They enrich uranium up to 60%. It is very costly and there is no civilian need for that. No one believes it is a civilian program.

I am very critical of Israel on Gaza, but on the Iranian nuclear program, there has been decades of procrastination, ambivalence and, since the last Trump episode, downright idiocy, in the handling of the diplomatic discussion. I kinda believe it when they say we were at the point where strikes were the only option to avoid a nuclear Iran.

Then again, the world pretends that Israel has no nukes whereas it is an open secret. All the other nuclear nations, including Pakistan and India, consider that the only way to be safe in such a situation is the MAD doctrine. Yet we expect Iran to stop its nuclear program and pretend its main enemy has none. I am not sure how idiotic we thought they are but even to religious fanatics it was pretty obvious that the only way for them was to have their own secret program.

This is a complex clusterfuck where you can’t easily split the actors as good guys/bad guys. There are lots of rational decisions and lots of totally idiotic religion-fueled ethnic hatred.

Solar panels dont produce fuel for thermal engines and are intermittent. In the longer term we want electric vehicles and batterie to absorb intermittence but in the short term it has its uses

And from French nuclear power outside of the solar peak:

Sorry about the graph in French, it comes from RTE, the electricity distribution network here. This is a graph of the import/export. Orange is Germany, the thick white horizontal bar is the zero: things below are exports from France and above are imports. During midday we typically import below-zero euros surplus electricity from Germany and re-export at around 100€/MWh outside of their production peak.

It is not a simple situation and it does not lend itself to simplistic judgement. There is some criticism here in France that German’s surplus and inability to absorb it makes it unprofitable to develop solar power locally. The manager of RTE already warned that in the current conditions, adding renewables to our grid may prove counter-productive. We are at about 30% solar during peak hours and 12% wind.

We have reached the point in France + Germany and probably Spain where renewables are at saturation until we find better ways to handle the intermittence. This is a good problem to have, but one that was warned against years ago.

We have so some pumping into the dams but that’s a very limited capability.

I non ironically think that a state that provides zero-cost electricity during its solar spike is going to attract a lot of companies whose productivity rely on cheap electricity, including, yes, AI training centers.

Yeah the turbine on top does not make sense while driving. It could be something used while it is parked.

Yes, there are contraptions that can extract energy from downwind or upwind vehicles. This is not one of those. On any decent road speed that thing will drag like hell.

Exactly. Cobalt does not lose its interesting properties if it is mined in a country with good environmental regulations by unionized well-equipped adults, or even better, robots. What changes is that then it becomes a bit more expensive.

It is the way international trade is organized that is problematic, not the fact that we use minerals.