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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Note before I get the inevitable Russian shill comments - I’m not justifying any aggressive invasion by Russia.

    No, you’re just parroting their BS propaganda.

    Some of those organizations just happen to be associated with the far-right groups that were part of the initial government that was unconstitutionally appointed In 2014 after Euromaidan- a series of violent protests that forced the pro-Russian president to flee the country.

    The constitutionality of the confusing as fuck situation is quite irrelevant (the Rada had the power to do what it did, it did have the votes, but procedure was not necessarily followed properly when disposing of the AWOL president) because there were new elections right after, healing any hiccup. Elections which tanked the results of those far-right parties which weren’t exactly impressive in the first place.

    Elections which solved a popular uprising caused by the president to renege on the country’s path to EU accession. That was the sparking point for the protests, which at that point could’ve been solved without an erm special electoral operation, but the Russian puppet ordered Berkut to fire on protestors, which those didn’t appreciate and failed to calm them down and disperse.

    After said puppet went AWOL and got disposed and the interim government did nothing much really but organise elections, Poroshenko got elected (yay, another oligarch, as is tradition), trying to solve Russia’s invasion (the green men one) militarily. Zelensky pushed him out of office in the next elections, on a peace ticket, as a Russian native speaker… and then Russia invaded even more. They fucking hit Kiev. The Ukrainian army had re-grouped extensively after the little green men operation, the SBU had identified and neutralised gazillions of Russian operatives, either the FSB didn’t notice or they didn’t want to tell Putin what he didn’t want to hear. The rest is taxi memes.

    If that – those totally irrelevant right sector fucks – is the US’s influence in Ukraine then it truly is pitiful. Compare the influence of glorious Europe: Ukraine actually wants to join up!




  • barsoap@lemm.eetoWorld News@lemmy.worldPutin issues ultimatum to NATO leader
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    9 hours ago

    The EU is plenty strong enough to defend itself – and Ukraine – against Russia. Several times over. Without switching to a war economy. Your maths fall flat once you realise that much of those 70% are aircraft carries in the Pacific and random research projects into fusion or whatever, utterly irrelevant to the question at hand.

    On the contrary without the US in the game expect Poland to put boots on Ukrainian soil pretty much instantly, and that’s after the rest of the EU convinced them to not march straight on Moscow.


  • OMG yes I said “blast furnace to reduce steel”. I meant “to reduce iron [to produce steel]”. Obviously: What else would you use hydrogen for in a blast furnace?

    But “reduce steel” is still, at least colloquially, correct for recycling steel: Scrap has rust on it so it also needs to be reduced. Which you would’ve realised instead of trying to turn this into a silly gotcha if you knew what you were talking about.

    Go ahead, do tell me about your plan on how to produce steel, from ore, without getting fossil fuels or hydrogen involved. Charcoal? Could work, but I don’t think the economics make sense.


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzAnon questions our energy sector
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    9 hours ago

    What makes iron is the lack of O in Fe3O4 (that’s magnetite, other ores are similar). Carbon for alloying is not an issue it can be easily covered by biomass, you smelt the magnetite by combining it with hydrogen resulting in iron and (very hot) water, no carbon involved, then you add carbon, something like 2% thereabouts, to get steel. Add too much and you get cast iron. The overwhelming majority of coke used in the coke process is not used for alloying, but smelting and reducing the iron. That part of the steel making process is completely decarbonised in the hydrogen process, and the carbon that’s used in alloying, well, it’s not in the atmosphere is it.

    You can rip the oxygen off iron ore with electricity but that’s less energy-efficient than taking a detour via electrolysis. It’s different with aluminium, there using electricity directly is more efficient.

    Sad to day I now understand your point of view. Natural gas wins.

    If you think that’s what I’m saying then no, you don’t understand my POV.


  • In essence, yes. And we need the hydrogen/ammonia/methane/methanol/whatever anyway to do chemistry with, so we’ll have to produce them in some renewable way anyway, and at scale. Using them in peaker plants is only a fraction of the total use.

    Even with fusion up and running we’re going to do hydrolysis. You can run a car on electricity, or domestic heating, also aluminium smelting, but not a blast furnace to reduce steel nor a chemical industry. Hydrogen, in one form or another, is the answer to all of those things. As things currently stand the market is in its infancy but the first pipelines are getting dedicated to hydrogen, the first blast furnaces made for operation with hydrogen are up and running… and the hydrogen mostly comes from fossil gas. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem you need demand to have supply but you need supply to have demand, so kick-starting the demand side by supplying it fossil hydrogen makes a lot of economical sense, that means that the supply investments can go big and be sure that they’ll have customers from day one.










  • barsoap@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzAnon questions our energy sector
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    15 hours ago

    When’s that going to happen? Right after the green hydrogen revolution?

    Already happening, on a small (but industrial) scale. You can buy that stuff off the shelf, but it’s still on the lower end of the sigmoid. Most new installations right now will be going to Canada and Namibia, we’ll be buying massive amounts of ammonia from both.

    Sorry, I didn’t think someone would deny the existance of dunkelflautes. It’s currently happening in Germany.

    Yes and elsewhere in Europe the wind is blowing. Differences in solar yields are seasonal (that’s what those three months storage are for, according to Fraunhofer’s initial plans), but reversed on the other side of the globe, and Germany would be better situated to tank differences in local wind production all by itself if e.g. Bavaria didn’t hinder wind projects in their state. The total energy the sun infuses into the earth does change a bit over time, but that’s negligible. In principle pretty much zero storage is needed as long as there’s good enough interconnectivity.

    …meanwhile, we’ll probably have the first commercial fusion plant in just about the mean construction time of a fission plant.


  • You must be confusing us with the UK or France. You can carry (concealed or otherwise) knives up to 12 cm or folder that are not designed to be openable with one hand. If you want to transport a Chef’s knife on the metro, do it in your backpack, that is, you’re not supposed to have it at hand. Some types of knives (e.g. butterflies) are right-out outlawed, you’re not allowed to have them even in your own home.

    Mostly though these weapon-free zones are a way to allow police to do searches.


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzAnon questions our energy sector
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    16 hours ago

    Wouldn’t it be better to go fossil free. Given, you know, climate change.

    Gas can be synthesised and we’re going to have to do that anyway for chemical feedstock. Maintaining backup gas plant capacity is cheaper than you think, they don’t need much maintenance if they’re not actually running.

    That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.

    Unless we use a different technology, that is not renewables + storage?

    It’s not technology it’s physics. It is impossible for there to be no wind anywhere, at least as long as the sun doesn’t explode and the earth continues to rotate and an atmosphere exists. If any of those ever fail electricity production will be the least of our worries.

    Technology comes into play when it comes to shovelling electricity from one end of the continent to the other and yes we need more interconnects and beefier interconnects but it’s not like we don’t know how to do that, or don’t already have a Europe-wide electricity grid. The issues are somewhere in between NIMBYism regarding pylons and “but we don’t want to pay for burying the cable earthworks are expensive”.


  • Yeah, I saw where this was going. You have a thing against studying.

    Not at all. Learning pointless stuff and producing pointless doctorates is not studying it’s wasting time and effort. Whatever happened to the virtue of laziness.

    I don’t know what you mean with the second paragraph. I already don’t believe in that sort of voodoo.

    The physiotherapy part isn’t voodoo it’s just off-brand.

    They still hawk homeopathic mumbo jumbo at pharmacies

    You could call it placebopathic and people would still go for it because wanting symbolic reinforcement of your wishes is a very human thing. Medicine shouldn’t be in the business of telling humanity how to be on a fundamental level, that’s a battle for philosophers, but in the business of providing health. The current situation around homeopathy is not ideal, especially those prices for sugar cubes are ludicrous, but this reductive “everyone’s an idiot and everything’s pointless” attitude isn’t making it any better, either. What would your way to kiss a boo-boo be?


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzAnon questions our energy sector
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    18 hours ago

    The watthours is what gas is for. Germany’s pipeline network alone, that’s not including actual gas storage sites, can store three months of total energy usage.

    …or at least that’s the original plan, devised some 20 years ago, Fraunhofer worked it all out back then. It might be the case that banks of sodium batteries or whatnot are cheaper, but yeah lithium is probably not going to be it. Lithium’s strength is energy density, both per volume and by weight, and neither is of concern for grid storage.

    Imagine bridging even a short dunkelflaute of 2 days.

    That’s physically impossible for a place the size of Germany, much less Europe.