Don’t let the plasma wave hit your ass on the way out.
Really? Got a quote?
100 million deaths around the world in one day, sad & 100 billion dollars in cost at least.
Keeping John Kerry busy & out of the country??? Priceless.
Iran imports a lot of its gasoline, because it lacks enough refineries.
If they don’t have refineries to process crude to gasoline a nuclear power plant aint gonna help any.
Even if they DID have refineries, it still wouldn’t help.
If they can’t get adequate refineries installed - either by developing their own or paying foreigners for the parts and expertise - why do they think they can tame a nuclear reactor? Nuclear power is probably…10 times harder and more dangerous than an oil refinery? More?
Fundamentally, a reactor is a set of very expensive zirconium rods that can potentially produce gigawatts or even terrawatts of heat very suddenly if you have a flaw in the design and let the reaction really get going. You only want them to produce a few gigawatts thermal at most, and to pump that heat away as fast as your produce it. You have highly poisonous materials that can contaminate vast areas of land for generation, measured by the ton. Anything goes wrong, and the leaked waste will make it lethally dangerous to even approach any of the equipment in order to fix it.
If a refinery goes bad, you can just put out the fires with hoses and start fixing stuff. The plant itself won’t be lethal to even approach once the fires are out, and protective clothing can stop chemicals from hurting you - protective clothing provides zero protection against gamma rays.
Which is neither here nor there in the overall argument. It’s just cheaper and easier to export crude and import refined products, because the world has a whole passel of refining countries ready to work by the VLCC-load. Iran has the wells and the reserves; can’t trump that.
Except when the US imposes sanctions, and makes it difficult to import gasoline.
Though nuclear doesn’t really have anything to do with gasoline, as I understand it. Oil-fired power plants and nuclear might be a better comparison, but as it stands now, gasoline is used vehicles mostly, which nuclear isn’t going to help for. Well, except in regards to electric vehicles charged from power plants. Or is it different there?
I think nuclear power is a pretty good power source as far as cleanliness goes, but I would also expect some work on nuclear weapons, and I can’t honestly blame any country for wanting them since other countries (often countries they are on very bad terms with) already have them.
I was just pulling a big number out of the hypothetical latis rectum of eliminative reasoning. But I was thinking of the entirety of the conflict. Iran hits Israel, Israel hits Iran, Iran hits Saudi Arabia, etc. The affair would have some domino effects, but would not spiral all the way up into an all-out exchange among the Big Boys.
Many…probably most…of the casualties would be Iranians themselves. And the guys firing at them know exactly how to maximize airburst effects.
Does Iran have any domestic uranium supply? If not, where are they buying it?
Killing 100 million people here, 100 million people there. . . Pretty soon, you’re talking about some real people.
When one person dies, it’s a tragedy. When 100 million people die, it’s a statistic. So everybody says “Well, if they put a nuke down in urban America someplace and 100 million people die . . . No big deal really. They can’t get ALL of us. Life goes on.” (Except for those for whom life doesn’t go on.) And of course, there are always those saintly fortunate people who get incinerated just-not-quite to death, for whom life goes on very very horribly. Those don’t seem to get counted in any statistic.
Iran has some small uranium mines, but most of their uranium ore comes from a purchase they made from South Africa in 1982.
Ah, sir, you err. I specifically said “casualties.” That includes the wounded, burned, maimed, and so on.
YOU said. But I was thinking more of the common news articles, op-eds, and other public discussions of war and mass atrocities, which often mention only the number of dead as a measure of the “badness” of the event. In the case of some kinds of really bad events, like dropping nuclear bombs on big cities, the people who get instantly vaporized near ground-zero are the relatively lucky ones.
Spot on. Iran is diversifying into nuclear energy for much the same reasons Saudi Arabia is diversifying into solar energy.
Iran might perhaps also want at least the possibility of building a bomb at some future date - which makes perfect sense if you consider the neighbourhood they’re in. Certainly it’d would lower the odds of some disastrous foreign invasion.
Iran wants the bomb, which is absolutely understandable if you consider the security competition that goes on in the ME. Iran is a Shia power and is ringed by and faces grave challenges from Sunni powers that have no love lost for Iran and its ‘heretical’ Shia population.
It is believed that the Saudis, Iran’s most powerful detractors, have their nukes reservedfrom the nuclear Walmart operated by fellow-Sunni Pakistan. America and Israel are old enemies of the Iranian state. Given threats of this magnitude, Iran wants to - needs to - invent a stockpile of ‘Shia nukes’ to guarantee its own survival.
At least the Iranians are working hard for their survival, and not stealing from or operating a blackmarket all over the world, the way the slimebag Pakistani generals did, with the blessings of Uncle Sam.
Well…Obviously, they just want to provide health benefits for mankind!
Think of all those medical isotopes they will give to hospitals all over the world…
It’s such a wonderful,wonderful thing that they are doing, for the benefit of us all.
Why would anybody object?
Why indeed?
Iranian nuclear power would reduce the country’s dependence on oil, and Iranian nukes would reduce the risk of yet another devastating war. Both things really would be a “benefit of us all.”
You need oil to make gasoline. And you need refineries to process petroleum whether you’re using it for gasoline or something else.