Matt Huber is a professor of geography at Syracuse University. He writes about energy, economies and the way that energy sources have influenced modern societies and economies.

One of his first books was Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (2013) which is very briefly described as follows:

Looking beyond the usual culprits, “Lifeblood” finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Matthew Huber, associate professor of geography and the environment, uses oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New Deal liberalism to the rise of the New Right, from oil’s celebration as the lifeblood of postwar capitalism to increasing anxieties over oil addiction.

In April 2022, Huber published a significant piece in Jacobin with Fred Stafford that explains how his research has revealed that most of the financial benefits associated with renewable power system development and electricity production “deregulation” have been captured by entities that the Left is supposed to dislike.

When we look at the actually existing decentralized renewable energy industry, we see many things the Left should abhor — deregulated markets, tax shelters for corporations, a rentier development model, and an anti-union industry dependent upon a transient and insecure workforce.

Though the environmental left may not want to accept it, the small-is-beautiful approach of decentralized energy provides ideological cover for a ruthless form of renewable energy capitalism. And even worse, it threatens our fight to halt climate change in its tracks.
-- In Defense of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Jacobin 40/04/2022

Huber believes that large, capital intensive power plants have been valuable investments as anchors in our electricity grid. Contrary to the characterizations offered by critics and advocates of radical transformation, he believes that the grid is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century and that we should add to its capabilities instead of seeking to completely rebuild it with a different generation model.

Seems that there is a deliberate backdoor in the twenty-year-old TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) standard used by police forces around the world. //

Looks like the encryption algorithm was intentionally weakened by intelligence agencies to facilitate easy eavesdropping. //

And I would like to point out that that’s the very definition of a backdoor.

Why aren’t we done with secret, proprietary cryptography? It’s just not a good idea. //

Clive Robinson • July 26, 2023 11:51 AM

@ Bruce, ALL,

Re : It started in WWII.

“Why aren’t we done with secret, proprietary cryptography? It’s just not a good idea.”

Remember this actually goes back well into the last century, that is it’s more than 20years old.

B.F. Randall
@Mining_Atoms
Word Fission power does not have a natural lobby or constituency. Fission consumes far too few resources--and produces far too much energy for a large supply chain. The world uranium market is only worth about $790 million. That's enough heat to provide all of humanity's energy nearly 6x current consumption (in a closed fuel cycle). The cow dung fuel market in India is valued at $4 billion.

@mdawese11
is doing precisely what everybody who understands objective reality and cogent energy policy should do: educate, persuade, lead. As Orwell said: restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent humans. Well done, Mark.
Quote Tweet

Mark Dawes
@mdawese11
·
Jul 28
In the @DailyMailUK on why we need nuclear power to tackle climate change.

And why the positive response is to campaign with groups like @emergencyreact @Gen_Atomic for the environment.

Darryl Siemer is a professional chemist who spent his career in nuclear waste remediation at the Idaho National Laboratory. While there, he developed a reputation as someone who will not go along to get along and apparently made quite a few waves by suggesting improvements in processes or technical decisions that might have resulted in the loss of numerous jobs by actually completing tasks and reducing expenditures on technical dead ends.

In a world dominated by “cost plus” contracting, beneficial suggestions are often quite unwelcome and can result in efforts to isolate and marginalize the source. //

Darryl points out that there are several fatal flaws in the current technical path being followed at the Hanford tank farm. He is certain that attempting to segregate the sludge in the tanks is difficult enough to be called impossible within the constraints of any foreseeable expenditures. He knows that the borosilicate glass that has been chosen as the final waste form is incompatible with several of the components of the sludge. Finally, he believes that it is a fantasy to assume that there will be any available “somewhere else” that will accept the material, no matter what form it is in.

Darryl’s suggested path forward dodges each of those flaws in a rather elegant, “lazy cheapskate’s” approach to solving the very challenging problem.

Aside: One of the highest compliments I can pay to a scientist or engineer is to point out that they are following a “lazy cheapskate” approach. In my view, a good problem solver should be a lazy cheapskate who prefers to ponder rather than work, and to come up with a solution that will not result in any excessive costs and the minimum possible work in the future. End Aside.

The Russian government today handed down a treason conviction and 14-year prison sentence on Iyla Sachkov, the former founder and CEO of one of Russia’s largest cybersecurity firms. Sachkov, 37, has been detained for nearly two years under charges that the Kremlin has kept classified and hidden from public view, and he joins a growing roster of former Russian cybercrime fighters who are now serving hard time for farcical treason convictions.

In 2003, Sachkov founded Group-IB, a cybersecurity and digital forensics company that quickly earned a reputation for exposing and disrupting large-scale cybercrime operations, including quite a few that were based in Russia and stealing from Russian companies and citizens. //

Prior to his arrest in 2021, Sachkov publicly chastised the Kremlin for turning a blind eye to the epidemic of ransomware attacks coming from Russia. In a speech covered by the Financial Times in 2021, Sachkov railed against the likes of Russian hacker Maksim Yakubets, the accused head of a hacking group called Evil Corp. that U.S. officials say has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade.

SkyFi is on a mission to help GIS experts and data analysts replace manual labor research with easier access to Earth observation data. What was once a high-tech process is now simple, affordable, and accessible to everyone. Start using SkyFi now to find and access the  high-quality, affordable satellite photos you need for any project.

Interest in nuclear energy as a climate change solution is rising, but no new commercial projects are planned in the U.S. right now

Plutonium-239 (Pu-239) is a nuclear fuel source that should play an important role in a sustainable, rapidly growing nuclear power enterprise. It is a natural byproduct that is created inside every fission reactor using uranium fuel. It is fissile with characteristics that are similar to U-235, the fissile material that provides most of today’s nuclear power.

During the 1960s and into the 1970s, energy visionaries spoke and wrote about a coming Plutonium Economy that would gradually replace the existing Hydrocarbon Economy and give human society an inexhaustible fuel source. //

It’s easy to imagine that people whose wealth and power came from the Hydrocarbon Economy weren’t thrilled about the near-term prospect of having their comfortable lives disrupted by a powerful new competitor.

A sustained campaign aimed at demonizing plutonium began sometime in the early 1970s. Plutonium has been called the most toxic substance known to man. //

Jack Devanney says:
August 3, 2023 at 3:03 PM

Excellent post.

I would add that a combination of thorium and plutonium is pretty useless as a weapon.

In ThorCon’s case, we found that even if you pulled the fuel out at the ideal point when the plutonium was 94% Pu-239, as long as the fuel contained 10 times as much thorium as Pu-239, it would not go critical. no matter how much Pu you had. Thorium soaks up neutrons. To make a weapon from this stuff , you would need a Thorex plant which is even more difficult than a Purex plant.

The tragedy is with no HALEU, designs like ThorCon cannot spike the fuel with thorium and we lose this safeguard.

One frustrating aspect of email phishing is the frequency with which scammers fall back on tried-and-true methods that really have no business working these days. Like attaching a phishing email to a traditional, clean email message, or leveraging link redirects on LinkedIn, or abusing an encoding method that makes it easy to disguise booby-trapped Microsoft Windows files as relatively harmless documents. //

re: “Teach a Man to Phish and He’s Set for Life”
This is an old saw from the UN … Give a man a fish and you’ve fed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you’ve fed him for life.

A coworker fixed it for me: Feed blowfish sushi to spammers as often as necessary.

United Airlines’ oldest Boeing 767 is likely a write-off after the fuselage skin buckled and tore in a hard landing at Houston on July 29. The aircraft arrived from Newark at 10:34 a.m. with 193 passengers and 11 crew, none of whom were injured. Circumstances of the landing have not been released, but the crew taxied to the gate as normal after their rough arrival.

Ground crews found the damage and the plane remains in Houston. //

Tim S
August 3, 2023 At 1:13 pm
That airplane has had the same thing happen before, and United decided to repair it.

Apparently it’s the oldest 767 (and probably the oldest airframe period) United has, so they may decide it’s cheaper to just part it out than do that king of repair a second time.

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