The reptiles are nothing if not inventive, daily devising new EXCLUSIVE ways to launch invective on hapless Albo and his mob ...
‘It stinks’: Labor’s fail on fertiliser firms rescue
Labor’s big stink: import scheme ‘cost us millions’, say fertiliser importers
It was meant to keep the nation going through the Iran crisis but Labor’s $7.5bn fuel and fertiliser scheme has cost some companies millions while distorting the market, amid conflict and governance concerns.
By Matthew Denholm
Might not mad King Donald also stink because he started the ruckus?
Meanwhile, Fergo scored top billing with an apocalyptic headline ...
Victoria faces line-in-the-sand poll as both leaders back reset
There will be a dramatic shift away from spendathon politics, regardless of who wins office on November 28.
By John Ferguson
The pond was almost beguiled and tempted to indulge, not least because of Emilia's stunning collage atop the piece ...
Besides, the pond is extremely loyal to its stars, and how could it walk around the bromancer, top of the world ma over on the extreme far right?
The header: Iran moves decisively against its greatest enemy – Donald Trump; Lyndon Johnson will be remembered for Vietnam, George W. Bush for Iraq and Trump for the strategic disaster that Iran has become.
The caption for the only snap to relieve readers mired in the bromancer's suffering: US President Donald Trump faces escalating Middle East tension and severe political headwinds ahead of November elections. Picture: AP
Please allow the pond to begin at the beguin ...
Way back in March, the bromancer was cautiously optimistic ...
If Donald Trump produces a more normal government in Tehran the whole world benefits. But every outcome, including the worst, remains possible.
The instant reactions give you some the clue. Around the Western world, perpetual demonstrators of the left, and pro-Islamist demonstrators, are in the streets denouncing Trump. Ethnic Iranians in the West, long subject to co-ordinated intimidation from Tehran, danced in the streets, as did Iranians at home, at the end of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s rule.
Trump has the right enemies, the right friends. That’s not to say he’ll succeed. His operation is intensely risky, involves huge human cost, and is unpredictable in its consequences. Nonetheless, when Trump declared: “No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight”, he was for once telling the truth.
Whether previous US presidents were constrained by wise prudence, or an unwillingness to face strategic necessity, is a matter of judgment.
The Albanese government is right to endorse Trump’s action and deserves some recognition for this. Deciding that in a war between Iran and the US, Australia backs the US, is not exactly rocket science – morally, strategically or electorally. Nonetheless, the government has made the right call. That the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, is strongly opposed to the US action is a further sign that it’s probably more good than bad.
But since that glorious start, endorsed by stout-hearted Albo, the bromancer has progressively become more disheartened and disillusioned, the vision growing darker and darker, the outlook getting gloomier, the result looking bleak, and today saw the bro in a grumpy mood ...
This past week saw a critical inflection point. With attacks in both directions halted, and Trump claiming negotiations were proceeding and Iran wanted a deal, Tehran decided to escalate with direct missile strikes at US bases and allies. That the Iranians can do this, even after Trump repeatedly declared their military destroyed, demonstrates their determination, Russian and Chinese help, and the asymmetric drone warfare they’ve mastered.
Iran also activated key proxies – militia in Iraq and Houthis in Yemen, who announced a blockade against Saudi Arabia transporting oil via the Red Sea. Among other effects, this raises US gas prices. America retaliated militarily. That was inevitable. The Iranians knew this. That’s what’s so striking. Iran, though vastly weaker than America, initiated escalation, knowing the consequences.
The Iranians themselves are divided, more than capable of overplaying their hand and making big mistakes. They could yet unravel. But this week it looked as though Tehran calculated its moves, acting deliberately and confidently. Whatever you think of Trump, it’s infinitely better if the US prevails. But this week shows us the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the mullahs think they’re winning and want to deny Trump any way out. They sense huge historic, strategic gain and the chance to cruel Trump’s presidency. The Iranians hate Trump. They’ve tried to kill him more than once.
The pond knew at once what the bromancer needed.
As the reptiles had refused to offer him any visual distractions, it was up to the pond to supply some light-hearted 'toons ...
Trump now has no chance of securing a meaningful nuclear deal. Trump says he needs Iran to commit to no nuclear weapons. But the Iranian leaders make that pledge (dishonestly) routinely. The struggle is no longer really about nukes. The US and Israel have done all the damage they can to Iran’s nuclear programs.
The struggle now is over the Strait of Hormuz. So far, Iran is decisively winning that struggle.
Oh come now ... it's not that bad, everyone has a Verne moment now and then ...
Still more gloom?
The US Air Force and navy are deployed in the Middle East in overwhelming and unsustainable numbers (at huge expense). Yet even with all that American military muscle in the region, and even after six months of battering, the US cannot secure the Strait of Hormuz for commercial shipping.
After six months of intermittent warfare, the US is running out of several kinds of missiles. As long ago as April, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies issued a definitive report, Last Rounds. It detailed US use of seven key munitions: Patriot interceptor missiles, THAAD missile defence systems and five attack missiles – Tomahawks, JASSM, PrSM, SM-3 and SM-6. For four of these, the US had used more than half its pre-war stock, including more than 1500 Patriots and more than 1000 Tomahawks. The report suggested they could take three or four years to replace. Many more have been used since.
The US military industrial base needs massive reform. It needs competition and a premium on designing cheap, plentiful munitions, as well as exquisitely hi-tech, perfection weapons it produces so well but so expensively. That this hasn’t happened is an indictment of both Trump and Joe Biden.
Iran’s asymmetric warfare has been technically brilliant and exposed this US weakness. The US Air Force recently announced it would scale back Pacific exercises because of Middle East needs.
That’s a huge constraint on Trump waging war indefinitely in Iran or even pursuing heavy, temporary escalation. But such escalation is anyway politically and morally impossible for the US.
Constraints? Nah ... no way ...
The bromancer kept sagging into the swamp of despair ...
In any event, Trump faces much stronger, more immediate constraints. The American people hate the Iran war. The latest CNN poll shows 72 per cent of Americans oppose the war. This is not some rogue CNN poll. All the polls show the same thing more or less. A Politico poll from late July shows the war has lost support even among Trump’s base. Only 37 per cent of MAGA Republicans now support the war. Trump’s own personal approval ratings are diabolic, just 34 per cent in the latest CNN poll, worse than his position at this stage in his first term.
The Republicans will almost certainly lose the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate in November. The reason is Iran.
The Republicans face three bad headwinds going into November: inflation, the war and lack of enthusiasm among Republican voters. Inflation, especially of petrol and diesel prices, is caused by the Iran war. So is lack of voter enthusiasm. Trump promised no more forever wars. The dearth of Republican voter enthusiasm also arises from Trump and Republicans being unable to prosecute any significant domestic agenda as their efforts are concentrated on Iran.
Iran has hurt a lot of American presidents in the past – Jimmy Carter with US hostages in Tehran, Ronald Reagan with the Iran-backed terror bombing in Beirut in 1983 that killed more than 200 US marines, the terrorists Iran supported who hurt George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, the weak nuclear deal that so discredited Barack Obama. They follow US politics minutely. Now they think they can have their greatest triumph over Trump, their greatest enemy.
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency is remembered for the Vietnam war, Bush’s for Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran will be Trump’s legacy, for better or worse.
But there's still hope, surely, if mad King Donald turns out to be wily ...
Eventually the bromancer ran out of steam ...
Trump has weakened America’s alliances, once a decisive US advantage, while the anti-American alliance has strengthened. Bush would have had the Europeans with him in Iran. On Trump’s watch America’s enemies have evolved into much more of a genuine military alliance. US economic sanctions can never finally bring Iran to its knees while it has Russian and Chinese backing.
The Democrats give Republicans a chance in November by embracing far-left candidates associated with the Democratic Socialists of America. Nonetheless a big anti-Republican wave is still the most likely result. Just as congress prevented Richard Nixon from ending the Vietnam war decently, left-wing congressional Democrats and fed-up Republicans could well combine to end the Iran war, to de-fund it, no matter the strategic cost.
That would leave Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Trump would try to camouflage a surrender with some pseudo deal and endless bluster and distractions. The Iranians look like they won’t give him anything. This would be a humiliating tragedy for Trump, and pretty bad for the world.
Oh surely not, surely it's all good, surely Faux Noise will triumph, and surely the immortal Rowe has evoked the current state of play ...
For the bonus, the pond gingerly trod around simpleton Sharri, full disrespect ...
The world’s most trusted doctor privately suspected a lab leak while publicly branding the theory a conspiracy – and Anthony Fauci has now pleaded the Fifth 111 times.
By Sharri Markson
News24 Host
The pond knows that silly Sharri is much loved by correspondents, and so this teaser trailer might send them off to the intermittent archive ...
The pond decided if it could help out the bromancer, it could do the same for Sharri ...
The only exciting bit came down at the very bottom of Sharri's piece, with news that the reptiles look like they've brazenly decided to pinch the ABC branding ...
Sharri Markson is the author of What Really Happened in Wuhan and the host of Sharri on News24, Monday to Thursday at 8pm.
Herpetologists who look up News24 might well stumble on a South African digital news platform...
For once the pond broke its rule of not linking to reptile sites, because correspondents would probably like to marvel at the way the actual "au" website is a tragic, wretched thing...
The pond also avoided that dill Dillon, pandering to the reptiles in the most pathetic way imaginable ...
Bill Leak’s legacy: Why fear of being called racist is failing Aboriginal children
Maybe on this 10th anniversary of Bill Leak’s ‘Righto, what’s his name’ cartoon, we make it our goal not to be silenced.
By Anthony Dillon
He gave the reptiles yet another chance to recycle that racist cartoon at the top of the piece, so the pond walked on by ... (no scare quotes needed for racist).
But the pond didn't need any of them because Lloydie of the Amazon was making a rare appearance ... and it was nukes all the way ... and the pond just knew that this would be a marvel and a triumph that would send correspondents away feeling fully sated ...
The header: Nuclear power on the back of a truck moves closer to reality in the US; Australian Bobby Gallagher is pinning his hopes on a very small nuclear reactor that could change the future of global energy.
The caption for the snap for a device the pond has already placed an order for, so it can be installed in the pond's backyard by Xmas: The 1 megawatt Unity Battery is a microreactor that can run for five years without needing to be refuelled.
A bloody ute, and it looked like it was all put together with a bit of barbed wire, a stocking, string and some sealing wax!
What's more, Lloydie came back with a full-blown bang, an 11 minute read which the pond knows will just blow away its correspondents.
Bobby Gallagher is a no-nonsense Australian from Brisbane who wants to make a big impact on the global energy future with a very small nuclear reactor that he jokes looks like a trash can.
On July 1 his company’s Unity Nuclear Battery was wheeled into the Idaho National Laboratories test facility in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where it became the third new US reactor to achieve criticality as part of a moonshot program launched by Donald Trump in 2025. Criticality means a chain reaction has been achieved. The next step is to add the hardware to allow it to be turned up to produce the heat required to drive a steam turbine to generate electricity.
As Australia grapples with decarbonisation and a booming demand for electricity from data centres, Gallagher says his technology could be transformative, “enabling the data centre boom, reducing carbon emissions at scale, providing stable long-term energy security as well as the ability to re-industrialise and reshore industrial capacity back to Australia”, he tells Inquirer.
The technology has a first-of-a-kind target cost of 15c a kilowatt hour with next-of-a-kind cost steadily coming down to 5c/kWh by the mid-2030s delivered to the customer end-user site. The key is mass production and Gallagher means business.
The heart of the Unity reactor was delivered to INL on the back of a Ford F-150 pickup truck. When complete, the whole package will fit into a shipping container. It has all happened at breakneck speed and if all goes to plan commercial deployment will start by 2028.
Aw, so the pond will have to wait until Xmas 2028 to place its backyard order, as the reptiles produced a snap of an assortment of mad Kind Donald heavies which gave the pond exceptional confidence in everything Lloydie was scribbling ... Bobby Gallagher with US secretary of the interior Doug Burgum, US energy secretary Chris Wright and US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on July 24. The Trump administration sees nuclear reactors as a key source of power for data centres and economic growth. Picture: UPI/Bloomberg
It was all mad King Donald, all systems go ...
Last month, Gallagher was posing with Trump in the White House as a pioneer of the nuclear future.
Unity Battery is a 1 megawatt microreactor that can run for five years without needing to be refuelled. It is easily transportable and can be run in series to power a single industrial facility, a ship, an island or a mine site, or be scaled up further to underpin a small city or a major data centre.
A fleet of reactors can be used depending on whether you need 1MW, 10MW, 100MW or 1000MW of power. It does not require water for cooling, can be buried underground, can replace gas to back up renewables and uses only a tiny fraction of the land needed for other power sources to generate the same output.
Gallagher’s company, Deployable Energy, boasts its microreactor has been designed to use standard fuels, materials and industrial processes already available at commercial scale. The result is a system that can be produced in volume, deployed quickly and operated reliably across a wide range of applications at what the company says will be a competitive cost.
It's a bloody miracle, and at this point the reptiles wheeled out an innovative montage of images, which managed to completely confuse and conflate what was being shown under a generic caption, A mobile nuclear reactor built in 150 days
The pond couldn't replicate the profound insights offered by the montage, but can report the images which quickly followed each other ...
After that, it was back to the central theme of the needs of AI...
The timeline from here includes full power operations under US Department of Energy authorisations at the INL in 2027, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval of a commercial licence in 2028, with 1GW of manufacturing capacity annually from 2030 and initial production facility essentially booked through 2035.
Gallagher says the company has more than $100bn in commercial interest.
Deployable Energy is not alone at the pointy end of a global race for nuclear that has taken on a new dimension with the advent of power-hungry data centres and artificial intelligence.
Having spent years making energy more expensive and our grid less secure, Australia is now faced with a surge in demand we cannot afford to ignore.
Energy planners everywhere are asking how to power data centres that can each consume the same amount of electricity as a small city and demand it without interruption. Australia is being targeted as a politically stable location to host mega data centres for the Asian region. It is a bet on the future that could define the nation, like mining before it, or see us left behind.
The Albanese government is embracing the future with caveats. It wants data centres to provide their own electricity by underwriting deployment of renewable energy projects. It is a big ask given the problems that federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has encountered in the existing energy revolution, where renewable energy and batteries backed by gas are expected to replace coal-fired power stations as they are forced out of business.
The reptiles quickly helped Lloydie change tracks, from nuking the country to tales of the urgent needs of AI ... The Goodman SYD01 Data Centre is a major 90MW digital infrastructure project being built on the former ABC television studios site in Artarmon in Sydney. Picture: Corbis via Getty Images
How Lloydie of the Amazon wept at the suffering of AI ... and how he loved to offer hope ...
There are slow planning and environmental approvals, rising construction costs and increasing pushback from local communities with environmental and social concerns. Energy users are told repeatedly that renewables are the cheapest form of energy available but savings in generation costs are being swallowed up by more elaborate networks and higher connection charges. The data centre industry worries it will not be possible to develop large-scale renewable energy projects on time. And even if data centres do agree to go with renewables, it is likely the power grid and data centres will be sweating on the same projects, not additional supply.
The federal government is facing pushback from state and territory governments as well as business. The Northern Territory has joined Queensland in rejecting Labor’s national green vision for data centres that mandates data centre operators to find new renewable energy supplies and pay grid expenses so costs are not passed on to consumers.
Queensland Treasurer and Energy Minister David Janetzki said this week while Queensland wanted to attract data centres, it was concerned about forcing uneconomic investment into the electricity system and raising household power bills.
Australia’s biggest data centre operators have warned Labor’s proposed AI power rules could prove difficult to meet. Major data centre developer AirTrunk has said there must be a level of flexibility to reflect the difficulty of perfectly sequencing new clean energy supplies with data centres that can be delivered in just two years.
It is not ideological, it’s technical. Data centre developers are big investors in renewable energy globally but they want backup.
In Australia, they are looking to the vast gas reserves in the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory for security. The NT government has met them with open arms to the dismay of environmental groups.
The NT government? What could possibly go wrong?
What Lloydie of the Amazon needed was an artist's impression which could set the NT on a magical journey to being the capital of the world, and the reptiles obliged in spades ... An artist's impression of the Beetaloo data centre, which could start the NT on its way to being the “data centre capital of the globe”. Picture: Jazz Pedder/Gabbert Design
A truly dazzling and splendiferous vision, up there with growing rice at Humpty Doo.
Mad King Donald and NT's Lia, what more could a pond correspondent want?
According to Greenpeace, the NT proposal “marks a dangerous escalation in the AI data centre industry’s expansion, which threatens to entrench fossil fuel infrastructure for decades and put immense pressure on the region’s fragile water resources while continuing to be unregulated”.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific head of climate and energy Joe Rafalowicz says: “This disaster proposal for a 2GW gas-powered AI data centre in the NT is a shocking example of the unchecked expansion of hyperscale data centres in Australia.” He says it is “more evidence for the urgent need for a moratorium on all new data centres until strong, binding regulations are put in place to protect our communities and climate.”
“While Beetaloo Energy and the NT government prepare to bulldoze ahead with this climate and water disaster, the Prime Minister is asleep at the wheel, promising to legislate a vague set of standards next year,” Rafalowicz says. “Next year is too late, and anything less than mandating data centres cover their own energy demand, and then some, with new renewable energy is not enough.”
Oh poo poo, alarmist greenies.
Listen to Lloydie of the Amazon, hearken unto his song ...
Which is why in the US the world’s biggest tech firms are investing billions of dollars restarting closed nuclear reactors, writing power purchase agreements with those still operating and funding what many hope to be the new era of nuclear, small modular reactors.
That story has been updated to include microreactors – essentially nuclear batteries – that are smaller again in scale but are quickly showing their potential.
There is another step change taking place in manufacturing. On July 22, the US Department of Energy put artificial intelligence at the centre of its nuclear build-out strategy, awarding $US60m ($85.4m) across three years to Prometheus, an INL-led project that will use AI to design, license, manufacture, construct and operate reactors.
Prometheus partner X-energy says the world is at the edge of one of humanity’s great technical evolutions. AI money is moving beyond the chat window and into the physical world.
The big nuclear investments involve a who’s who of innovation: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Google parent organisation Alphabet and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
Trump may have famously said “drill, baby, drill” but he is also betting big on AI and nuclear.
And whatever mad King Donald bets on, he always wins ... just ask the bromancer.
Besides, is there any better way to produce confidence in the reader, than to bring in that "meta"man, and the wedding in Venice man, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are central to Donald Trump’s AI and nuclear energy plans.
It was go, go, go with mad King Donald ...
Trump said “swift and decisive action is required to jump-start America’s nuclear energy industrial base and ensure our national and economic security by increasing fuel availability and production, securing civil nuclear supply chains, improving the efficiency with which advanced nuclear reactors are licensed, and preparing our workforce to establish America’s energy dominance and accelerate our path towards a more secure and independent energy future.”
A little more than one year later, the program is bearing fruit.
In June last year the US Department of Energy announced its new reactor pilot program to expedite testing of advanced reactor designs under the department’s authority. The target set by Trump was for three reactors to achieve criticality by July 4 this year.
One of the developers chosen was Deployable Energy, which was described as an Australian concept, now a Houston-based company developing the Unity Nuclear Battery. Deployable Energy was selected in April this year, a reactor was transported from Houston to INL in May and on July 1 the unit achieved full core criticality at INL, the third new US reactor to do so.
Since the breakthrough, Gallagher has been opening up about his journey and management style across the specialist nuclear media. Gallagher’s reactor is far from being developed in a back shed; he has assembled a team of leaders from venture-backed deep-tech energy start-ups, the commercial, research and naval nuclear sectors, traditional energy companies, the military, the US Department of Energy and national laboratories. His management skill is to get people to think outside the box, ask the right questions, prioritise repeatability and efficiency, and see nuclear as a production line product at scale.
“We combine entrepreneurial speed with deep technical and regulatory experience to solve one of the hardest problems in energy: delivering affordable, reliable power at scale,” Deployable Energy’s website says.
Deployable Energy was founded last year on a simple idea: nuclear energy should be a product, not a project.
“The modern US industrial base is built to manufacture products – repeatable, scalable systems that can be deployed quickly and affordably,” the company says. “We are building nuclear systems in the same way the energy industry builds everything else – through world-class engineering, manufacturing and supply chains that already operate on a global scale.”
Gallagher says Houston was chosen on purpose.
“Detroit, that means automotive. If I was to say Silicon Valley, that means software. If I was to say Taiwan, that means chips. Houston is all about energy infrastructure that’s deployable to sites. That’s what Houston does better than anywhere else in the world. That’s why we’re located right in the heart of the energy corridor where a good portion of the world’s energy infrastructure is design built, deployed, and ensures the lifestyle that we live right now,” Gallagher told one nuclear energy podcast.
A podcast! So it must be true!
The pond was dazzled by the dreaming and the dreamers, Deployable Energy chief executive Bobby Gallagher says nuclear energy should be a product, not a project. Picture: AFP
Lloydie of the Amazon wrapped it all up with a final gobbet that had the pond wild-eyed with excitement ... a startling pitch for nuking the country to make it safe for AI ...
Back in Australia, nuclear engineer Tony Irwin, technical director of Australian company SMR Nuclear Technology, has been monitoring the progress of the SMR program and says Deployable Energy has achieve a breakthrough success that represents another technology loss for Australia. He tells Inquirer SMR projects are finally making it to production and deployment.
The first of four GE Hitachi BWRX-300 SMRs is under construction at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington site in Canada. Each unit will generate 300MWe and the four units will power 1.2 million homes.
There are also plans for deployment of the BWRX-300 in the US, Finland, Sweden, Poland and Britain. Rolls-Royce, which has built all the reactors for British nuclear-powered submarines, has designed a complete nuclear power station and signed a contact with Great British Energy-Nuclear to allow work to start immediately on delivery of three Rolls-Royce SMRs at Wylfa in Wales, an existing nuclear site that has old shutdown Magnox reactors. Each Rolls-Royce SMR will produce 470 MWe.
Rolls-Royce is also deploying its SMR in the Czech Republic and signed an early works contract in April this year. Several other countries, including, Sweden are also interested.
The microreactor space is considered to be a game changer of its own. Irwin says microreactors “will be an economic option for strategic installations including data centres and for replacing diesel fuel to supply electricity, heat and other energy needs for remote communities, islands and mine sites in Australia”.
He is not surprised that it is an Australian leading the way but disappointed that there is another great missed opportunity for domestic manufacturing. The big question is: Will Australian learn from its mistakes and embrace the new frontier of nuclear technologies that can offer solutions to the obvious problems being experienced in the decarbonisation puzzle?
Gallagher says Australia’s bans are “misguided and a relic of misconceptions about nuclear power and atomic weapons”. He says it has been clearly demonstrated globally that nuclear power is one of the cleanest, safety and less environmentally impactful forms of energy. “The next generations of reactor technology will continue to build on that record, whilst reducing costs and construction lead times,” Gallagher says.
“It’s time to lift the ban, set appropriate regulations modelled off world-class nuclear regulators in other jurisdictions and allow the market to determine demand and Australia to enjoy the economic and environment benefits.”
AI offers new complexity but also a great opportunity to get with the global program. Small nuclear is a new frontier that was once considered too good to be true but now looks as if it finally could be an opportunity that is too good to miss.
Indeed, indeed, and it was purely by chance that this week Tom was all in on genius inventors and innovation and entrepreneurs and governments picking winners...
And this one's for Sharri ...
