Intelligence, targeting info and selling (no longer giving) weapons are all important support but sanctions is the really big one. The most recent round in particular has really bit into Russia's oil revenue.
Of course it would be absolutely disgraceful for the US to drop sanctions on Russia and have normal relations with it while it continued its invasion. But that's what the US voted for.
> Of course it would be absolutely disgraceful for the US to drop sanctions on Russia and have normal relations with it while it continued its invasion. But that's what the US voted for.
The reason US sanctions Russia is because the US has been pushing its oil insustry in Europe. For instance, EU tariff deals included buying a minimum amount of hydrocarbon products:
> As part of this effort, the European Union intends to procure US liquified natural gas, oil, and nuclear energy products with an expected offtake valued at $750 billion through 2028.
In that context, US sanctions on Russia serve a purpose which isn't solely helping Ukraine ; I don't see the US lifting these sanctions anytime soon.
I personally think Trump loves Russia and Putin and generally wants to do business with them. He has wanted a Trump Tower in Moscow for decades and probably still wants that to happen.
It could be but the US and EU have so far been unable to build commercial fission reactors without going 2x+ over budget in time and money. China is having success but even they are not projected to have nuclear account for more than single digit percentages of their generation.
Maybe SMR's, thorium, 4th gen, etc will work out, but maybe not.
The US and Russian Navies deciding to remain mostly petroleum-fueled is one of the strongest arguments against nuclear becoming very cheap: surely they would do it if it wasn't ruinously expensive, because it eliminates the national security risk of a petroleum blockade and simplifies at-sea logistics immediately.
I don't know much about militaries or nuclear reactors, but I know that reactors are used in some submarines and in some aircraft carriers -- situations where you want a vessel to to remain at sea for long periods of time without refueling, and weight is not a primary concern.
That's pretty niche, though. Think about trucks, tanks, aircraft, generators for outposts, etc. It might be cool if you could safely package a zillion nuclear reactors for those use cases, Terminator style, but I'd guess that reactors are a better fit for centralized, permanent power generation.
The Aircraft Reactor Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Reactor_Experiment, yielding 2.5 megawatts, was about two meters tall and one meter in diameter; the fuel was 15kg of U-235, but I think the reactor as a whole may have weighed several hundred kg. (It couldn't have been more than about 40 tonnes, just because no material would be dense enough, but I think it was much lighter than that.
Arleigh Burke class destroyers have 80MW of propulsion and displace 8300 to 9700 tons, compared to which the SSTAR's 500 tonnes is almost insignificant. So weight isn't an issue for ships, and weight doesn't get ridiculously high until you're down below the megawatt scale.
So, you may be right that existing proven reactors won't scale down to a single truck or tank. There isn't a known physical reason it's impossible, or even impossible to do safely, but it hasn't been achieved.
Probably you are right that many small reactors would be more dangerous, but warships exist so that they can go into dangerous situations. You have to weigh the risk of a reactor problem against the risk of being unable to fight because you have no fuel. And we've certainly seen that many militaries have little concern for sailor safety.
Despite all this, no navy has switched all their ships to nuclear fuel. The only explanation I can come up with is that it's unsustainably expensive.
Don't presume too much about the US Navy's fleet decisions. Using that same logic you could presume that smaller, aged and poorly maintained fleets are advantageous for naval supremacy since that appears to be the choice of the US Navy for a couple generations now.
Or you could presume that the complete inability to build a merchant marine fleet was also a strategic advantage!
It's not just the US Navy. It's also the Russian Navy, the French Navy, the Chinese navy of the PLA, the British Navy, the Indian Navy. If nuclear power were cheaper than oil, or anything other than much more expensive, at least one of those would have gone all-nuclear.
The US Navy doesn't build them, private companies do. None of the SMR companies that I am aware of have attempted to use designs from naval reactors. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they use highly enriched fuel which is a no-no for civilian reactors.
In any event, if your more general point is that naval reactors indicate its possible that SMRs can be built on time and budget, I don't disagree. It certainly is possible. NuScale was the furthest along of the SMR companies and had their project implode before it got off the ground. So, its also possible for them to crash and burn.
So, I'll stick with my classification of SMRs as "maybe it will work out, maybe not".
There is a similar idea called "community solar" in the US. It allows electric customers to subscribe to the output of solar panels on someone else's roof. This allows a developer to build a solar array on a large commercial building's roof that they rent.
I'm impressed! It didn't take many books for it to start suggesting other books that I liked and it showed me several solid choices I'm adding to my queue.
“I’d just become leader and I’m excited and President Trump’s there. And I look over at the Democrats and they stand up. They look like America,” he told Sorkin. “We stand up. We look like the most restrictive country club in America.”
Kevin McCarthy, former GOP House leader and Speak of the House.
Wouldn't making a quick circuit around the house before landing allow wires to be observed from multiple angles be enough?