We've recently heard more veiled threats from Putin about Ukraine being unable to pay for gas (thus presumably leading to new attempts at cutting them off), which suggests that Russia is getting itself ready to start a new crisis. That means two things:

1. the internal infighting between groups of powerful Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs for the control of unofficial Russian gas deliveries to Ukraine (more on this below) is still not conclusively settled, and requires "action" using official levers of State and interference with Gazprom's export deliveries through Ukraine;
2. Russia thinks it stands a better chance to focus European blame on Ukraine and, even more importantly, to get Europeans to buy off the Ukrainians (thereby increasing the available unofficial gas loot for the players involved).

While Russia's actions are not easily understandable when considered as those of a country, they are much easier to interpret rationally when you look at who the actual players behind the scenes are. Conversely, public European reactions which sound logical are, in fact, incredibly naive if you know the industry a bit and, given that the people involved are certainly not naive, they are other things at stake.

So let's try to make some predictions and unravel what's actually going on.

Originally posted on European Tribune. See also my full series of articles on earlier episodes of the Russian-Ukrainian crises here

This is the fourth part of a four-part guest post by Dr. Michael Dittmar. Dr. Dittmar is a researcher with the Institute of Particle Physics of ETH Zurich, and he also works at CERN in Geneva.

The accumulated knowledge and the prospects for commercial energy production from fission breeder and fusion reactors are analyzed in this report.

The publicly available data from past experimental breeder reactors indicate that a large number of unsolved technological problems exist and that the amount of "created" fissile material, either from the U238 → Pu239 or from the Th232 → U233 cycle, is still far below the breeder requirements and optimistic theoretical expectations. Thus huge efforts, including many basic research questions with an uncertain outcome, are needed before a large commercial breeder prototype can be designed. Even if such efforts are undertaken by the technologically most advanced countries, it will take several decades before such a prototype can be constructed. We conclude therefore, that ideas about near-future commercial fission breeder reactors are nothing but wishful thinking.

We further postulate that, no matter how far into the future we may look, nuclear fusion as an energy source is even less probable than large-scale breeder reactors, for the accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality.

(Links to 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd parts)

At the ASPO conference in Denver, October 2009, I had the good fortune to meet Stoneleigh, former editor of The Oil Drum Canada, who left the The Oil Drum crew with colleague Ilargi to set up The Automatic Earth where they publish stories, news and analysis of the unfolding financial crisis. I spent a couple of days chatting with Stoneleigh where she recounted her rather gloomy prospects for the immediate future of the global economy. The following interview is a summary of her analysis of the unfolding situation. Note that in a departure from convention, my questions are set in "blockquotes" to distinguish these from Stoneleigh's responses.

Stoneleigh, the world economy seems to be suffering from two great structural woes at present, namely stubbornly high energy prices that are linked to demand that is persistently ahead of the supply curve, and a level of debt that has destabilized the global finance and banking systems. Can you explain for us the scale and structure of this debt and to what extent write-downs and quantitative easing (QE) have solved this problem?

Even as we've been going through years of hand-wringing about security of supply, and about how Russia was an unreliable gas supplier, it comes out the European gas buyers are themselves increasingly refusing to pay the price that underpins the security of their Russian supplies, and are breaking their contractual obligations towards Gazprom, making Europe, erm, a less reliable customer... something that's likely to come and bite us in the near future:

European Energy Firms Fall Short in Gazprom Purchases

European energy companies, faced with weakening demand and plentiful lower-cost fuel supplies, have bought far less natural gas from Russia's OAO Gazprom this year than they are obliged to under long-term contracts -- setting the scene for a potentially damaging showdown with Moscow.