People are Starting to Get it
September 27th, 2009
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I’m very glad to see an editorial in the Washington Examiner that speaks the truth on solar and wind power. The editorial cites how many have pointed to Spain as an example of what the US should aspire to for energy independence and economic growth, but tells the hard truth on the matter:
In his campaign to increase renewable energy use in the United States by government fiat, President Obama often points to Spain as a “green jobs success story.” Here’s the part of the story Obama doesn’t mention: If the United States follows Spain’s decade-long lead, we’ll need massive government subsidies to keep renewable energy companies afloat. Worse yet, each new “green” job will come at the expense of at least two old jobs in the private sector, according to a blockbuster study led by Gabriel Calzada, economics professor at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.
When Calzada and his team published the study, they were publicly denounced as unpatriotic for questioning their country’s “solar revolution.” But the Spanish government itself quietly admitted on April 20 that the growing deficit created by solar subsidies jeopardized the financial stability of Spain’s entire power industry. When the government was forced to reduce the subsidies by 30 percent and put a cap on new solar plant construction, “the whole sector collapsed,” Calzada said in an editorial board meeting with The Examiner. Without ever-increasing subsidies, he explained, Spain’s renewable energy industry simply is not economically feasible.
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Even after receiving the equivalent of $43 billion in subsidies, solar energy still accounts for less than 1 percent of Spain’s total electric output. But now residential electric bills are going up, and energy-intensive industries have begun moving their plants to Malaysia and Brazil to escape rising electricity costs and an increasingly unreliable power supply. Spain has the worst-performing economy in the European Union and, despite its massive support of renewable energy, remains the biggest violator of the Kyoto Protocol. Unemployment — including thousands of former “green” workers — hit 18.5 percent in July and is expected to be even higher next year.
This is the nation Obama wants the United States to emulate?
It’s always bothered me (a lot, actually) to see various groups pointing to countries like Spain, Austria and Germany as examples of good energy policy. When praised, there’s usually a lot of talk about how many solar projects or wind turbines they’ve built, but never that it accounts for a tiny fraction of the power generated in these countries. There is a lot of focus on the thousands who work in these industries, but little about the copious amounts of national treasure that has been squandered on these jobs at the expensive of two to three times as many jobs lost – even by conservative estimates.
Both Germany and Spain are importing more and more electricity, their share of nuclear electricity increasing even as they shun the technology due to their ballooning imports from France, the world’s largest exporter or electricity. Meanwhile, Germany is plowing villages to the ground to get at more coal, which is being fed to constantly expanding coal fired power plants. In Spain, natural gas and coal are both on the rise. Germany, Austria, Spain and the Netherlands use more natural gas than ever before and have seen energy prices skyrocket, in some cases driving industries out of these countries. Is this anything to emulate? Some insist these are success stories.
On the bright side, there are other countries which are not cited for their energy policy but are actually doing quite well. Finland has embraced nuclear energy and managed to keep its need for natural gas in check by doing so. In Sweden, after years of official policy of nuclear phase-out, the politicians have come to their senses and repealed the law. Italy is looking to nuclear power and Romania is building more CANDU reactors, having been very satisfied with their first two.
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 1:22 am and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Nuclear, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 27th, 2009 at 2:30 am
I just wish my own nation would see this rather obvious flaw in “renewable energy” as well.. they are forcing windmills down our throat’s here. even when the locals do not want them because quite frankly. they ruin the landscape
the irony is that i live in a country that has only 1 fossil fuelled power plant. it’s a brand new LNG plant, they promised full CO2 scrubbing but that has ofc not happened at all. nor will it ever happen. they recently publicized the real cost of scrubbing. it would practically double the cost of the plant.
However. for some reason they state that 20% of our energy needs is to be covered by renewable. however they fail to include hydro as renewable…. oh the irony.
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September 27th, 2009 at 6:24 am
Doc, how about a post analysing the results of the German federal election? Whichever way it goes, it’s going to have a significant impact on the global energy paradigm (dare I use that word in polite company?), and will be a significant consideration on how to craft pro-nuclear advocacy pieces for a long time to come.
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September 27th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
This has always been our most powerful argument: reality always bats last. The only thing that surprises me is that it is happening sooner than I would have predicted. I would have thought that they could have hidden the failure of these renewable projects for much longer than they have.
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September 27th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
A lot of people are reading these article with their blinkers on. This should be read in conjunction:
France has the worlds highest percentage of nuclear power production – 80%
France is the worlds largest exporter of electricity.
France has the lowest electricity prices in Europe.
French electricity production is relatively inefficient as a lot of plants are idling over the week-ends due to lack of demand.
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September 27th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
ciccio said:
Yeah, one of the interesting thing about nuclear power is that because the fuel is a minor part of the cost of the plant and the fuel is usually changed at regular intervals, there is little cost difference in whether the reactor can load follow or whether it just produces surplus energy that mostly goes out the condenser discharge.
Still, it would be nice to harness some of that to fill in the peaks when fossil fuels are used. France generates most of it’s power from nuclear with the second largest generator being hydroelectric. That leaves about 8% coming from fossil fuel, mostly gas, but some coal. France closed their last coal mine several years ago and they want to completely phase out coal (if they have not already).
The gas power plants are generally to fill gaps at high demand times and for general reserve. It would be nice to finally get rid of those. One simple proposal for adding more peaking capability to nuclear is to add thermal mass that could soak up extra heat when the reactor is in low demand and then later could be used to generate more power or even allow the turbine to keep working during refueling or maintenance outages.
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September 27th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Pro nuke blogger David Walters is fond of pointing out that the energy storage that would so benefit “renewables” could be put to even greater benefit by nuclear plants.
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September 28th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Why couldn’t any excess electricity be used to run an ammonia plant? They already do that in Iceland and used to do it at the Vemork hydroelectric plant in Norway (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production).
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September 28th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Joel Upchurch said:
That would be a good idea. Of course it doesn’t need to be an ammonia plant. It could also be a chlorine plant or any other chemical process that could use electricity.
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September 28th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
The problem you can run into with such plans is capital cost. If you have an expensive piece of kit, like an electrolyser, you want that thing to run as close to 24/7 as you can make it and electricity costs may have to be awefully low to compensate.
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September 28th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Soylent said:
Yeah that’s true.
Too bad they don’t just make a big jacbos ladder and when the power demand is low, like late on weeknights, everyone could gather at the plant and they could blow up hot dogs and make ball lightning and the other things that are fun to do with a small neon sign transformer but would be more fun to do with half the output of a power plant. They could make a “can crusher” that crushes 55 gallon drums and a penny shrinker that shrinks manhole covers and such.
None of that should be too expensive, especially ones that are just a big spark gap with enough voltage to pull a five foot arc and enough amperage to make a glowing column of ionized air a couple hundred feet high.
This might seem pointless, but I assure you that I personally would get tremendous enjoyment out of it and I know many others who would too!
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September 29th, 2009 at 12:25 am
I thought ammonia would make a good example, since it only requires air and water as inputs. Otherwise you need Natural Gas to produce the Hydrogen. Aluminum refining might be a better example. I think some of it is already get done off peak, since 20-40% of the price of aluminum is the electricity.
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September 29th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Keep in mind that in the nuclear Utopia we are planing, automobiles and other rolling stock like trucks and buses will be charging on the grid mostly during the off peak.
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September 29th, 2009 at 1:10 am
Joel Upchurch said:
Point taken. An ammonia plant could use natural gas and then supplement that with water-derived hydrogen during off peak hours. Actually, the nuclear plant could just make hydrogen during off peak hours. Hydrogen has pretty good industrial value for fertilizer manufacture for one, but also for things like hydrogenation of heavy oils and synthesis of plastics.
I still think my idea would be more fun.
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September 29th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
This conversation went from misdirected subsidies in support of a renewable energy sector to nuclear power support and ammonia for … not sure why it went off topic but to bring it back – the real analogy here is subsidies for corn based ethanol which created a false market and had the unintended consequence of high food prices, a double whamy. What we need to learn is the government policy should set the rules of the game and also set incentives, but NEVER pick the winning horse which is best left to the entrepreneurs and the market. I’m in Colorado and we’re on track to get 20% of our power needs from wind and solar, in fact we’re so far ahead of the goal that install system incentives have been removed. Nuclear has its place no doubt, but distributed production and same time generated consumption offsets peak power gen need, which is super expensive. We need to figure out storage, and intelligent grid distribution, but hey – we did put men on the moon right? We’ll never outperform the nuclear power coming from our life giving star so we might as well use what it sends us. We need to help our government make better decisions not poopoo those that have tried. That’s equivalent to your troglodyte employees talking crap about every management decision that comes down the pipe eh.
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September 29th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Chuck ray said:
I agree with the sentiment but it’s an impossible goal as long as the government cannot be expected to be rational.
It can decide to force the nuclear industry to spend billions on ’safety’ that is expected to save less than one life while at the same time ignoring the 30 000 per year that die from coal particulates. It cannot even be expected to institute a simple carbon tax rather than a >1000 page cap-and-trade monstrosity full of loop holes, exemptions and subsidies.
Since software is expected to have ~10 bugs per 1000 lines of code during inhouse testing and for ~1 per 1000 lines of code to make it into production. Since politicians never do any “debugging” of their legislation and seem to “mysteriously” introduce bugs that occur in favour of their supporters I wouldn’t trust politicians to write anything longer than what fits on a single sheet of toilet paper.
It’s important to realise that the government is not a meritocracy. It’s run by people whose chief job qualification is charm, ability to manipulate and lie convincingly; it’s a giant rent-seeking enterprise. One of the most brazen and thoroughly rotten expressions of this rent-seeking is the so called “milker-bills”/”juice bills”/”fetcher bills” that generate campaign contribution to the politicians who craft them by constituting a mock-threat to some industry, mobilizing the target industry to expend money lobbying to defeat the bill.
Chuck ray said:
Come on now, you think you can slip in such an obvious lie and not be called on it?
In 2008 you had 1.07 GW of installed wind and 15 MW of installed solar and you consumed 51 TWh of electricity. Because I have no information and would rather err on the side of optimism than be called biased, I will assume wind has a 30% capacity factor and solar a 20% capacity factor.
At those capacity factors you would produce 2.8 TWh of wind power and 0.026 TWh of solar power. None of this phases out any coal or natural gas; it’s just a way to save them a little bit of fuel.
Chuck ray said:
This is almost an exact inversion of the truth. Wind power cannot be relied upon to produce peak power, in fact you must have the so called “super-expensive” peak power ready to jump in an replace wind power at a moments notice. A not insignificant portion of the wind power produced is in fact worth less than zero; it is a disposal problem to the extent that feed-in tariffs and carbon credits creation cause it to be incorporated into the grid:
E.g. see http://knowledgeproblem.com/2008/11/20/frequent_negati/
Chuck ray said:
I wouldn’t bet the continued existance of industrial civilization on it, it seems like a much harder problem. Solving it would be worth literally trillions for the companies involved and this has been true since the early 20th century and yet the best energy storage solutions we have managed to come up with continue to be pumped hydro and lead-acid batteries, both invented in the mid 19th century and gradually refined.
Even the simplest, crummiest, coal burning steam boat vastly outperformed the most advanced clipper ships of the day. There simply wasn’t any comparison. I don’t know in what respect the sun is the ultimate power source, but it certainly isn’t in practicality or cost.
Chuck ray said:
If government is the chief responsible agent for setting back the civilian nuclear industry by decades it is very important to ‘poopoo’ it’s decisions.
Chuck ray said:
No, it’s like bringing attention to the fact that one of the surgeons keeps “mysteriously” losing patients to multiple stab wounds to the jugular and voicing the opinion that this surgeon should perhaps not be allowed to practice.
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October 13th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Solar thermal power generation has zero future. Every Dollar (or Euro or Pound or whatever) is wasted. It will never be anything more than an extremely expensive curiosity and produce small amounts of power at a very high price.
I know this sounds horrible and I’m used to getting people jumping down my throat on this. Let me explain though that I have direct experience working on some projects and you have no idea how much more difficult and complex this is and how badly they have all returned.
You need a HELL OF A LOT of mirrors and space to put them to get a relatively small amount of energy back. The effeciency is horrible because the mirrors are only so good at focusing the light and some of the heat leaks out anyway. Better focus means more mirrors and more expensive ones and better motors to move them, making it more expensive.
That is not even the problem. The problem is that a ten megawatt power station may need to employ 60 or more workers full time to keep it up and running. This is simply what happens when you put a lot of electric motors, tilting mirrors and heat exchangers in the desert and subject them to the hot sun and sand. Motors jam constantly. With so many, one is always broken. Collectors and heat exchangers need to use thin gauge material to maximize the transfer to the fluids and they leak constantly. Minor leaks of the heated metal or salt or whatever are difficult to fix.
The turbines are usually small and they operate in conditions that are very bad for them. One project gave up on combined cycle and went with a simple steam system after the problems with everything else compounded so badly that it was just not possible to even consider adding more mechanical systems to the mix.
I am glad I no longer am involved in that area. Sorry if this offends anyone, but I found it very frustrating and unfulfillable to be working on a technology that is all hype and completely empty.
The problems are not due to lack of development, as some say. The price will not come down because this is the nature of the beast. It is a simple matter of gathering the amount of light necessary and the enviornment that the whole thing needs to work in and you can’t really escape that.
Now tell me how wrong I am. I am used to it.
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October 13th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Been There Done That said:
None of the regulars here will argue with you over this , we too have been chanting the same litany here and elsewhere for years.
We too know the frustration of trying to explain that 10MW can’t replace 1000MW of nuclear, and having that explanation fall of deaf ears.
The fact is that innumeracy is so common now, that any argument of scaling is beyond the understanding of the bulk of the population.
At any rate we understand and share your pain.
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October 13th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Been There Done That said:
This point of view would be excellently placed in the debates at the following site:
http://bravenewclimate.com/
Do please consider going there and adding your voice to the party of reason thereon.
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October 14th, 2009 at 4:01 am
DV82XL said:
The problem is not innumeracy, but the fact that you have to explain that 10 MW of solar cannot replace 1000 MW of nuclear. There is no place for explanation in the culture of 10-second soundbite…
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October 14th, 2009 at 5:04 am
I would say that needing an explination that 10MW does not replace 1000 is the definition of innumeracy.
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October 14th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Chuck P. said:
People seem to have been taught that if everyone gets new lightbulbs then it will cut electricity demand enough that the piddly sources will be all we need. They are also taught that if that fails to work then it is because people are using too much stuff like air conditioning or other ‘luxuries’ and furthermore they should be ashamed of themselves for that.
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October 15th, 2009 at 5:50 am
Chem Geek Gregor said:
Yes. Ang the inability of most of the public to differentiate between 1kW and 1MW is part of what allows thoses memes to persist.
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October 15th, 2009 at 8:19 am
Chem Geek Gregor said:
Indeed — most people on this blog think “We need #### GW of power: what is the best way to generate it?”. The boosters of wind and solar simply regard it as immoral to use non-renewable energy sources — for them the question is “How can we reduce our energy consumption to the point that renewable sources will be enough?”
It’s a clash of values, a bit like abortion (which is an essential part of women’s emancipation to pro-choicers, but murder to pro-lifers).
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October 15th, 2009 at 10:07 am
George Carty said:
The difference is that we can prove that we can put our money where our mouths are, and they can’t.
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October 16th, 2009 at 4:01 am
DV82XL said:
Yeah, but the other side can put government money where their mouth is… and where their wallet is too.
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October 18th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Were memories of the Nazi occupation an important factor in France’s decision to embrace nuclear energy so wholeheartedly? The occupation virtually shut down the French economy by cutting off the country’s coal and oil imports. (Germany had coal, but not enough to power France’s industries as well as its own.)
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October 18th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
George Carty said:
France’s decision to launch a large nuclear program dates back to 1973 and the events in the Middle East that they refer to as the “oil shock.” The quadrupling of the price of oil by OPEC nations was indeed a shock for France because at that time most of its electricity came from oil burning plants. France had and still has very few natural energy resources. As De Gaul famously said about France’s nuclear program: “no coal, no oil no, gas – no choice”.
French policy makers saw only one way for France to achieve energy independence: nuclear energy. Plans were drawn up to introduce the most comprehensive national nuclear energy program in history. Over the next 15 years France installed 56 nuclear reactors.
So to answer your question, I don’t think it had as much to do with the events of WWII as it did their waining influence in the Middle East. The French nuclear weapon program, on the other hand, probably did draw political legitimacy from the will of a population that never wanted to hear the crunch, crunch, crunch, of jackboots in their streets again.
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October 18th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
DV82XL said:
I disagree that they had no choice. They could have gone without nuclear energy and simply accepted that this would mean that they would not have clean plentiful energy. Plenty of other nations have done that. They end up hurting because of it, but they could have done it too.
France has some coal domestically – not a whole lot of it, but some. They could have gotten by with coal by primarily importing it and using what little they have domestically. There are enough countries that export large quantities of coal that even if an entire region of the world became unstable, there would still be alternative sellers. The United States, China, Poland, Russia, Australia, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the Chez Republic and others are all potential suppliers of coal. I highly doubt that each and every one of them would suddenly start refusing to sell to France.
There are countries that get by without nuclear energy despite the fact that they desperately need it. The Marshall Islands, New Zealand and others are suffering high energy prices and dependence on imports to fill their energy needs. They just bite the bullet and suffer.
France had a choice. They could go with nuclear energy or they could voluntarily suffer without it. They chose wisely.
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October 18th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
drbuzz0 said:
While your point is valid, it touches on something I have been harping on about the English speaking world having a subconscious Calvinist ethic that says that somehow the path that involves some sort of sacrifice is somehow morally superior to one that does not. French culture does not labor under that particular philosophic imperative.
Thus the idea of doing without energy, or paying exorbitant rates for it, are simply unthinkable if there is another option.
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October 18th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
The US navy has been using nuclear plants to run its ships and submarines for over 50 year WITHOUT ONE SINGLE NUCLEAR ACCIDENT. One little sub generates 50 MW power, I have no idea what the giant aircraft carriers generate but I guess it to be in the region of 1TW. A large naval dockyard will have as much nuclear generating capacity as the largest power stations, all without environmental assessment, planing and building permission, greenpeace gets told to f.o.
Russia is using nuclear powered carriers in remote parts of Siberia to power whole towns.
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October 18th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
ciccio said:
The Nimitz class aircraft carriers have two A4W reactor plants – each comprised of one reactor and two steam turbines. The original specs on the reactor were 140,000 shaft horsepower per reactor system. That’s about 104 megawatts. Thus the carrier has about 208 megawatts of power.
However the more recently built ones are closer to about 250 megawatts because there have been incrimental upgrades to improve effeciency and added turbines to power the onboard electrical systems with greater capacity.
(At least that’s what the official documents say, but in some cases, the reactors can be run at greater than their official 100% power, but that’s not public info).
The USS Enterprise has eight A2W reactors. The official total shaft power of the USS Enterprise is 210 megawatts. Again, it may in reality be a little bit higher, as the full technical details are not public. It has had some modernizations and received new reactor cores which may have increased power.
The newest class of carriers and the first new one since the USS Nimitz will be the USS Gerald R Ford (CVN-78) which is supposed to be laid down later this year and will enter service in about six or seven years, if all goes according to plan.
The new carrier will use two A1B reactors, the new design is still in final development. They’re supposed to be signifficantly more powerful than the A2W reactors. The new carrier will use electromagnetic catapults and will need even more electrical power in anticipation of high power radar, electronic warfare and other future considerations. It’s possible that the total output of the A1B will be double that of the A2W.
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November 3rd, 2009 at 10:40 am
Being french, I can confirm you are mostly right on the french energetic policy.
After decolonisation, France was left with very little natural resources, some coal deep under the northern part of the country (now totally unexploited because of the extraction cost and the local steel industry moved to the proximity of the country major ports because we don’t have much local iron either), very little petroleum and a respectable natural gas facility near spain border. The country has to import a very large proportion of its hydrocarbons, mostly from the middle east, Russia and ex-USSR, Algeria and Norway.
On the other hand, France has some uranium mines, mostly in new caledonia (but also buy some from various african countries). In reality, it is not just that atomic power is the main source of electricity, it is that the other sources (mostly hydroelecric ang gas) are used only as a fast response emergency backup. This may however be a little different next winter as an unusually high percentage of reactors are currently down for various reasons.
As a consequence, we have heavily taxed oil (gas is currently aroung 1.40E/L and diesel around 1.10E/L), and cheap and reliable electricity, that becomes dirt cheap during evening/night and weekend.
Concerning the military nuclear aspect, it has to be placed in the larger delusion of grandeur/struggle for independance that has some roots in the german occupation, but also in the cold war era egemony of both USSR and USA. For a small country that chosed to design and build their own planes, tanks, submarines, carrier, satelites or orbital rockets, adding a couple of bombs to the list is just too cheap to be ommited.
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