@Pluto's Republic
democracy and freedom. And we WILL bring them democracy and freedom even if we have to kill every last one of those damned god forsaken gooks to do it.

…to say exactly what horrendous act Kim Jong-un committed that no one else is currently committing — how he harmed the planet-civilization-people — and why he and all North Korea deserve to be put to death.

Anyone?

@snoopydawg
http://www.basnews.com/index.php/en/news/middle-east/334662

ERBIL — A military source from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said on Monday that the US military began expanding the Kobani Airport runway, south of the city, in order to be able to receive the bigger aircraft.

The source, who requested anonymity, revealed to BasNews "The US military is expanding the runway of Kobani Airport, in order to receive the giant aircraft," confirming the presence of hundreds of technicians and experts and American military personnel at the airport.
...
The source pointed out that "the US forces are also installing high-frequency radar systems on the hills around the airport aiming at protecting the airport from any possible air attacks."

The US does what it wants, where it wants, when it wants. "Might is right."

that can use nuclear weapons or invade any country that it wants to or hold war exercises in other country's backyard and all other countries have to watch them do it and if they feel threatened that is just too bad.
I wonder how our government would feel if Russia and Canada practiced war games off our coasts?
Yeh, that's what I thought.
And just how much money do these war exercises cost? Probably enough money that could be better spent on things in this country such as the social programs that congress says they don't have enough for.
Will this insanity ever stop?

@snoopydawg

…to the North Koreans. What is the point of this non-productive policy? Expert diplomat Ann Wright points out that the US approach has failed:

Why are discussions for a peace treaty with North Korea not an option to resolve the extraordinarily dangerous tensions on the Korean peninsula? At long last, experts with long experience with the North Koreans are publicly calling for these negotiations.

Many in Washington’s think tanks finally acknowledge that the Obama policy of “strategic patience,” which relied on sanctions and other pressures to frustrate North Korea, did not result in a slowdown in the nuclear weapon and missile programs, but instead provided room for the North Koreans to expand their research and testing of both nuclear weapon and missile technology.

According to Wright, the U.S. government needs to deal with the reality that sanctions have not slowed North Korea’s programs.

William Perry, who was Secretary of Defense from 1994-1997 during talks with the North Koreans that led to an arms control framework, wrote in a Jan. 6 op-ed in the Washington Post that some Western perceptions of the North Koreans as crazy fanatics are false and meaningful negotiations are possible:

“During my discussions and negotiations with members of the North Korean government, I have found that they are not irrational, nor do they have the objective of achieving martyrdom. Their goals, in order of priority, are: preserving the Kim dynasty, gaining international respect and improving their economy.

“I believe it is time to try diplomacy that would actually have a chance to succeed. We lost the opportunity to negotiate with a non-nuclear North Korea when we cut off negotiations in 2001, before it had a nuclear arsenal. The most we can reasonably expect today is an agreement that lowers the dangers of that arsenal.

“The goals would be an agreement with Pyongyang to not export nuclear technology, to conduct no further nuclear testing and to conduct no further ICBM testing. These goals are worth achieving and, if we succeed, could be the basis for a later discussion of a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula.”

In other words, the US is displaying its insanity — repeatedly pursuing a policy that doesn't work, and expecting a different outcome. Personally. I see the fingerprints of Neocons in the State Department and the CFR all over this crapfest. Putting our lives at risk.

that can use nuclear weapons or invade any country that it wants to or hold war exercises in other country's backyard and all other countries have to watch them do it and if they feel threatened that is just too bad.
I wonder how our government would feel if Russia and Canada practiced war games off our coasts?
Yeh, that's what I thought.
And just how much money do these war exercises cost? Probably enough money that could be better spent on things in this country such as the social programs that congress says they don't have enough for.
Will this insanity ever stop?

@ZimInSeattle

Pot meets kettle. When both participants are irrational, do they cancel each other out?

No, they add to one another.

Both matter and antimatter are congealed energy. When they come in contact, the energy is uncongealed -- at the standard Einstein rate (mc squared) for all the mass involved. (I don't know how PriceRip gets maths to appear here, sorry!)

A similar principle applies to irrationality.

Pot meets kettle. When both participants are irrational, do they cancel each other out?

@Linda Wood

…back in the day, with the same crazy-making affect. (Westinghouse, also, as I recall.) The difference is that Iran was not pursuing nukes. It is assumed, for the sake of argument, they could have acquired them via a direct transfer somewhere along the way, if they had wanted to. These paranoid projections, the demon seeds of the US isolating them in the first place, landed them in the most recent kabuki where they had to pretend they were building WMD — so they could claim they were giving it up — in order to end the US sanctions and normalize their business ventures in the world. And people like Hillary and Trump still want to bomb them because they are hopelessly confused by the CIA and the Neocon think tanks that hang like barnacles on Capitol Hill.

All the bold type has been added by me.

http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/05/12/...

Rummy's North Korea Connection
By Richard Behar Research Associate Brenda Cherry
May 12, 2003

FORTUNE Magazine) – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rarely keeps his opinions to himself. He tends not to compromise with his enemies. And he clearly disdains the communist regime in North Korea. So it's surprising that there is no clear public record of his views on the controversial 1994 deal in which the U.S. agreed to provide North Korea with two light-water nuclear reactors in exchange for Pyongyang ending its nuclear weapons program. What's even more surprising about Rumsfeld's silence is that he sat on the board of the company that won a $200 million contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors.

… FORTUNE contacted 15 ABB board members who served at the time the company was bidding for the Pyongyang contract, and all but one declined to comment. That director, who asked not to be identified, says he's convinced that ABB's chairman at the time, Percy Barnevik, told the board about the reactor project in the mid-1990s. "This was a major thing for ABB," the former director says, "and extensive political lobbying was done."

The director recalls being told that Rumsfeld was asked "to lobby in Washington" on ABB's behalf in the mid-1990s because a rival American company had complained about a foreign-owned firm getting the work. Although he couldn't provide details, Goran Lundberg, who ran ABB's power-generation business until 1995, says he's "pretty sure that at some point Don was involved," since it was not unusual to seek help from board members "when we needed contacts with the U.S. government."

… the deal was criticized by many people close to Rumsfeld, who said weapons-grade nuclear material could be extracted from light-water reactors. Paul Wolfowitz, James Lilley, and Richard Armitage, all Rumsfeld allies, are on record opposing the deal.

… One clue to Rumsfeld's views: a Heritage Foundation speech in March 1998. Although he did not mention the light-water reactors, Rumsfeld said the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea "does not end its nuclear menace; it merely postpones the reckoning, with no assurance that we will know how much bomb-capable material North Korea has." A search of numerous databases found no press references at the time, or throughout the 1990s, noting Rumsfeld was a director of the company building the reactors. And Rumsfeld didn't bring it up either.

ABB, which was already building eight nuclear reactors in South Korea, had an inside track on the $4 billion U.S.-sponsored North Korea project. The firm was told "our participation is essential," recalls Frank Murray, project manager for the reactors. (He plays the same role now at Westinghouse, which was acquired by Britain's BNFL in 1999, a year before it also bought ABB's nuclear power business.) The North Korean reactors are being primarily funded by South Korean and Japanese export-import banks and supervised by KEDO, a consortium based in New York. "It was not a matter of favoritism," says Desaix Anderson, who ran KEDO from 1997 to 2001. "It was just a practical matter."

Even so, ABB tried to keep its involvement hush-hush. In a 1995 letter from ABB to the Department of Energy obtained by FORTUNE, the firm requested authorization to release technology to the North Koreans, then asked that the seemingly innocuous one-page letter be withheld from public disclosure. "Everything was held close to the vest for some reason," says Ronald Kurtz, ABB's U.S. spokesman. "It wasn't as public as contracts of this magnitude typically are."

… The Republicans attacked the deal from the start, particularly after gaining control of Congress in 1994. "The Agreed Framework was a political orphan within two weeks after its signature," says Stephen Bosworth, KEDO's first executive director and a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea. It's not hard to understand why it was controversial. North Korea is on the list of state sponsors of terrorism and has repeatedly violated the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Robert Gallucci, the assistant secretary of state who spearheaded the 1994 agreement, doesn't disagree, but says, "If we didn't do a deal, either we would have gone to war or they'd have over 100 nuclear weapons."

The problem, say a number of nuclear energy experts, is that it's possible, though difficult, to extract weapons-grade material from light-water reactors. "Reprocessing the stuff is not a big deal," says Victor Gilinsky, who has held senior posts at the Atomic Energy Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "You don't even need special equipment. The KEDO people ignore this. And we're still building the damn things."

… By 1998 a debate was raging in Washington about the initiative… Where was Rumsfeld? That year he chaired a blue-ribbon panel commissioned by Congress to examine classified data on ballistic missile threats. The commission concluded that North Korea could strike the U.S. within five years… The Rumsfeld Commission also concluded that North Korea was maintaining a nuclear weapons program--a subtle swipe at the reactor deal, which was supposed to prevent such a program. Rumsfeld's resume in the report did not mention that he was an ABB director.

In his final days in office, Clinton had been preparing a bold deal in which North Korea would give up its missile and nuclear programs in return for aid and normalized relations. But President Bush was skeptical of Pyongyang's intentions and called for a policy review in March 2001. Two months later the DOE, after consulting with Rumsfeld's Pentagon, renewed the authorization to send nuclear technology to North Korea. Groundbreaking ceremonies attended by Westinghouse and North Korean officials were held Sept. 14, 2001--three days after the worst terror attack on U.S. soil.

The Bush administration still hasn't abandoned the project. Representative Edward Markey and other Congressmen have been sending letters to Bush and Rumsfeld, asking them to pull the plug on the reactors, which Markey calls "nuclear bomb factories." Nevertheless, a concrete-pouring ceremony was held last August, and Westinghouse sponsored a training course for the North Koreans that concluded in October--shortly before Pyongyang confessed to having a secret uranium program, kicked inspectors out, and said it would start making plutonium. The Bush administration has suspended further transfers of nuclear technology, but in January it authorized $3.5 million to keep the project going...

@Linda Wood
There are 2 kinds of Molten Salt Nuclear Breeder Reactors, The Liquid Thorium Fluoride Reactor and the Liquid Uranium Fluoride Reactor. The Thorium Reactor uses relatively abundant Thorium [1000 year supply at current power usage rate] while the Uranium reactor can use spent fuel from a conventional Uranium pressurized water reactor.

Liquid Thorium Fluoride Molten Salt Nuclear Breeder Reactors are fueled with a mixture of Fluoride salts of Lithium/Beryllium [as the Moderator], Thorium 232, Uranium 233 [Breed from Thorium] and either Uranium 235 or Plutonium 239 as an initial neutron source.

Uranium Molten Salt Nuclear Breeder Reactors replace the Thorium with Uranium from spent reactor fuel. Uranium Pressurized Water Reactor spent fuel still has 1-2% Uranium 235, 1-2% Plutonium 239 and 90% Uranium 238. The spent Uranium/Plutonium Oxide is is purified and converted into the Tetra-Fluoride salt for use by the Molten Salt Reactor.

Both types of Molten Salt Reactors have a burn up rate of 99% versus 2% for a conventional reactor. The waste that is left is much less radioactive and only needs to be secured for 10 to 350 years instead of 100,000 years. The waste can also be burned up by surrounding the reactor core with a blanket of waste salt and letting the reactor neutrons transmute the waste isotopes until they are stable. The remaining part of the waste consists of valuable isotopes such as Technetium 99 that are used in medicine and industry.

The Liquid Thorium Fluoride molten salt reactor was developed at the Oak Ridge Laboratory in the 1950-1960's as a safer Breeder Reactor technology alternative to the Uranium/Plutonium Fast Breeder Reactor.

is a 2015 Norwegian political thriller TV series that my husband and I watched last year. It's based on a near future premise that Norway stops all fossil fuel production and begins development of thorium nuclear power. Russia invades, and resistance leads to civil war.

The premise led me to look up thorium, and sure enough, it exists, but it still yields nuclear waste, although less enduring somehow, possibly. In reading about it, I learned that the reason nuclear power developers chose the kind of uranium we use is that it's easier to make nuclear weapons with U-238.

I don't know enough about this to be bringing it up, but I posted that article about Rumsfeld and North Korea's nuclear weapons program to put some light on the fact that the industry of nuclear power and the industry of nuclear weapons need each other. I hope the more closely we look at the relationship between so-called governments and so-called private industry, the more we will see a pattern of treason and murder.