Petroleum producers know that there are not many opportunities to make major new discoveries so they are focused on maintaining their current production levels. In many cases, there is a growing supply of unused capital waiting for an appropriate place to invest.

Oil executives would be wise to consider investing their human and financial resources in nuclear reactors, which can be considered to be modern, near zero emission energy wells. When nuclear reactors are used as advanced heat sources to produce synthetic fuels and hydrocarbons, a substantial portion of the capital infrastructure and core competencies are directly transferrable from the conventional petroleum industry. //

Fossil fuel companies have the necessary assets to make successful investments in nuclear energy wells. They can raise capital from investors that are comfortable with risk, work their way through the regulatory wickets, buy the steel and concrete, develop the necessary agreements with local governments and ensure that their suppliers meet exacting specifications. They live and breathe safety based on long experience with massive quantities of volatile materials. After their new energy wells begin operation, they can look forward to many decades worth of reliable production and sales – energy is not a fad and people will always find new ways to use whatever quantity is available.

Sea-going or floating nuclear plants are especially well-matched to the current infrastructure and skill set of fossil fuel companies. They will be produced in the same shipyards that currently produce off-shore platforms, tankers, support vessels, and barges. In some cases, the production platforms will closely resemble floating petroleum or natural gas processing plants.

There are increasing pressures on fossil fuel companies to slow or stop their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Fossil fuel companies can legitimately meet their fiduciary responsibility to maximize their investor returns by directing their capital budgets to a new generation of energy production and distribution capability.

That new energy production capacity should include:

• Systems using heavy metal fission to directly supply heat and power
• Installations that use fission to produce heat and power for synthetic fuel production that combines hydrogen from water and carbon that is captured from the atmosphere.

At Nucleation Capital, we are focused on investing in advanced nuclear energy, synthetic fuels and macro energy integration systems that can all help decarbonize our energy and power sources. The transition from hydrocarbons to clean energy will be challenging, but nuclear energy investments will enable its success with lower costs than attempting to complete the transition without nuclear energy.

[Cueball is typing on a computer.]
Voice outside frame: Are you coming to bed?
Cueball: I can't. This is important.
Voice: What?
Cueball: Someone is WRONG on the Internet.

Title text: What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!

Axiomatically, you sign your federal income tax return under penalties of perjury. That means it should be accurate and complete. But in the real world, despite your best efforts and honesty, you may forget something or make an innocent--even if foolish--mistake.

In fact, it may not even be your fault. You may receive a Form 1099 or Form K-1 after you file your return. Amended K-1s from partnerships, S corporations and LLCs have a particularly bad habit of showing up right after you file.

In such cases, it may surprise you to learn that you are not required by law to file an amended return. Once you have filed your tax return, you cannot be prosecuted for failing to file an amended return, even if something happened after you filed that makes it clear your original return contains mistakes. When considering an amendment, first ask yourself whether the return you filed was accurate to your best knowledge when you filed it.

If it was, you are probably safe in not filing an amendment. (You still may want to amend, of course, but filing an amendment would be optional.)

My best understanding is that you need to file Form 843. The instructions for the form say that it can be used to request:

A refund or abatement of a penalty or addition to tax due to reasonable cause or other reason (other than erroneous written advice provided by the IRS) allowed under the law.

The "reasonable cause" here is a good-faith confusion about what Line 79 of the form was referring to.

In Form 843, the IRC Section Code you should enter is 6654 (estimated tax). For more, see the IRC Section 6654 (note, however, that if you already received a CP14 notice from the IRS, you should cross-check that this section code is listed on the notice under the part that covers the estimated tax penalty).

If your request is accepted, the IRS should issue you Notice 746, item 17 Penalty Removed:

We removed the penalty we charged you and we are reviewing your account. We will let you know the results

You can get more general information about the tax collection process, and how to challenge it, from the pages linked from Understanding your CP14 Notice.

An important new study in the journal Energy (Weißbach et. al. 2013, paywalled) focuses on energy return on investment (EROI, or sometimes ERoEI), which is the ratio of electrical energy produced by a given power source to the amount of energy needed to build, fuel, maintain and decomission that power plant. //

Here's the idea in a nutshell: in the US, a kWh of energy (unweighted) costs about 10 cents but it produces about 70 cents worth of GDP, a ratio of 7 to 1. //

But the big winners in non-fossil energy are run-of-river hydro (Weißbach allows a 100 year plant lifetime, which may be generous) and nuclear (at a 60 year plant lifetime, in line with other studies). And by the way, this is one reason Weißbach's study is better than some earlier works: he includes plant lifetime in his computations, which can make a big difference. Wind turbines, for example, are subjected to large physical stresses which limits their lifetime to about 20 years, both in this study and according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. In effect, you have to build a windfarm two or three times over during the lifetime of a nuclear plant, and that adds up.

Two cases were analyzed for coal, one hard coal (EROI 29, EMROI 49) and one brown coal (EROI 31, EMROI 49). These were averaged to an EROI of 30 as shown. In the US we have plenty of hard coal reserves and don't use brown coal. Also, the authors omitted from this study the energy cost needed to transport coal, apparently because that varies by country. Using EIA data, this amounts to 244 KJ per tonne-km for rail transport. So in the US, where a lot of coal is moved from mines in Wyoming to end users far away, a typical 1000 mile trip would lower the EROI of coal from 29 to 28, while EMROI remains unchanged at 49. //

So if you ever wondered why climate scientists like James Hansen are pro-nuclear, this is one reason. Yes, wind is fine if it can be grid-buffered against a non-fossil generating source. And absolutely we need more hydro, especially run-of-river hydro where it's feasible. But there are limits to the amount of river where it is feasible. So if we want to eliminate fossil fuels from electricity production (and we do), and if we want to manage that transition so that it doesn't hurt the economy (and we do), nuclear has to be part of the mix. And in fact, it has to be a much bigger part of the mix than it has been in the past. In the next part of GETTING TO ZERO, I will address the safety issues of nuclear power in detail, but for right now what you need to know is that even after accounting for latent deaths from Chernobyl (and non-deaths from Fukushima), nuclear is still one of the safest forms of energy.

Finally, if you'd like to take a detailed look at the calculations, Weißbach's spreadsheet can be found on Google Docs. I used the spreadsheet to compute some of the numbers above.

The Dirty Truth (Josh)
@AKA_RealDirty
·
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.@DavidSacks explains how the FBI was using a tool called “ teleport” to communicate with Twitter. They were able to send instructions that deleted after 10 days and they weren’t able to take a screenshot of the communication.

5:20 PM · Jan 15, 2023

But they could tell that some messages were sent via the teleport tool when they were looking at the emails and the FBI would tell Twitter Safety head Yoel Roth to look at the messages they just sent him on teleport. “It was a very weird detail,” Sacks said, “And it shows the way our government prefers to operate, which is in secrecy.” “What basis is there for the FBI first of all even to be engaged in censorship on social media to the extent they were,” Sacks said, noting they had an 80-agent team flagging posts for the FBI and other parts of the government. //

“What was the crime that they were investigating here,” Sacks declared. This was all coming under the heading of searching for “foreign interference” in elections, a truly nebulous justification. Add to that the instructions were secret, disappearing, Sacks said, “Why isn’t that a matter of public record?” He said first of all, it was a violation of the First Amendment if they were pushing censorship, but on top of that, they weren’t even being transparent about it. “We have a right as citizens of this country to know what our government is doing, and for them to be engaging in this sort of um, you know, magic trick, where the instructions they are giving are disappearing, it’s almost like the cover-up part of this crime.” //

What that means is that it’s harder to find the evidence of secret instructions that they were giving to Twitter if you were trying to figure out what they were doing. It also raises questions about why they’re erasing the evidence unless they knew that what they were doing was problematic. Yet, we still haven’t gotten any real answers from the FBI on this, just a response that claimed that this was “traditional” contacts they’d had with private companies (that alone is chilling if this is “traditional”) and they called the Twitter files “conspiracy theorists. //

Quiverfull
10 minutes ago
Relevant to the discussion, and hopefully a jury instruction read during the trial of numerous federal employees who participated in this mass violation of Americans' civil rights, here is the Federal Court Jury Instruction:

1.20 SPOLIATION/DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE
[Party] contends that [Other Party] at one time possessed [describe evidence allegedly destroyed]. However, [Other Party] contends that [evidence never existed, evidence was not in its possession, evidence was not destroyed, loss of evidence was accidental, etc.].
You may assume that such evidence would have been unfavorable to [Other Party] only if you find by a preponderance of the evidence that:
(1) [Other Party] intentionally [destroyed the evidence] [caused the evidence to be destroyed]; and
(2) [Other Party] [destroyed the evidence] [caused the evidence to be destroyed] in bad faith. //

anon-8f8k
17 minutes ago
Isn't destruction of official government communications a crime in and of itself?