Furthermore, it is the only Russian refinery that produces cracking catalysts, which are components that other facilities depend on for secondary oil refining.

So an even bigger win for Ukraine if this indirectly reduces refining even more at other locations.

The strikes have hit the unit’s process columns. The refinery has a capacity of 8.4 million metric tons of crude oil per year.

had

Guy gets shot and the impact sends him flying across the room, out the window, etc. Physics says “oh hell no”. The guy who fired that shot would have likely had his arm dislocated from the recoil if he was able to even hold onto it.

I’d be very careful about using copper this way. While ingesting small amounts of copper is ok, and in fact a good part of a diet, Ingesting too much copper is not a good thing, and can be toxic.

Having copper piping, etc. in close proximity to a garden risks having it leach into the plants, which might then be ingested. Since copper is a fairly soft metal then rain could slowly corrode it and introduce it to the plants.

A bit more on copper toxicology here.

Probably written by AI…

Maintaining nuclear weapons is far from trivial. The Wikipedia page on stockpile stewardship goes into a bit of detail. But in a nutshell everything from the nuclear material to the electronics to the high explosives used to initiate the nuclear reaction degrade over time.

The US hasn’t manufactured new nuclear weapons since 1992, meaning they’re all at least 33 years old at this point. The US regularly checks & replaces all these components to keep them operational.

Russia is also believed to have stopped building new nuclear weapons since the breakup of the USSR in 1991, so their arsenal is at least as old as the US one. I’m not sure Russia would have been capable to maintain their stockpile the way the US has. Among other things:

• Tritium, used as a booster, has a half life of 12 years, so needs to be replenished fairly regularly. It decays to Helium 3, which can hinder a fission reaction. So it’s critical it’s properly removed.
• The batteries that power everything need regular replacing every few years.
• The conventional high explosives used to initiate the chain reaction degrade over time, especially in high heat, and the close proximity to radiation from the nuclear core. These explosives are critical to triggering a nuclear reaction. They have to be very precisely shaped around the nuclear core, and the timing to detonate each piece of it is also critical. If they are even slightly degraded or the timing is off then you won’t get a nuclear chain reaction when the explosives detonate.
• plutonium changes phases over time, so cores require occasional purification.

Back in the 90’s and early 2000’s when we had treaties like START there were reports that US officials inspecting Soviet missile silos saw standing water in them. The implication was that the Soviets may not have taken maintenance as seriously as the US did.

But the bottom line is we truly have no idea. Organizations like the CIA and MI6 might have insight into all of this if they have assets (like Oleg Penkovsky was) who are able to provide them with verifiable data on the issue.

If Russia is unable to rebuild refineries, keep aircraft flying (safely), etc. without all the supplies they used to import from other countries, it makes me wonder if their nuclear weapons are actually useable at this point. They have to be properly maintained, and the nuclear materials occasionally replenished. The longer sanctions are in place, and the more infrastructure Ukraine damages or outright destroys, the less nuclear capability Russia will have. Not a bad thing.

A decade or so ago National Geographic had a reality TV show called Worlds Toughest Fixes, where they went around and documented all sorts of major repair & other big construction jobs. One episode had them replacing the steam turbine in a nuclear power plant. I really enjoyed that series.

Some other fixes they documented included a valve on the Alaska oil pipeline, replacing an antenna on a 2000 foot tall tower, and launching a rocket in French Guiana. It’s a fun series if you’re into this kind of stuff.

I worked in IT at a university about 15 years ago. As part of a research project I helped set up a Tor exit node. Within a few hours of it taking on traffic I was contacted by the universities IT security team. They were seeing all sorts of malicious traffic originating from that system and wanted to know what was going on. They had the system shut down immediately.

Same. I have Firefox with ublock Origin on it right next to Chrome. If I need to visit some third party site I use Firefox. Occasionally I forget I’m in chrome and visit a third party site that’s chock full of ads. When that happens I immediately close the page in Chrome and jump to Firefox for a more reasonable experience.

My employer has been pushing AI as well so I’ve been using Claude to help me when it makes sense. I’ve had it write python scripts to interact with various API’s, had it analyze log files, etc. I might use it two or three times every other day for between 10 to 30 minutes at a time. So while I’m not using it excessively, I’m still using it what I consider to be a reasonable amount.

I checked my Claude account the other day and it said I have used a whopping 1% of my quota for the past month. That really makes me wonder how all these companies are burning through their usage the way they are reporting. Do they have teams of employees now that are doing nothing but interacting with AIs for 8 hours a day? It seems like that would be the only way for me to put a dent in my monthly quota with Claude…

I bet Iran will only honor ship insurance sold by Iran.

I used to work across the street from Boston Dynamics and would regularly see them testing robots in their parking lot & surrounding grassy/hilly areas. At one point they actually gave a bunch of folks in my company a tour of their labs. I still keep tabs on them from time to time because I find what they do absolutely amazing.

From what I’ve seen of the past 15 years or so of watching them I believe that Boston Dynamics is well in front of Tesla when it comes to robotics. Especially when you see gaffes by Tesla like that video that seems to show their robot was actually being controlled by a person wearing a VR headset.

Our solar panels are probably the best investment we ever made. Year to year our electric bill averages out to zero, even with charging our EV. Over the summer our batteries participate in our electric utilities virtual power plant program, which pays us around $2000 each year for the excess electricity we provide. And our state has a renewable energy program that pays us for every megawatt our panels generate, no matter what it’s used for.

🖕

Yes, exactly.

What Australia exports is likely Low-Enriched Uranium (LEU), which is less than 20% U²³⁵, and is suitable for nuclear power plants.

Nuclear powered submarines require Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU), which is 20% or more U²³⁵.

Weapons-grade uranium is usually enriched to 90% or higher.

Getting to that 90% level is extremely difficult & time consuming. U²³⁵ and U²³⁸ are chemically identical, so it’s converted to a gas & spun in centrifuges to separate the atoms by weight. Typically hundreds of centrifuges are used in this process. As an example, it took roughly 3 years for the Manhattan Project to refine enough U²³⁵ for the first bomb. That bomb used roughly 60 kilograms of bomb-grade uranium. To get those 60 kg, over 9 metric tons of raw uranium was processed.

It’s this weapons grade uranium that Iran has collected and is protecting.

I see plenty of Amazon vans driving around neighborhoods with the side door wide open…

Has RFKjr told the CDC that they need to promote Ivermectin as a treatment for screwworms?

Well it certainly wasn’t the gas tank if all those burning refineries are any indication.