Nuclear power

Tuesday

Charlie Gammell

Will Iran take the nuclear win?

To enrich or not enrich? This seems to have been the question dividing Iranian and American negotiators, and there are swelling choruses in Tehran and Washington who hold strong views on the matter. In a report leaked to Axios, it appears that during the last round of talks, the US gave Iran a proposal that would allow limited low-level uranium enrichment for a specified period. The proposal suggested that Iran would be forbidden from building new enrichment facilities and must dismantle “critical infrastructure for conversion and processing of uranium,” adding that research and development on centrifuges would also have to stop. Sanctions relief will only come once Iran is demonstrably adhering to the terms of the deal and has clearly paused its underground enrichment activities.

Iran

Saturday

Michael Evans

The problem with putting US nukes in Poland

Nuclear weapons are becoming a major issue for Poland. One way or another, both the Polish president and prime minister want their country to host tactical nuclear weapons as a deterrent against President Putin’s Russia. In the latest — but by no means the first — statement on this issue, President Andrzej Duda revealed that he recently discussed stationing American tactical nuclear weapons in Poland with Keith Kellogg, the US special envoy for Ukraine. In an interview with the Financial Times, Duda said: “I think it’s not only that the time has come, but that it would be safer if those weapons were already here.

Friday

Emmet Penney

Meet Meredith Angwin, the grandmother changing the energy industry

Along a twist in the Connecticut River within an old-style colonial Vermont home lives Meredith Angwin, the Jewish grandmother who saw what almost no one else did: the coming downfall of the American electrical system. Three years ago, Angwin self-published Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid, the first-ever explanation for laymen of America’s labyrinthine, abstruse power markets. Her diagnosis was simple and troubling: when America moved away from the monopoly utility system in the Nineties toward restructured electricity markets, all players were divested from the responsibility of keeping the lights on.

Angwin

Sunday

Emmet Penney

Nuclear power is the answer to our energy woes

America is about to spend $126.9 billion on renewable energy thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. When this is added to the already existing production tax credits, the total is $240 billion. Greens everywhere are rejoicing. Paul Krugman took to the New York Times to wonder if the Democrats had just saved the world from climate change. And why not? America has seen emissions drop to 4.8 trillion tons a year since 2000. That’s a one-trillion ton decrease. In fact, since America has embarked on building out wind and solar, the country has returned to 1949 levels of emissions. But are renewables really to thank? After all, wind and solar only accounted for about 12 percent of our electricity supply in 2021.

nuclear

Friday

Emmet Penney

California goes lights-out thanks to green energy

California has gone full pagan — it lives and dies by the weather. Over the last few days, the state’s power grid has groaned under the strain of a massive heatwave. Combine that with a hydropower-sapping drought and you’ve got a recipe for blackouts. While major weather events pose challenges for any electricity system, California’s has become uniquely vulnerable to blackouts thanks to an over-investment in weather-dependent wind and solar. Every night during the heatwave, solar experiences its scheduled defeat at the hands of sunset and Californians are left praying for the wind to blow and and the imports to flow.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Biden finalizes terrible new Iran deal

Several sources in the negotiating team in Vienna tell Cockburn we can expect a "new Iran deal" between the Biden administration and the mullahs as early as Thursday morning. For the last few months, Iran has been behaving stubbornly in negotiations, refusing to back down from its “red lines,” including lifting sanctions on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Instead, it's kept to the original timeline on the Iran deal, which would allow it to test ballistic missiles next year and remove all restrictions by 2030. Now, Iran’s resolve seems to have paid off. Sanctions: Cockburn's sources say the Biden team is set to waive virtually all sanctions on Iran.

iran

Friday

Chadwick Moore

Sam Brinton and the dorkification of kink

Remember when gay people were cool? Libertines and romantics, reviled, spat-upon, defiant and irreverent? Gay life could be sexy and thrilling, tragic and shameful. If the homosexual offered nothing else, he carried an arsenal of bawdy tales that left any housewife glued and dithering at a cocktail party. Judge his life as you may, but never call it ordinary. The mystique is gone. That dusky boundary between the dark and dirty and the workaday has evaporated. Assimilation has meant the faces of gay are either vapid, Instagram-famous semen receptacles, complete goobers or repulsive shrills. And they’ve dragged the rest of us, by association, into their orbit of cringe. The Forces of Biden particularly love the latter two.

sam brinton