Comments by "Tim Trewyn" (@timtrewyn453) on "Oliver Stone: Vladimir Putin and War in Ukraine | Lex Fridman Podcast #286" video.

  1. I've signed off on monthly payments for nuclear power. It had a wholesale price of about 9 cents per kWh. Add 1 cent for transmission and 4 cents for distribution and administration and you were at 14 cents per kWh. That was in the 90s. It is not cheap. Wind and solar are cheaper now. Hydro, where you can do it, was the cheapest. Coal was at 6 cents per kWh out of the plant. Today its more expensive than gas, solar, or wind generated power. That's as much a reason for utilities not building new coal plants as renewable incentives. New power plants are natural gas fired or renewable. A nuclear plant has a low risk of failure, but a high cost for failure if it happens. See Chernobyl. If you think we need to do more nuclear, then good luck convincing the rate payers their electric bills need to go up 15 to 25%. What the US should do is keep rebuilding its existing nuclear generating sites if they can be updated safely. Burning oil to generate power is up over 15 cents per kWH. Utilities avoid oil as much as possible as a fuel source. What utilities do want to do is operate their coal plants for their designed life in order to pay off their construction debt and fulfill long-term coal contracts. My understanding of the US warning of a Russian invasion is that that call was based on analysis of the scope and equipment involved in the exercises close to the border. If a possible invasion is not on your checklist, there is no reason to conduct exercises of the scale conducted so close to an international boundary. You conduct them on more interior bases. Russia is certainly sensitive to NATO force levels near its western border. They should not be surprised by comparable concerns. I think Stone's proposal that somehow the US tricked the Russian Army into invading Ukraine is wrong. There is a school of geopolitics in Russia that finds the assimilation of Ukraine a vital Russian strategic interest, no matter how 40 million Ukrainians might feel otherwise. The sense of importance of that interest explains Russian persistence in the conflict. If Russia just wanted to end conflict in Donbas, they would have focused on it in the first place. Stone goes on to back up the idea that Putin is essentially negligent in due diligence with his own government. Maybe not such a smart guy. And it does not surprise me much that Ukrainians would use the kind of state mechanisms of population control that the Russians use. They were in the same Soviet Union. Hey, I know Ukrainians that prefer being in the US to pre-war Ukraine. Stone was right on when mentioning the contrast between the American and Russian defense budget. We do not get a good ROI on American defense. Interviewer asked very good questions.
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