Interesting plot. It would need to have multiple parallel plots where each nation with a nuclear arsenal thinks they are the only one that has lost their nuclear capability. Hijinks ensue as each tries to bluff the national actors.
Nuclear weapons are not very useful when you have good intelligence and a distributed ability to delivey vast amounts of precious-guided weapons.
I assume they are using renewable energy to reduce naturally-occurring iron oxide.
When the iron is burnt are they going to do with pure oxygen? Otherwise they'll get pollutants like nitrogen dioxide, possibly ozone. And the 0.5% not burnt will also become a pollutant unless carefully removed in some smokestack scrubber.
Or is this 'burning' to occur some kind of iron fuel cell? How would they liquidize the iron which is quite heavy?
Lastly, iron is heavy. Moving reduced iron could be expensive and dangerous.
Still, if sufficiently close to the renewable source this could provide much needed load leveling for intermittent sources.
The article assumes the viability of a hydrogen-driven process to reduce the iron. The intention is to establish a circular economy of reducing iron oxidized by burning it in the proposed fashion.
The byproducts from burning iron are no more noxious than burning fossil fuels, possibly less so. Filtration technologies exist as well.
Of course this technology would have to compete with other technologies to make use of excess renewable energy, like liquid hydrogen storage and transport (which it has several advantages over), iron-based battery technologies, or green-produced carbon-based fuels. I guess it makes the most sense in applications where heat instead of electricity is required.
> Of course this technology would have to compete with other technologies to make use of excess renewable energy, like liquid hydrogen storage and transport (which it has several advantages over), iron-based battery technologies, or green-produced carbon-based fuels. I guess it makes the most sense in applications where heat instead of electricity is required.
I'm going to come out and say those competing technologies are vastly more plausible and viable.
If you target a niche in a large market then you are targeting a small market. Create serial MVPs targeting those niches until you find product-market fit.
Article alleges it is not external threats but corrupt political interests that drive ever higher US defense spending. But correlation is not causation and this link is unsupported, especially when no analysis of the un/reality of the external threat is offered. There is some low-hanging fruit here around Iraq so not bringing that in leads me to question the quality of this article. It is harder to make that case with the Cold War or the PRC vs its South China Sea neighbors so perhaps that is why this aspect of their argument was not pursued.
Phew...thank god we rebutted that. I was worried for a second there that war may be motivated by money and not the morality or ideology spoken to justify it...
> Article alleges it is not external threats but corrupt political interests that drive ever higher US defense spending. But correlation is not causation and this link is unsupported,
I think the charge that it's an unsupported thesis is itself unsupported, when that thesis is advanced by military generals and DoD insiders as a result of their experience or analysis.
> especially when no analysis of the un/reality of the external threat is offered
The specifics of the external threat don't change the dynamic of a threat being fabricated or exaggerated to boost spending.
> There is some low-hanging fruit here around Iraq so not bringing that in leads me to question the quality of this article.
It could be a word count thing. But I guess the article was quality enough to require a careful and determined rebuttal from yourself. Although it seems you would be unlikely to accept the article's thesis if you felt it was defending China, so I think your questioning the quality of the article would be something we could assume would happen without question. Making it not an actual signal of quality but rather of your ideology
> It is harder to make that case with the Cold War or the PRC vs its South China Sea neighbors so perhaps that is why this aspect of their argument was not pursued.
But what is the real threat presented by China today, or by the USSR before? If it's such a hard case to make for the non-threat thesis, I respectfully request you give the easy argument for its antithesis. Just 1 sentence will do, unless it's too much to ask?
