Europe sans Russia does not produce uranium - why people constantly paint this as an independent energy source is beyond me. Of all Russian energy companies, it was Rosatom that could not be sanctioned.
Kazakhstan is by far the largest uranium producer in the world and has a leg in Europe, west of the Ural river. The important thing is that there are more stable partners worldwide for uranium than Russia is for oil and gas.
There are deposits in Europe, the respective countries decided not to exploit them [0]. This could change depending on external pressures.
You’re right that European nuclear is not "independent" if that means "mined entirely inside Europe". But the dependency profile is not the same for Russian pipeline gas. Uranium is globally traded, compact, cheap to stockpile relative to the energy it contains, and available from several non-Russian suppliers (Kazakhstan, Canada, Namibia, Australia...). The harder choke points are conversion, enrichment, and reactor-specific fuel fabrication.
Europe does have uranium resources, for instance the Salamanca/Retortillo project, but the constraint is permitting, environmental acceptance, waste handling, and political legitimacy rather than geology. So the honest claim is not "nuclear makes Europe autarkic". It is "nuclear gives Europe a more diversifiable and stockpilable dependency than gas, provided Europe also invests in mining, conversion, enrichment, and fuel fabrication capacity".
Europe managed to get off Russian Gas, but didn’t manage to get off Russian uranium industry. You correctly identified the chokepoints and Russia can’t be replaced fast there.
While the Fogbank story is a funny anecdote, I don't see it as a fitting example for atrophied skills. It's like writing a clean implementation of some software and it just doesn't match the legacy version until you realize that the legacy version had an unnoticed bug that made it behave the way it does.
Merit order pricing and the fact that you need fossil peakers will make the price effect completely negligible to consumers. You are comparing the MWh price of slightly more efficient fossil power plants to slightly less efficient fossil power plants.
The author clearly means professional publishers, who have editors and fact-checkers. Self-published books already lack trust. The reply also misses several other points the author makes, which I find ironic because it kind of goes into the direction the author bemoans: The author wrote a longer article to lay out his thoughts and it sure took him time to write and any reader time to read and digest and here is a quick oneliner as a rebuttal that took no time and effort and is superficial.
Do publishers really have fact-checkers? My understanding was that support for authors is now relatively minimal, even for established authors, and no one really has the time or resources to second-guess everything an author has claimed. I take as a key example Naomi Wolf learning after her book was "done" that a significant chunk of it was based on a misunderstanding of an admittedly confusing 19th century British legal phrase.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/naomi-wolfs-book-cor...
I think maybe the idea that a single author spending months or years on their research, which the publish as a single bound and polished work is misguided -- an academic trying to do similar work in multiple articles would have gotten review from peers on each article, and hopefully have not spent so much time working under a correctable misunderstanding.
Fact checking as a separate job is more for journalism than books. But editors have fact checking as part of their jobs. (It is not copy-editing, which is a different job.)
Many nonfiction authors will hire a fact checker separately. They don't want to look like they missed something. Errors still happen, of course.
When I ask an LLM to help me decide something, I have to remind myself of the LotR meme where Bilbo asks the AI chat why he shouldn't keep the ring and he receives the classic "You're absolutely right, .." slop response. They always go in the direction you want them to go and their utility is that they make you feel better about the decision you wanted to take yourself.
Very level headed and empathetic to go and claim that 50 countries just lost their right to criticize China because US and Israel are fighting Iran. Trolls having their priorities straight!
Whenever certain countries start a war, China is used as a tool to divert attention. People don't discuss the right or wrong of the countries involved in the war, but they keep saying China, China...
A program that helped people evade real censorship is "feeding them US propaganda" and social media awash with state-sponsored trolls tearing our societies apart is "an alternative geopolitical narrative" - bit of a spin, isn't it?
Weird, I remember Western media ran full transcripts of his speech after the Ukraine invasion and every other time he crawled out of his bunker in the Urals. Would you like to enlighten us which important viewpoints of Putin get censored in the West?
I don't see any problem-solving being done, I only see the US dismantling the world it created, where - let's not kid ourselves - America always came first. The problems the US faces would be better solved with international cooperation, but the US is flushing its softpower down the toilet and destroying all goodwill amongst its allies.
I agree 100%. That is the reality of what is happening, but is a disconnect between what people thought/hoped it meant vs what is actually happening.
From what I could tell, -most- America First proponents just got mad that the country was sending/spending money abroad while our own veterans/homeless/sick suffered. Some thought it reasonable to give up being the world police if it meant fixing issues at home. I think both are a fairly reasonable ask/thought. The problem of course is that there seems to be zero movement in fixing anything people were complaining about.
That said, it's a policy also historically used by racists and ultra nationalists, so it muddies the waters a lot. But I also have trouble believing the majority of the 67% of Americans who supported the idea fall into either of those camps.
