make the power plant work less well: I can't rule out that anyone would want to do that, but you'd need a bona fide conspiracy (or some kind of purge of all available experts) to even attempt it.
Sure, but this is HN, and we get a lot of The Case For Nuclear Power articles coming through, and startups building micro reactors that everyone thinks are very cool- me too, honestly- but I think that the case against gets given short shrift, or can turned into a strawman.
The consequences of a nuclear incident are very high, and can be more or less permanent for an area. It's a lot to ask for a technology to be absolutely resilient to mismanagement or even sabotage.
> The consequences of a nuclear incident are very high, and can be more or less permanent for an area. It's a lot to ask for a technology to be absolutely resilient to mismanagement or even sabotage.
There should be international agreements for nuclear energy where neighboring countries can come and inspect each others power plants, or one org on the continent level.
You can see online, nuclear power is actually one of the safest methods of energy generation, behind solar and ahead of wind, because sometimes dudes fall from the tops of the windmills.
Could you start looking at the second-order effects of the meltdown to get a higher death toll? Probably, but you could probably also look at all of the pollutants generated by solar panels, and the fact that they get shipped to Africa and crushed up and thrown in the ground to make solar's death toll look higher too.
I think I already addressed this point. You also need to think about second-order effects, but like I said, there are second order effects to all of these solutions. Just because nuclear's side effects are more easy to dramatize doesn't mean that it is necessarily more deadly / harmful to the environment.
That's because the deaths would be lost in a sea of ordinary cancers. Hundreds of additional cancers would not be detectable; that would be below the statistical noise floor. Not being detectable does not mean they won't occur.
Anyway, let me steelman what you're aiming at here. I think you want to argue not that hundreds of deaths won't occur, but that hundreds of deaths don't matter that much. These are statistical deaths, so it's appropriate to treat them using the "statistical value of a human life". This is the value of a life to be used for policy purposes (like deciding if a safety measure is needed, if spending on a medical treatment is appropriate, etc.) In the US, it's around $12M per life. So, 200 (say) deaths would have a value of $2.4B. This is not enormous compared to overall cost of the accident, even to the utility. It could be reasonable to treat radiation releases as at Fukushima by fining the polluter by an amount related to this value.
Under this sort of regulatory regime, the purpose of regulations is not to avoid all releases, but to keep the releases small enough that the utilities would have the resources to pay the fines. So, no 100,000 death accidents. Nuclear power plants designed to this concept could allow some small radiation release in accidents.
There was no nuclear disaster at Fukushima. There was a tsunami and there was a destruction of a nuclear power plant. There were a couple cancers and an undetectable release of tritiated water into the Pacific Freaking Ocean.
> MSRs eliminate the nuclear meltdown scenario present in water-cooled reactors because the fuel mixture is kept in a molten state. The fuel mixture is designed to drain without pumping from the core to a containment vessel in emergency scenarios, where the fuel solidifies, quenching the reaction.
Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main
drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future
U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management
seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is
not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized."
It's like tobacco and junk food companies blaming doctors for spreading misinformation about the healthy effects of smoking and fat and sugar consumption. That explains everything.
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