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Battery bombs in the suburbs?
By Jo Nova
You think exploding pagers was a wicked trick….
Hypothetically, suppose you were distracted while you tried to change tropospheric jet streams, and accidentally gave away your national manufacturing to a foreign adversary. Next thing you know, you’re buying the batteries they make, and installing them in essential grid infrastructure and thousands of homes. You’re patting yourself on the back for getting a cheap deal (never mind the slaves) and it all seems dandy until one sunny day, a leader who was cheesed off with a trade deal, quietly switched off the “overcharge protection” on all of them remotely.
At that point, millions of solar panels are pumping excess electricity into batteries that have no safety cut off. A few houses start to go off like popcorn, and an hour later we’re all living at the Western Front.
Brian Craighead – chief executive of Energy Renaissance, has come to warn us — it’s a hidden threat to national security. He says Australia has already installed 220,000 batteries that were made in potentially unfriendly places, and each home battery has roughly 7,500 times as much energy as a pager. As he […]
Cunning Plan: New Australian PM to set up an Office of Climate Change Threats, but not an Office to study the Threats of Climate Action
Shut down Australia and save 0.01 degrees.
Admiral Chris Barrie will be paid to worry about how seas rising by 1mm a year might affect our supply chains, but not about how making electricity ten times more expensive might destroy manufacturing in Australia.
If we had to actually build our own nuclear submarines will China still be happy to sell us the steel? Will we have an aluminum smelter left in the nation, and how long can we run that on solar panels and batteries? Are 2,000 kilometer long high voltage lines an easy target for hostile forces? Will electric vehicles be easier targets for cyber hackers or EMF weapons? Could dust bombs sabotage 2GW of solar panels? Would paint bombs be worse?
If we managed to build one nuclear submarine by 2040, will it be the most reliable baseload generator left in the national energy market and should we plug it back into the grid so we can build another sub?
So many questions…
Anthony Albanese to order intelligence chief to examine […]
Next thing you know we might get *one* nuclear power plant?
HMS Ambush
Yesterday the odds of that were “Buckleys”. Wow. Foreign readers might not appreciate how seismic this is. There are 450 nuclear power plants in the world and Australia has none of them (just one little medical research reactor). So even getting a small nuclear plant in an underwater boat is a pretty big deal.
Australia to get nuclear-powered submarines, will scrap $90b program to build French-designed subs
ABC
In 2016, the Turnbull government announced French company Naval Group (then known as DCNS) had been selected for this country’s largest-ever defence contract, to design and build “regionally superior” conventional submarines.
A well-placed military source has told the ABC the Defence Department’s general manager of submarines, Greg Sammut, has called an urgent “clear lower decks” meeting for tomorrow morning to discuss the dramatic development.
Another senior official said “top secret” briefings have been arranged at the Defence Department on Thursday.
We’re still fixing the legacy of Malcom Turnbull’s mistakes.
Australia Goes Nuclear
Breitbart
[…]
With the US Defence Force about to release “something” on UFO’s, these very engaging videos from Mick West are persuasive and apropos. But if smart guys with trigonometry and metadata can explain how these aliens are mysterious camera artefacts — surely the Pentagon can too?
Why then are they called “unexplained” and why are they being released as teasers for “the big news?” Did the DoD forget parallax and gymbal corrections?
Apparently 120 incidents will be reviewed in June. Former intelligence director John Ratcliffe has hinted the report will be a big deal. Let’s hope they saved the best stuff. I’m looking forward to a good tantalizing mystery.
Michael Shermer (of Skeptic.com infamy) wrote this all up in a long feature on Quillette:
Understanding the Unidentified
The “Go Fast” video purportedly shows an object with no heat source (and therefore propelled by some unconventional engine) that appears to move impossibly fast just above the surface of the ocean. West then conducted what he describes as “10th grade trigonometry” (based on the numbers provided in the video image itself) to show that, in fact, the object was well above the ocean surface at around 13,000 feet and was probably […]
Is there a better badge to show the intellectual collapse of The West than the idea, from a NATO chief, that we should put solar panels on battlefield tanks? One hundred years from now, there will be a stage in the collapse of civilization called the “Solar powered battle tank” phase. An idea so radioactively stupid that any science writer’s first question is “is this satire?”
Apart from the whole power to weight ratio non-starter, there is the problem of night time and rainy-day warfare, camoflaging a shiny surface, and the general vulnerability of glass and electronics in a situation known to “have bullets”.
Oh the dilemma: how to camouflage solar panels and also collect sunlight?
Not only are these Solar Powered Tanks at risk of being immobilized by a stray shot, they could be struck down with a paint bomb.
Another day in Fall of the West Nato chief suggests battle tanks with solar panels as militaries go green
Thomas Harding, National News
The Nato chief [Jens Stoltenberg] suggested that militaries should advance research into low-emitting vehicles because of the advantages they bring, at an online seminar titled New Ideas for Nato 2030.
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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