Cold Air

Reporter: Why didn't you tell allies about the war before attacking Iran? Trump: We wanted it to be a surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor?

Which demographics of Canadians are leaving Canada? >67% of the are 20-44 year olds. >3x more likely to be in Sciences than avg population. >31.1% have a masters degree. >61.4% left to the US. In other words, it's Canada's youngest, most talented and educated population.

Taiwan’s nuclear phaseout created a vulnerability that now sits directly on top of the Qatar Ras Laffan force majeure. The uncomfortable arithmetic is that the nuclear capacity Taiwan chose to retire is almost exactly equal to the LNG volume it imports from Qatar. Taiwan imports roughly 35 percent of its LNG from Qatar. LNG now fuels nearly half of Taiwan’s electricity after the political phaseout of nuclear power. The island maintains only about eleven days of LNG storage. Had Taiwan kept its full nuclear fleet operating and commissioned Lungmen, its completed but never fuelled fourth nuclear plant, the country would today have roughly 7,750 MW of nuclear capacity producing about 61 TWh per year, covering around 21 percent of the grid. Replacing that output with gas requires far more primary energy because Taiwan’s combined cycle gas turbines operate at roughly 55 percent thermal efficiency. Producing 61 TWh of electricity from gas therefore requires roughly 110 TWh of fuel input, equivalent to about 10 to 11 billion cubic metres of natural gas or roughly 7 to 8 million tonnes of LNG per year. That volume is almost exactly the amount of LNG Taiwan currently imports from Qatar. In other words, the nuclear fleet Taiwan shut down would have displaced essentially the entire Qatari supply stream. Every cargo that does not need to cross the Strait of Hormuz is a cargo that cannot be held hostage. Instead that capacity was retired and mothballed on political grounds and the gap was filled with gas. On 23 August Taiwan held a referendum on whether to restart the Ma’anshan nuclear plant, the island’s last operating reactor station, which had shut down in May after its forty year operating licence expired. A clear majority of participating voters supported restarting the plant subject to regulatory approval and safety confirmation. Taiwan’s referendum law, however, requires affirmative votes from at least one quarter of all eligible voters, roughly five million people. The referendum received about 4.3 million yes votes, leaving it below the legal threshold and keeping the plant offline, effectively confirming the continuation of Taiwan’s nuclear phaseout. Oil markets built resilience after decades of shocks. Strategic petroleum reserves, spare tanker capacity, and a deep spot market exist precisely because embargoes and supply crises forced the system to develop buffers. LNG developed very differently. For most of its history it operated as a point to point business, the same ships on the same routes under long term contracts, functioning in conditions stable enough that nobody was forced to build equivalent shock absorption into the system. Storage compounds this vulnerability and it divides sharply along geographic lines. Europe benefits from geology. Depleted gas fields and salt caverns can hold months of supply, which is why European utilities spend the summer refilling underground storage ahead of winter demand. Asia has no equivalent. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan depend almost entirely on above ground insulated LNG tanks at their import terminals, essentially the same thermos principle used on LNG ships. South Korea had roughly nine days of LNG supply when Ras Laffan went offline. Taiwan had about eleven days. Japan operates in a similar range. These are operational buffers designed for a world of uninterrupted deliveries rather than strategic reserves designed to ride out supply shocks. When a major node in the LNG system fails, there is no large fleet of idle ships ready to reroute, no spare liquefaction capacity waiting to fill the gap, and in Asia no underground storage that can stabilize supply while the market adjusts. Taiwan’s nuclear shutdown therefore produced a structural vulnerability that is now impossible to ignore. The reactors that were closed would today be offsetting almost the entire volume of LNG Taiwan buys from Qatar. There's never been a better time to restart Taiwan's nuclear fleet.

I'm gonna be honest with you energy twitter - and I've already told the nuke bros - I used to be a big fan of feed in tarrifs for wind power. Back in 2015 when I ran for the NL NDP it was my central energy policy. I was looking at Germany with stars in my eyes. (1/x)