So, aside from the obvious nature of messing around with Nuclear generating station being an idiotic move. From a tactical move for Russia - clearly they want the generating station offline to cause further chaos in Ukraine and that it supplies 1/6 of the power I believe(?). Was the generating station fighting to say online / not surrender or did Russia just show up guns blazing?
It's clearly a tactically important source of energy for Ukraine.
Also - wouldn't it just be easier for Russia to destroy the substations nearby? I assume there would be some problems with all that excess power being generating if the substations were blown. The whole thing is pretty nuts.
I can't imagine being the ISO trying to balance the grid or ISO equivalent of the grid over there right now (amongst other impossible jobs/positions people are in Ukraine right now).
If the reactors are on, destroying any of the infrasture around it can be devastating. The reactors need external power to operate. If external power disappears, the reactors now need emergency power from diesel gen sets. If those fail due to any reason, the reactors will probably melt down - unless they have already been off for quite a while (~weeks would be necessary). If the reactors melt down, the VVER has both a core catcher and a containment. That's not bad and much better situation than Chernobyl. But other things may go wrong such as a pressure failure and potentially related control rod ejections that could cause the temperatures to rise and pressures to become higher than what the containment can handle.
The surrounding war environment, the stressed operators, etc mean that any of these failures are now more likely. It is reaonsable that external power will not be available, it is possible the gen sets will fail, it is possible the operators will do something stupid.
To put it simply, warfare is not a design basis accident for current light water reactors like VVER-800.
Yes, the power plants now need a stable supply of electric power or diesel for cooling in coming days, weeks and months as they have been shut off last night. A failure of cooling is what lead to the newclear disasters in Fukushima.
The chain reaction can be shut down in a matter of seconds. However, the reactor continues to generate a huge amount of heat for weeks afterwards. It's not as much heat as a fully-running chain reaction, but it's still enough to cause a catastrophe if cooling is not kept running - we're talking multiple megawatts of heating here. The cooling requires an external power supply. It was the failure of this external power supply that caused the problems at Fukushima.
There are newer reactor designs that are specifically engineered to be capable of cooling themselves on shutdown without an external power supply. However, most reactors in the world do not have that capability.
Your link supports the comment you are replying to; it says that after the reactor is shutdown, additional cooling is needed for some time, and that eg the Fukushima and Three Mile Island incidents both involved damage done by an inability to cool the reactors after they were already shut down.
No they are technically correct. In the reactor world "shut down" explicitly and specifically refers to chain-reaction-running mode. The reactors do still require active cooling for several days+ to avoid plant damage scenarios. Several comments on this page seem to not have a clear understanding of this difference.
Once the chain reaction is shut down - there is basically no way for the reactor to come alive (chain-reaction-wise) again on its own - not even if it's being bombed, shelled, etc. And run-away super(prompt)critical reactions are not even possible with this reactor design. These reactors are water-moderated - which means that water is used to slow down neutrons to increase their reaction probability. As the reactor heats up, the water gets less dense (even if it is still a liquid) making it a less effective moderator - this density decrease is enough to passively/automatically keep the reactor in a shut-down state. Residual decay heat from radioactivity of the fission byproducts post-shutdown is enough to damage the reactor internals for several days - hence the need for active cooling post-shutdown.
I've seen lots of crazy-exaggerated news reporting on how "bad" or "dangerous" this entire situation could be. It's not good, but neither is the war in Ukraine. It's not even remotely possible for this to be anything like Chernobyl, and I think unlikely to be nearly as bad as Fukushima (which in the grand scheme of the Tsunami - wasn't really that bad). In the war context, I don't think this nuclear plant situation is particularly notable beyond it providing a large fraction of Ukraine's power.
anything is possible in war. if Ukraine was on the brink of losing everything and they had nuclear weapons, would they not use them against Russia? that's the whole point. if your state is about to cease to exist, you are desperate. for now, the war has not reached this point. if Ukraine where to try to use nuclear material now they would lose allies. but you don't know what the war will look like in 2 weeks. so I don't think it's fantasy.
No? Considering the nuclear power plants are in Ukraine, and whichever way the wind blows, it will at a minimum impact Ukrainians. And then you can't know where it will end up - maybe Russia, maybe Germany.
yes, whether Ukraine would actually launch such a bomb is debatable. it's not like it would change the tide of the war, it would be mostly for revenge. war is very unpredictable. I wouldn't rule out anything.
If the Ukranians are willing to sacrifice everything for the independence, chances are, they will get their independence, nukes or not. At least as long as they keep getting support from the west. If Russia keeps getting thousands or tens of thousands of body bags back each year, for 10, 20 or 30 years, eventually, they will tire of holding on to the Ukraine.
The cost may be millions of Ukrainian lives, so this all comes down to how much the Ukranian people is willing to endure for their eventual independence.
Every country has its propaganda and lies, but they're generally couched in half-truths. It's truly remarkable how the Russian flavor of misinformation sounds just like a pathological liar making up wild bullshit that nobody could possibly take seriously. That's been a tradition for decades, as far as I know.
This is a deliberate part of KGB style propaganda. It's not designed to convince people of any specific lie, but rather so muddle things that people become cynical about knowing the truth period. There's a book on the topic where the title kinda tells the whole story: "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible"
With the internet and Google translate, you can easily go read for yourself. And it’s still pretty nutty with no western filter applied. The accidentally published victory unification speech is particularly crazy:
I think the gp was referring to the filter in your own brain, that was set up by watching western media.
The idea that you are somehow immune to this is unsustainable - I'm sure avid Putin fans feel the same, after all they have access to Google too.
It's just that we are privileged to live in a relatively free societies, where bias is self imposed groupthink as opposed to mandated by the government.
For an extreme version of this in action, you can see the early reporting in the American media of the Iraq invasion.
I was mostly referring to the filter outside the brain.
You are right that we also have filters inside our brains. But just like with the outside filter, we can make some efforts to get around them. Even if our efforts don't always lead to perfection.
To borrow your framing, collectively internal filters will manifest as emergent external filters. It can be considered emergent/systemic propaganda. Even the freest societies fall victims to this.
That's not at all to say we're doomed to be brainwashed; along what you're saying, with conscious awareness, effort, openness to reassess, and honesty (first and foremost to oneself) we can better ourselves and the social groups we're each part of.
Yes, I agree that it's pretty nutty. It's just that to actually verify that we have to do a bit more work, like you suggested; otherwise we might just be bullshitting ourselves.
It's certainly true for politicians too. Many politicians cherry-pick the facts that suit them best, but very few are so completely detached from reality as that guy was.
> It's truly remarkable how the Russian flavor of misinformation sounds just like a pathological liar making up wild bullshit that nobody could possibly take seriously.
IIRC, the correct term is disinformation, and I believe the idea (at least sometimes) is more akin to "jamming" than any kind of persuasion (e.g. encourage passivity because it's too much effort to sort out the truth from the lies).
The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth. And one of those (pravda) is a kind of a half-truth used to keep moving from the current situation.
Russians know they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever.
>The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth.
I looked into this, and found this blog post [1]. The comments are quite interesting, but the main post points out this isn't much different from English. In English we use synonyms for truth/true (e.g. authentic, factual, legitimate, etc) and lie (e.g. fabrication, falsehood, misrepresentation, disinformation) with different meanings too.
Maybe we shouldn't use vocabulary of a language to draw/imply further conclusions about a culture.
Pravda means truth. Pravda was also name of state journal. The half-truth is said as half-pravda. English has many words for lie too: misinformation, lie, untruth, false, deceit, deception, dishonesty, disinformation, distortion, evasion, fabrication, falsehood, fiction, forgery, misrepresentation, perjury, slander, tale. I got them from synonyms dictionary.
That does not say anything about English speaking people other then their language is rich and can express nuance.
English has a lot of synonyms, redundancy, alternatives, ways-to-say, and overlapping constructs. In that context, the many English words for lie is an uninformative truth. English has so many words for lie because English has too many words for everything.
Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, noted that people more easily believe colossal lies, totally out of whack with reality, exactly because, well, who would say such a wild thing if it were not the terrible truth?
But there's a real treath that he can become president again. The real problem is that there's big gap in how the democrats see the world vs how republicans see the world. From the outside it's really mindblowing how differently they see and interpret the world. And the same is happening all over the world.
When it comes to defense, republicans and democrats see the world similarly. It's the one topic which you could say there's no gap in their desires. Republicans and democrats place utmost value in the American hegemony.
That didn’t happen with Bush, who conjured up a premise with multiple lies in order to justify going to war. And then 3 years later, he got re-elected.
That was by far the most disappointing US election. Electing a bad president is clearly a risk of democracy, but re-electing a bad president, that's incomprehensible. And yet that was the only presidential election in decades where the Republican candidate got the majority of the votes.
> And yet that was the only presidential election in decades where the Republican candidate got the majority of the votes.
That election was 2004 of course. Reagan got 58.8% in 1984, so two decades prior (decades as you noted).
Obama got 52.9% in 2008. And prior to that for a Democrat? More than two decades prior, wherein Jimmy Carter barely scratched out a majority popular vote at 50.08% in 1976.
Lyndon Johnson of course got 61% in 1964. The monster that put us deep into Vietnam and wrecked the country got the highest popular vote percentage for the Democrats in the past century.
The two highest in modern US history, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon. What does it say about the people of the 1960s and 1970s? It says a lot of terrible things about their ability to judge character and make rational decisions.
I think parent actually meant plurality, at least that’s how I read it.
However these numbers are quite interesting. Some people attribute Nixon’s second election to his promise of withdrawing from Vietnam and one can easily blame the war for the problematic 1968 election for the democrats. LBJ was probably even gonna be the first sitting president to loose in a primary before he announced his non-bid.
I’m guessing the 1964 for election he was pretty much just riding the popularity of the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy. (Plus the war hadn’t escalated at this point).
Definitely a strong case for term limits. If Putin had left after 8 years, he would now be considered a great president. He wasn't perfect, but he stabilised the Russian economy after the bankruptcy of the 1990s.
He could have left a great legacy, but his addiction to power has become his ruin. And quite possibly that of Ukraine and Russia.
I mean… Trump was lying about how many electoral votes he got. It was easily verifiable. Also such a stupid lie because he did have enough electoral votes to win the election anyway. But still! He fabricated that number. He was also truly in pathological liar territory.
Also consider his insistence that his inauguration crowd was larger than Obama's, when the photos clearly showed that wasn't the case. It's a completely meaningless lie. He doesn't accomplish anything if people were to accept it as truth, and it was quite obviously at odd with reality, and yet he just kept going on about it.
That's not a strategic lie, that's a pathological lie. That's someone who simply cannot tell the truth.
No matter how much I consider Trump a dimwit liar, I can't completely shake off the other explanation, that of yesmen telling him whatever they thought he would like to hear. I suspect that in a position like that, even making up falsehoods is conveniently delegated. You don't lie, you just select convenient sources to parrot. Putin must have spent recent years in an even worse yesmen-bubble, the shift from him being considered dangerously competent to him being considered dangerously senile should really not come as surprising as it does.
I'll take the downvotes too. We had a president who idolized Putin and still praises him to this day. If we think this sort of thing can't happen here, or aren't clear eyed about the threat he and his enablers still pose, we are in even more danger.
Yes, propaganda and political lies is certainly not confined to Russia or backwater dictatorships. In America you also had that president's opponents concocting lies and peddling insane and baseless conspiracy theories for years about him colluding with Putin to hack the election and other such nonsense. That was even more infantile and simple than the propaganda that comes out of Russia.
Everything in the Mueller report was true. No republican has denied that, or come to any other conclusion in their committee reports. Trump was cleared in the impeachment not because of the contents of the report, but whether what happened technically constituted collusion, or whether republicans felt that convicting him was necessary for what he and his associates did in fact do.
This is what the last report from the republican majority senate intelligence committee wrote [0]:
> It is our conclusion, based on the facts detailed in the Committee's Report, that the Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process[,] and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modern era.
The Mueller report clearly states they did not find evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded or conspired with Russia to interfere with the election. That nonsense was all a conspiracy theory. For example Adam Schiff never had the "ample evidence" for it, despite being on the house intelligence committee. That was bald faced and repeated lie peddling this conspiracy theory. Unfortunately many fall for these "stolen election" conspiracy theories. Probably as a coping mechanism more than anything.
I know you're not responding in good faith, but I want to respond with actual quotes from the Mueller report, since this is on a public forum.
> "While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."
> "[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment."
> “Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” Mueller wrote. “The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”
> "the President engaged in a second phase of conduct, involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation."
You're the one not responding in good faith because I never said anything one way or the other about obstructing justice. That's clearly a far more complicated and nuanced question seeing as he was head of the executive at the time.
The idea he colluded with Putin to hack the election was always an utter baseless fantasy. There was no evidence for it ever. Not from Mueller, not from Schiff, not from 17 intelligence agencies. It was a conspiracy theory.
You ever wonder about people who fall for baseless conspiracy theories about stolen elections? How could they possibly fall for these politicians and other assorted nutjobs telling them the election was stolen, without ever providing the evidence? Dumb uneducateds! They're nothing like us enlightened intellectuals.
Your red herring arguments and whataboutism is noted. Stretching arguments about obvious ties to russia to being "election = stolen", while ignoring the actual 40℅ of the country who still believes trumps bullshit. I will also note that there were dozens of confirmed contacts between trump and Russia and you see the bromance still playing out to this day.
I'm clearly saying you didn't fall for the baseless idiotic conspiracy theories about Biden stealing the election or Trump colluding with Putin to hack the election, or being a "foreign agent". Not sure what you're all worked up about.
And I'm not talking about "obvious ties to Russia" whatever that means (everyone seems to have weird ties and uranium sales and gas company deals with Russia, Ukraine, etc). I'm talking about the delusional baseless conspiracy theory that Trump colluded or conspired with Putin to hack or otherwise influence the election. That was the conspiracy theory that so many were repeating and so so many gullible people fell for.
There were world-wide protests against that war [0]. You might consider that many of the people commenting here will have been involved in those protests, or are otherwise well aware that the justifications were a huge flight of fantasy. That doesn't mean that current news from the Russian media isn't also a huge flight of fantasy.
"Democratic" is used as a thought-terminating cliche. Just a few years ago Ukraine had an insurrection because of their election results and overturned the election to install a new leader. It's a corrupt kleptocratic state very similar to Russia, it's just more of the money comes from American interests than in Russia, and that upsets the Russian kleptocrats who don't want American influence in Ukraine.
Similarly, although Ukraine is clearly much more peaceful relative to Russia, there has been low-level conflict for years (including violence in the insurrection and fighting in the contested territories) and there are verifiable claims of them having committed atrocities.
All this can be true and Russia can still be engaged in morally (strategically may be a different story) unjustified aggression.
That's objectively and demonstrably false. The revolution (not an insurrection) didn't happen because of election results (the election was in 2010, the revolution started at the end of 2013 and continued into 2014). It started because the president decided to halt the integration of Ukraine with the EU and was peaceful until the government had decided to escalate.
And if you're talking about the Orange Revolution from 2004, that was peaceful all the way through, and lead to a second round of the election, not installing a new leader.
I agree that remembering these events is a crucial enterprise in a moment like this.
And, since both wars are based on bombastic lies, it seems consistent, given this act of remembering, to call the aggressor in each to account.
With these memories still fresh in terms of the cognition of the collective internet, perhaps now we can begin to get serious about a future in which the streams of fantasy which are reliably produced by hegemonic states (or mutually-assured-destructive states) are muted indefinitely, and the capacity for capricious warfare stemming from them dismantled.
This whataboutism has to stop. One bad thing doesn't excuse another. Would you suggest that it's OK to use nuclear weapons because the US used two of them in WW2? I hope not.
The invasion of Iraq was based on lies and this is terrible. The invasion of Ukraine is based on lies and it is also terrible.
Didn't read it as whataboutism. Was more a call to consider the "ridiculous stream of fantasy being spewed out of <country> leader and media" is rhetoric which is almost always applicable somewhere. The spewing's given some credit elsewhere, just not here because they've been pretty cleanly labelled as the enemy. Also maybe because it's batshit, but the people who are unsure of that will have a harder time having a discussion about it because so many people are jumping to emotional or canned responses.
One thing that I've seen is "preemptive whataboutism" - essentially, when Russian state media make a wild unreasonable claim, one that's not merely false but invokes a "WTF how and why would someone even think of something like that??" feeling, then sometimes it turns out that this is something that they are planning or doing at the time, and that is why they have considered that this is a plausible thing that others might do as well and can be reasonably accused of actually doing.
I also noticed for a long time, bad actors tend to project their behavior on to others to try influence negative public opinion toward their opponents.
Seems a popular strategy as it acts as a seed for those who don't question, it provides plenty of false arguments to raise when debating an issue.
I'm not sure I understand you. Of those two Ukraine is surely more likely to use a dirty bomb; purely because they don't have access to a traditional nuclear arsenal.
If Russia wants to use Nuclear weapons then they only need to enter the codes. That would probably be the final straw for western powers putting boots on the ground though.
Now Russia has control of the power plant and actual means to do it, if they decide that they want to depopulate that region a bit. Launching nukes might trigger a retaliatory strike, so I don't think that it was ever on the table.
They're easy to shut down, but when the reactor is first turned off the core is full of unstable isotopes that are byproducts of the fission reaction. Those isotopes continue decaying even with the reactor "off" until the become stable, and they put out enough heat to cause a meltdown on their own. This means the reactor needs active cooling for a couple of weeks until it reaches a safe state. That's what happened at Fukashima; the reactors were shut down when the earthquake hit, but then the tsunami disabled the backup generators that were powering the cooling pumps, and they weren't able to restore cooling before the core melted.
I did not know about that aspect of nuclear plants and in my non-expert view it would be a major point against nuclear plants in the discussion how to solve climate change (at least until we learn how to secure them in case of a war). Am I wrong?
EDIT: I would also like to ask if you can recommend some source where curious layman with no knowledge of physics could learn a bit more about this.
You are not wrong that it's a major point in the discussion, but even with that it can still be better than the alternatives for baseline production (the part that intermittent sources like solar and wind can't cover). Remember that coal power add insult to injury by continuously releasing radioactive pollution.
The new designs are built with the expectation that power can be cut off. The new design shut themselves off passively without any damage (that we know of) when the power is gone.
Seems to me like it should have been this way from this start. Catastrophic meltdown caused by power loss, no matter how many power backup systems there are should have been a non-starter. Basically requiring a 100% SLA, 6 nines not enough, with catastrophic consequences for failing to adhere to 100% uptime. That is scary as hell.
> I did not know about that aspect of nuclear plants and in my non-expert view it would be a major point against nuclear plants in the discussion how to solve climate change
It's a reasonable criticism to make, but I think it tends to be a bit overblown. Modern reactors have redundant layers of systems to prevent such a disaster from occurring. In the ~60 year history of nuclear reactors Fukashima is the only time this type of failure has happened (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were very different), and even then it was due to a cascading series of problems:
* In hindsight it was a really poor idea to locate a nuclear plant by the ocean in a region known for strong earthquakes and tsunamis.
* The backup generators flooded because they were located in the basements, another poor decision for an area at risk of tsunamis.
* TEPCO had additional generators and batteries on site within 6 hours of the earthquake, which was in time to prevent a meltdown, but they were unable to connect them to the plant's electrical system (I don't recall the details of why).
It's also worth mentioning that this is only a problem with large reactors. Smaller designs like those used in ships and submarines still have decay heat, but the reactor core is physically smaller so that it doesn't contain enough isotopes to cause a meltdown. Many nuclear advocates believe that we should be building more nuclear plants with smaller reactors for this reason as well as smaller reactors being easier to operate without getting into a dangerous state.
As far as reading, I highly recommend Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey [0]. It's very well written, aimed at a total layman, and covers basically everything that has gone wrong since we as a species started seriously messing with nuclear materials in the 19th century.
Russia most likely designed and built that reactor and the others in the country, back when it was part of the Soviet Union. I think it's safe to say they fully understand and are capable of operating nuclear reactors like it.
edit: Construction started on it in 1980. This is a Soviet designed and built reactor. Russia should have no problem maintaining it.
It is highly unlikely there are be nuclear scientists with that knowledge amongst the armed forces currently invading Ukraine. The type of reactor may be known but each reactor and its instruments, controls and protocols will be unique in some way. The only people who are qualified to run this reactor safely are the staff who work there every day.
It's not impossible, though. Russia seems to have pressed a lot of civilians into service. Ukraine recently captured an entire squad of school teachers.
Usually they have fail safes that will more or less immediately shut them down. On any reactor designed in the last 50 years, they pretty much default to a safe state, as they require power to keep the failsafes open.
It's not a problem if you can continue to run the cooling system for quite some time. If you bomb the plant or its connections to the outside, that might be a problem - just as in Fukushima, where a key cause of the disaster was that the cooling system could not be properly powered when required.
You realize that instituting a no fly zone means the US shooting down Russian aircraft, right? Which means a hot war between US/NATO and Russia. That is something that the US should absolutely not engage in, because the stakes at that point are the survival of the species, rather than just Ukraine.
We need to not normalize the idea of a no fly zone, no matter how gut wrenching watching this war gets.
Ukraine is already winning the war in all domains except air. Air support is all we need to have a clear win here. At this point NATO has a choice of engaging Russia at Ukrainian territory now, or at NATO territory later.
You're operating under an assumption that Putin will only use nuclear power if we cross some imaginary line. We analyze agreements, fine print, war conventions. Those things don't matter to him. If he feels he is losing this war he will threaten nuclear weapons anyway. He may threaten it if he doesn't get exactly what he wants. We need to stop normalizing the idea that there is some holy line which is we just stay away from bad things won't happen.
Putin just moves the line wherever he wants and you will keep dancing around it. This naive thinking really needs to die already.
As abhorrent as it sounds, if the Russian government authorizes use of nuclear weapons, it might only be exclusively to get Ukraine to surrender and end the war on Russian terms. I don't think their designs will be to go nuclear on rest of Europe.
Nuclear salami doesn't work on NATO territory, so we can assume that is an unlikely scenario... But, hey, what do you know... if Putin is really as unhinged as the Western media claims him to be. As for me, I can't bring myself to trust the Western media in the times of war. Not after the farce that was WMD.
A no-fly zone is no justification for nuclear escalation. Internationally, the only justification for a nuclear attack is in retaliation to another nuclear attack. That is it.
Putin has made it clear that he will also launch a nuclear attack in case of an "existential war", which means a war where Russia itself is being attacked with the purpose of conquering or destroying it.
A no-fly zone is not that. There is no reason for Russia to escalate to nuclear, except for Putin's vengeful ego. Because everybody knows that if Russia goes nuclear, it would be the end of Russia. Everybody in the nuclear chain of command knows this. Even if Putin is actually insane enough to order a nuclear attack (he might be, I don't know), anyone of any competence in the military will ignore those orders, because it would end their country and kill their family. (Although you could ask whether there is anyone of competence left in the Russian military; Putin seems to replace competents with loyalists, and the incompetent execution of the attack on Kiev doesn't inspire much confidence here.)
And if Putin's vengeful ego will make him order a nuclear attack, then losing this war will probably do that anyway, whether or not NATO or EU had anything to do with it. And there is no way Putin can win this war. Ukrainians have made clear that they will continue to fight, no matter what. If Kiev falls, they will continue to fight. Any city that Russia takes, will be Ukrainian again the moment they leave. For Ukrainians, there is no surrender possible to a man who wants to enslave them. If this war continues, it can only become a massacre. Putin would have to kill every single Ukrainian, and I'm starting to believe that he would. It would be another holocaust.
> A no-fly zone is no justification for nuclear escalation.
Not directly, no - but by induction, probably.
NATO fighter jets attacking Russian aircraft & SAM sites would likely be used by Russia to justify strikes against the airfields those NATO planes operate from. So then you have Russia attacking airfields in NATO countries. Already that's terrifying because you have missiles launched by Russia flying at, say, Germany - and you don't know until they hit if they're nuclear, chemical, conventional, or what. Next step you probably have NATO counterstrikes on Russian land. That puts you right on the edge of nuclear scenarios very fast. No world leaders should even remotely be considering going there.
> Putin has made it clear that he will also launch a nuclear attack in case of an "existential war", which means a war where Russia itself is being attacked with the purpose of conquering or destroying it.
Are you sure about that, to the point of risking the continuity of the species and all of our modern civilizations upon that? If one can claim that the Jewish population in Ukraine is actually Nazis and have many of their citizens believe it even as the economy is collapsing, i doubt that justifying even greater crimes against humanity or other horrible actions is out of the question.
It breaks my heart to see that bullies like Putin are allowed to largely get away with what's going on (apart from support for Ukraine by the international community, though that's essentially funding a proxy war and civilians and the culture at large will still suffer immensely), but you also have to understand the reluctance of other countries to escalate.
And to prevent anyone dismissing the above arguments due to my biases towards the western perspective, i've seen people on /r/russia attempt to justify their military's actions by recalling past actions of western regimes. Just to be clear, i condemn all actions like this, regardless by whom they're perpetuated: two wrongs don't make a right. Humanity should learn to talk, though i fear that there are irreconcilable differences as well.
I absolutely do understand the reluctance to escalate, and I share it. I don't want that war to escalate at all; I want to de-escalate. Away from bombing civilian targets.
And I understand that western countries are reluctant to impose a no-fly zone out of fear that Putin has gone insane and might resort to nuclear escalation, but I think the risk of him resorting to nuclear escalation already exists if he can't have his way with Ukraine. And there are a lot of Russians who strongly disagree with this war and would probably support a no-fly zone.
I fully admit that if Putin has indeed gone nuts and isn't merely playing games, then we have to trust the Russian military in control of the missiles to do the right thing, but I think that trust is also warranted; many Russian soldiers already don't want to fight, and I'm sure the more competent commanders are well aware that a nuclear attack would be suicide.
> And I understand that western countries are reluctant to impose a no-fly zone out of fear that Putin has gone insane and might resort to nuclear escalation
No, the fear is that Putin is basically sane and operating under something like normal great power expectations despite his crimes of aggression, and thus will not attack NATO countries for fear or nuclear retaliation, but will escalate against NATO countries if they intervene directly against him, potentially and quickly leading to nuclear war.
If they thought Putin was insane, the marginal risk between aiding Ukraine and intervening directly would be less, not more.
Putin has never claimed that the Jews in Ukraine are Nazis.
He is claiming that the Neo-Nazi units of the Ukrainian military operating in the south of the country, who harbor Nazi tattoos and whose flags represent the Black Sun and the rune used as the symbol of the "Das Reich" SS division, are probably Nazis. The Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant mentioned, in his manifesto, that he had visited those guys.
Last year a UN resolution was motioned to condemn Nazism and Neo-Nazism. Only two countries voted against: the United States and Ukraine.
This doesn't justify any war of aggression, of course, but you cannot pretend that there is no Nazi problem in Ukraine either.
Of course he is not claiming that the Jews in the government in Kiev are Nazis, because that would be absurd, but it's pretty clear that they are tolerating Nazis in the military for very cynical reasons (they're actually very effective fighters and are employed to fight the separatists in the Donbass region).
We absolutely need to keep pushing for a no-fly zone and enforce it. This is now the world's war, and has reached far beyond the politics internal to Russia and Ukraine.
> We engaged in plenty of proxy wars during the Cold War, we never went direct.
In fact, we went direct fairly regularly, but only in circumstances where we (or they, or, in a few cases both) maintained superficial (not always really plausible, as both sides would often protect the fiction to avoid escalation) deniability.
That is why, for instance, radio intercepts of North Korean pilots in the Korean War showed they tended to switch from Korean to Russian a lot under stress.
Just one nuclear reactor can be used to create continent wide Red forest. Chornobyl disaster was just an incident without evil intent. Small fraction of nuclear fuel was released into atmosphere. With evil intent, much larger percent of nuclear fuel can be turned into thin dust and released into atmosphere. Larger reactors contain much more nuclear fuel. With evil intent, much more radioactive elements, such as radioactive iodine or radioactive noble gases, can be breed in reactor before blow up. With evil intent, safety systems can be disabled to produce maximal amount of dangerous elements. Depending on time given for preparation and technique used, it can be from 1 Fukushima to 10k Chornobyls. If NATO will give initiative to Russians, they can blow up reactor in good weather, so RF will not be affected, but EU will gone.
In the meantime I fear he is indeed that crazy. He repeatedly stated that his goal is to wipe out Ukraine at any costs. He is a like a little child that doesn't get his way and then blindly hits at everything in his reach.
Russia is desperate to deter EU/USA from involving itself more in the war, and the only way it can do that is by treating to escalate to nuclear war.
But that threat is only effective if people actually think that you will do it, so they must play this so that they seem crazy enough to start a nuclear war.
It's a bit like someone blackmailing you for money for something illegal you did together, only way to get you to pay is to show that they are really willing to expose your secrets, even if they might be exposed also. And once you believe them and start paying they will continue to demand money from you.
What does crazy mean? Irrational? I don’t think so. He is currently following the Nash equilibrium strategy for fighting a war with a non-nuclear power.
Edit: by your terminology I would consider Ukrainians to be crazy. This a good thing and the reason why I’m rooting for them. They’re the underdog. The rational thing for them to do was to capitulate as soon as the invasions started. It takes a “crazy” level of conviction to the do the irrational thing here.
No, capitulation would be irrational, because it would mean they would be controlled and enslaved by Putin. Ukraine has lived under that yoke before, and will do everything possible to prevent it from happening again. There is no surrender possible for them, and that's why Putin cannot possibly win this war.
The only rational response to that would be a nuclear attack on Moscow. Likely, though, he just wants to make you think he’s that crazy. Madness is a major component of MAD.
Indeed. A responsive deterrent is only a deterrent if you believe the other person will absolutely, 100%-of-the-time, without-blinking-an-eye execute the strike.
If you think they might not, because ethics and morals, then the deterrent's value is discounted by your percentage of doubt.
I know I'm steelmanning like a crazy person right now, but a valid reason for Russia to seize those power plants might be to prevent Ukrainians from using them as huge dirty bombs in a desperate last strike.
Why would they dirty bomb their own land? If anything it's a reason to have already taken some materials offsite to dirty bomb Moscow later. Or for the invaders to threaten dirty bombing if they're about to be driven away (like they're already doing with their nuclear arsenal).
Nah. They just want control of the power. It's a lot of leverage, and they want to take over the country, so they will need it.
The Ukrainians are fighting for their own land. I don't think that there's a single one of them that would deliberately cause another Chernobyl (remember that they have some experience with what happens when reactors go kablooey).
But they seem to be quite persistent, in not just just rolling over and letting the Russians have their way. I suspect that they've got plenty of other nasty little surprises in store.
One of the things that the last 50 years' worth of guerrilla wars has been, is an object lesson on how to do asymmetric warfare against technologically-advanced, and overwhelming armies.
I suspect that every military in the world has been taking notes.
> They just want control of the power. It's a lot of leverage, and they want to take over the country, so they will need it.
If they are going to “find” evidence to support Putin’s claim of an offensive Ukrainian nuclear weapons program supported by the US, presumably it will be at one of Ukraine’s actual nuclear reactors.
While it's not a hard limit on propaganda, actually having physical control makes a story about such a find more plausible.
> It seems awful transparent, when they do this “false flag” stuff, but I think they are playing to a domestic audience.
I think the US managed to get and share enough intelligence to forestall most effect of the false flag stuff they wanted to use for international justification, leaving them with basically “But NATO...” on that front.
At the same time, the solid international opposition and the sanctions impact make the domestic propaganda front more critical, and there's a lot more that they can do on that front given the degree of control they have over domestic information channels.
The real-time visibility of the domestic propaganda probably further aggravates the international situation, but I think they probably have written that off except direct intervention, which they think, probably correctly, is deterred by their nuclear arsenal.
its not out of the question, especially since resistance in its very nature becomes more decentralized and dirty the second the government is weakened or falls.
Take a place like syria, it went from a centralized government to a heap of insurgencies and many sides killing people en-masse.
If anything though, that's Russia's goal. You invade a country you create insurgencies and those insurgencies will be much more evil in character than the government Russia is intentionally destroying.
Ukraine has 4 working nuclear power plants plus Chornobyl. Also, Ukraine has some nuclear facilities left from USSR times or freshly built. Ukraine has more than enough nuclear material to build dirty bombs or nuclear warheads.
For example, China Nuclear Corporation tries to buy Russian part of nuclear fuel facility almost built in Smolino[0], central Ukraine.
someone elsewhere in this thread wrote that bombing a nuclear plant was considered a war crime, if this is on video, will it likely be used in the current UN investigation of Russian war crimes?
They already commited a lot other of war crimes in past 9 days, it doesn’t really matter for Putin. It seems he has nothing to loose and until his people will stand against him, he will just continue “according to the plan”.
This has been a real reckoning for me, as somebody who has historically been very pro-nuclear.
Quite simply, humanity is too good at screwing things up to harness such a fundamentally powerful and dangerous source of power. It requires a commitment to long lasting peace and stability that we're just not capable of.
This touches on why I think humanity will not survive for much longer. Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat, and yet it continues to be more or less ignored. Vast swathes of the population believe that their egos can determine reality, no matter the actual physical reality they so hubristically ignore.
> we’re not capable of
I don’t think so, either. This sentiment tends to be met by the techno-futurists on this site with swift downvotes, though, so is not a popular one to espouse here. Nevertheless I believe it to be true based on the evidence at hand: humanity is too short-sighted to prevent its own doom.
I believe nuclear power is essential to the survival of humanity. I also think you are likely correct: humanity cannot be trusted with nuclear power. If true, this is yet another data point against our survival.
Not saying you’re wrong, but espousing the idea that “humanity is too short sighted” is just as daft as saying “we are definitely going to colonise the universe”. It’s not particularly helpful, you’re reasoning more on emotion than fact (we’ve gotten this far) and most of all you’re talking as if this is something you or I cannot change. I think that’s why you get downvoted. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable opinion you hold, but it’s not a very constructive outlook. And HN is full of people who want to make things better, not sit on the sidelines pronouncing doom. If you see a problem, work to fix it. People can and do change the direction of humanity.
If we can make energy storage simple and cheap enough I do not see why nuclear power would have any upside left except maybe for when traveling outside the solar system.
Regarding survivability of humanity I have similar fear but my current hope is that while weapons will continue to be more attainable their relevance might diminish. Why fight your neighbor if you have everything you need? But warlords create a problem of their own because they seem to exist to attain superiority for its own sake.
If we can make energy storage simple and cheap enough
If you're thinking of big Tesla Powerwall-style batteries, that just kicks the problem ahead by a few years or decades.
The materials needed to make those batteries are finite. They will become "the new oil" in N years.
Energy storage is going to be a big part of any sane energy future, but it's going to have to make heavy usage of non-battery means: giant flywheels? Pumping water? I don't know.
You're right that the current state of battery tech is woefully inefficient for any kind of grid-level storage.
But energy can be stored by pumping heated water to deep wells in the bedrock for example or you can use excess power to generate hydrogen and feed it back to the grid via fuel cells when needed. All of this is doable, but also slow to build and currently expensive.
What percentage of batteries are actually recycled? How much energy does recycling them take? What toxic byproducts are produced as part of the recycling process? What will future demand for batteries be, and how long will our supplies of lithium etc. last? Who controls the lithium supplies?
This is not an argument against recycling batteries, by the way. Chemical batteries are a big part of the future, and we should recycle them. But let's not be glib about any of these choices.
> Why fight your neighbor if you have everything you need?
Clearly this line of logic is not working, seen in Ukraine. At some point there is a person with enough power who wants to fight just because they can. Essentially humanity is at mercy of random power-hungry sociopaths to not bomb the nuclear power plants.
Are you so sure you're not yourself trapped in an irrational thinking loop?
Global warming is not a civilization-ending threat. Even nuclear war is not a civilization-ending threat, outside a few places in the Northern hemisphere. I could be wrong about both of these claims. But you could be as well, and you're taking an extremely pessimistic view based on what you know, which is not the whole picture.
We have quite some understanding that a mayor nuclear war will cause nuclear winter, by generating huge amounts of smoke at high altitudes which will block the sunlight.
We also know that it causes an extinction event, since it was one of the effects of the K-t extinction event 60 million years ago. It is the one that killed the dinosaurs, and many more: A huge number of species, including almost any large land animals, dies. It is unlikely that homo sapiens would survive this time.
How are these things not a civilization ending threat? Nukes can literally kill everything and global warming, if unchecked, will probably do the same long term.
it's not the nukes itself that would kill. it's the nuklear winter. with highly reduced sunlight this planet will become a freezing hell. no plants -> no food
The nuclear winter calculations by Sagan et al noticed that some fuels create more problematic smoke than other fuels. A lot of trees and wood structures would be ignited in a nuclear war, but the smoke from those fires falls out of the atmosphere relatively quickly compared to smoke from burning oil tanks, which Sagan et al said would contribute most of the cooling effect.
Then Saddam lit thousands of oil wells on fire as a big fuck-you to the miltary coalition arrayed against him, more oil than would be set on fire by any nuclear war. The cooling effect was detectable, but hardly serious.
There are the typical threats (which assume society remains more or less stable) such as ecosystem collapse leading to food shortages etc.
Then the non-typical threats. It is hard to predict what an unstable society will do, and some of those choices could be civilization ending.
We've built an extremely fragile massively interdependent system. It is conceivable that the US power grid could go down, and due to supply chain issues could not be restored in < 5 years. Unlikely, yes, impossible, hardly.
Is that enough to end civilization? How would we distribute food, assuming we have it?
Yeah. Across the universe, what percentage of advanced species managed to harness nuclear power and not end themselves by nuclear energy, directly or indirectly?
I can relate. I've been pro nuclear my entire adult life, but in more recent years have added a lot more hesitations and conditions to that. Fukushima put me onto a similar thread of thinking. If there were any society and government you'd expect to have sober thinking and solid engineering around nuclear, it'd be Japan, let the way TEPCO and the Abe administration behaved in the opening stages of the emergency was quite shady.
That gave me pause for thought that our governments and institutions just might be up to the task of running something like nuclear. If you understand the physics and engineering, then nuclear done right is a no brainer. I have less faith in us doing it right that I did in the past.
Add to that the huge capital costs, and the trendlines in renewables + storage capital costs... it's hard to be enthusiastic about anything nuclear that doesn't fundamentally change the economics. And so far every attempt at that (eg SMR) has failed rather definitively.
Just when I was ready to abandon my anti-nuclear stance and ready to accept nuclear power as transitional technology before we can transition to fully sustainable energy.
Humanity is fine, just some parts are quite far ahead of others. We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism. There will be some slides backwards as people in difficult situations value their opinions and risk aversion more than others’ freedoms, and there are plenty of places where people are just fine with their autocrats continuing to rule.
Progress, for the most part, can’t be given.
It is hopeful that Ukraine is having some real success fighting back and for the most part without an external force coming in and trying to do it for them.
>The desire for power might be baked into humanity at a deep level.
I think we confuse the direction of causality a bit here. People in power tends to be those that want power.
To get a powerful person you only really need one person who wants power. I think it's a false conclusion to think that people in general seek power.
It is, but the reckoning for me is how a single dictator among billions could make so much harm. So it is not enough that humanity is 99.9999% fine. We need fail-safes for things going terribly wrong, and in this particular scenario, having an autonomous colony outside of Earth or underground on Earth could be one such.
It's not that nuclear is easy or perfect. But until we scale up renewable energy by orders of magnitude, or somehow scale down demand, nuclear is the least-bad choice by many measures.
It is a very costly choice. We don't know how to store waste securely. We don't know how to process the waste efficiently and somewhat without it being an ecological disaster. We don't know how to extract and process nuclear 'fuel' without it bei g an ecological disaster as well. Just because the atom doesn't produce smoke at the plant doesn't make it an alternative.
Additionally there is the whole thing about the dangers of an accident and the cost for insurance against it. The cost of building and maintaining a somewhat secure reactor and the later cost of dismantling it and storing the additional waste.
Nearly all these costs for externalities were not factored into the price of energy. Calculating in all these costs mskes renewable energy look more than interesting. And also makes the question of storing excessive energy an interesting case. But governments/lobbies argue for cheap (read subsidized) nuclear, while not factoring the same subsidiaries into energy storage for renewables.
Investing into the future with a broad renewable energy and storage infrastructure program could ensure not only less dependency on Russia (for oil or gas) but also have a positive impact on the topic of climate change.
On the other hand. The German/European dependency on Russian gas and Russias dependency on the money from the sale of said gas was done to reduce the risk of war. The idea being that both sides could loose too much in the case of war and that would act as a deterrent. Even during the height of the Cold War Russian gas flowed towards the western world (aka Europe/Germany).
Additionally there is the whole thing about the
dangers of an accident
Sure, let's talk about that.
- As a species, we've been running hundreds of nuclear reactors (440 currently) for a while now.
- Their cumulative track record is (very roughly) "one Chernobyl every 25 years."
- The cost of a Chernobyl-scale incident is that it renders a region uninhabitable and kills several hundred people.
- With plants getting safer and safer, we might reasonably expect the risk to be more like "one Chernobyl every 50 or 100 years" for modern plants.
- Waste storage is obviously a challenge. The US has apparently produced enough nuclear waste "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." (64,000 metric tons)
That is steep but manageable.
Relative to fossil fuels, this is less-bad by orders of magnitude. It is regrettable (to put it laughably mildly) that the Fukushima and Chernobyl regions are no longer inhabitable, but fossil fuels have pushed us to the point where everything near the equator is going to be uninhabitable soon.
As for the waste issue, again, compare it to the alternatives. 64,000 cumulative tons of nuclear waste in America's history versus 6,500,000,000 tons of CO2 emissions last year. Obviously a ton of nuclear waste is not directly comparable to a ton of CO2 emission, but at least nuclear waste can be collected and sequestered. It is a local problem, not one that irrevocably poisons the entire planet.
Yeah, green energy sources are better than nuclear, for sure, and maybe fusion will save our butts eventually. But we need energy in the meantime. We should use the least-bad thing until we get something great, and nuclear is the least-bad option by such a ridiculous margin that it's not even funny.
> The cost of a Chernobyl-scale incident is that it renders a region uninhabitable and kills several hundred people.
There are quite a few interesting numbers regarding Chernobyl:
31 deaths, for example, is an official figure. But the credits for the TV series also state that estimates of deaths would vary between 4,000 and 93,000 victims.
A bit more about the numbers and some additional estimations:
The environmental organization Greenpeace estimates the total number of dead as a result of the Chernobyl accident at 93,000.
Kate Brown, a professor at MIT, considers up to 150,000 deaths realistic for Ukraine alone.
The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) says Chernobyl caused 50,000 to 100,000 deaths and up to 900,000 disabled.
34,499 rescue workers died, according to the Ukrainian Commission for Radiation Protection. However this figure is considered to be wrong because there is usually no such precise information on this scale. So the number just seems to be doctored to look more precise than is possible at estimations like these.
So now we can pick and choose to support our ideology. I don't pick and chose, but state that there are quite a few nuclear reactors that sit in areas way more densely populated with massively more inhabitants in the zone of imminent danger.
So any extrapolation from Chernobyl numbers (whichever one selects) would need to factor this into their argument imho.
Edit: One question ==>
> Waste storage is obviously a challenge. The US has apparently produced enough nuclear waste "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." (64,000 metric tons)
Does this number include the parts of the reactor buildings being contaminated?
This is indeed quite worse than the parent suggested, and I agree with your numbers.
I am curious, though, to how many people die due to the normal, continued operation of coal plants (both from mining and from the plant's actual operation). Is that something we can quantify with a reasonable degree of accuracy (like to a rough order of magnitude)?
Because even if we have a Chernobyl every 25 years that kills 150k people and gives another million some sort of disability, we have to acknowledge that operating coal plants -- as a "normal" part of their operation -- kills people too. I don't know if they are better or worse than the "amortized" 6k/year killed by nuclear in our estimate here. But it's certainly not zero.
And beyond that, burning fossil fuels destroys ecosystems, causes extinction of various animal species, and, if we do not arrest the affects of climate change, will kill millions of people due to its various effects. (Arguably, this has already killed lots of people during extreme weather events linked to climate change.) Maybe 150k people dead every 25 years in a nuclear disaster is, unfortunately, a "bargain" in comparison.
If we could scale up renewables at the same rate we could scale up nuclear, then it'd be a no-brainer: choose the former. But it's not clear that we can meet our energy needs with renewables today, even if there was a giant, global push to go fully renewable on a short time scale. Maybe it's better to risk nuclear power incidents in the medium term than continue to vomit fossil fuel byproducts into the atmosphere. But of course the general public will never make this kind of decision rationally; ultimately most of these are political decisions.
I dug a little deeper for those interested. In Germany there are currently reactor being demolished. None is done, so the numbers are still estimates.
For a 1.3MW reactor block the amount of highly contaminated material will probably be in the range of 3000 to 5000 metric tons.
For the US with around 96 active reactors (2020) this would imply something (back of a napkin calculation) 280,000 to 470,000 metric tons of additional waste on top of burned nuclear fuel. Depending on the peculiarities of the reactors and so on. I know there are error margins.
Highly contaminated material that needs to be secured for thousands of years.
This is a multi generational cost factor for our generations convenience. For the ability to burn electricity like there is no tomorrow.
Today the lower half (poorer half) of US population is living a live that would enable the US to reach Paris Climate goals. The same applies roughly to most western/northern countries.
People like me in the upper income half are the culprits so to speak (statistically speaking).
It would be catastrophic but much more localized. Fallout from Chernobyl went around the world several times, poisoning most of the humans alive or being made at the time (not to mention the rest of the biomass)
Do you have any kind of source for this? As far as I am aware, estimates for deaths based on thyroid cancers are ~160 [1]. Not 'thousand, just 160 – you claim is off by five orders of magnitude. Estimates for the total death toll are up to 60000 if you assume the linear no-threshold model [2], so might be much lower in reality.
[2] The model assumes that any amount of radiation is harmful and estimates the harm of low doses as a corresponding fraction of the harm of large doses. Empirical evidence is unclear, at best, but it functions as worst-case estimate.
How about the 2009 epidemiology study that estimates > 900,000 dead by 2009 with no end in sight? Quoting from a summary (easy to find the original):
> In 2009, the New York Academy of Sciences published a book Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. A team of European scientists led by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, assembled over 5,000 research studies, most written in Russian and not previously published.
> The results were staggering. Yablokov’s team estimated that just in the first 20 years after the Chernobyl meltdown, some 986,000 deaths attributable to it occurred, many in parts of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The percent of children living in these areas considered in good health plunged from 80% to 20%. Rates of certain cancers soared, including childhood thyroid cancer in Ukraine (20 times higher) and Belarus (200 times higher). Rates of disease in covering many organs in the body all increased in areas closest to Chernobyl.
> Yablokov’s team indicated that the number of casualties would continue to grow, well after publication of the book.
Thank you, that is indeed a source and I have raised my estimate of the probability larger casualties slightly. (For the record: above excerpt is from an article in the online magazine CounterPunch [1], which itself refers to the 2009 book [2].)
However, its methodology and rigour have been criticised [3]. As I am not an expert in this area I cannot evaluate the source directly, but several general heuristics apply. The source is a single book. (I am aware that the book claims to rely on numerous non-english sources, but I do not believe that they make the same claims.) The book relies on observational epidemiological data, which is generally hard to get right, and dose-response curves seem to be not analysed (seeing a relationship between doses and effect sizes is a good way to exclude spurious correlations). Finally, since the article mentions Yablokov's prior occupation I will also note that he founded and lead the Soviet chapter of Greenpeace, an organisation with a strong anti-nuclear position.
So I do not think that this is strong evidence. (But as I said earlier, I do currently consider it weak evidence.) In any case, the book claims one million deaths, not multiple millions, and only a fraction of those is attributed to thyroid cancer.
You're cherry-picking negative responses from the wikipedia article, as opposed to the following:
> The IAEA/WHO have often sought to justify their dismissal of eastern European epidemiological studies by citing questionable scientific practices: but epidemiology is not an exact science, and the same shortcomings exist in western studies uncriticised by the IAEA. The IAEA also point to shortcomings with pre-Chernobyl Soviet cancer registries, but cancer registries in western countries had similar issues at that time.
Indeed, where is the criticism for the IEAE and WHO applying a very selective "conservativism" about epidemiological research, much like big tobacco and DuPont? They're the reason nuke fanboys make risible claims like "< 100 people died because of Chernobyl" and don't get laughed out of the room.
Pointing out that the author was affiliated with Greenpeace without noting the systemic bias of nuclear organizations against epidimiological data is questionable.
> Fallout from Chernobyl went around the world several times, poisoning most of the humans alive or being made at the time [...]
> Not at a dangerous level, say more than eating a banana.
Born 1986 in Germany and I got a rare metabolism illness that only ~2000 more people have, all born around June/July/August in 1986 in Western and Middle Europe with some exceptions distributed around as late as born in September and October. But the Spring of 1986 was probably just a famous year for pregnant women eating exceptionally many bananas I guess?
At least I agree that dams killed more people than that specific event. But wait till you see the numbers for fossil fuels ...
Yes, I brought up the dam since hydropower is something that's typically seen as good; but still has the potential for big disasters. (I totally think hydropower is good on balance.)
Fossil fuels, and especially coal, have worse impact in total but they are typically more diffuse. So I left them out of the discussion.
> In 1975 the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam and other dams in Henan Province, China caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history. The disaster killed an estimated 171,000 people and 11 million people lost their homes.
Are you saying that 180 (old) people who refuse to leave out of 50000 who were displaced are a representative sample that should show us that living in a fallout zone isn't a problem?
I hope you realize how bad of a comparison that is. If a dam would break and flood some area it would kill people but after a year the chaos will be cleaned up and things will be back to normal.
If the same thing happens to a nuclear power plant the area can't be lived in for millions of years.
Living secluded in a big exclusion zone with ~180 other people, no stores or infrastructure and higher levels of cancer is definitely something we should strive for.
The lack of stores and infrastructure comes from lack of other people, which could be fixed.
I'm not sure if there is a higher level of cancer. But I grant you that we can assume that.
It's not pretty, but it's also not something that prevents people from living. Remember when everyone used to voluntarily increase their risk of lung cancer by crazy amounts? Back when everyone smoked? Civilization still persisted.
Actually, the estimates for when the region will be habitable range from 3 centuries to 20 000 years. [1] "Millions" is off by several orders of magnitude.
I used to be in in favour of nuclear. Nuclear works if you can guarantee political stability for 100+ years, but here in South Africa we can't even keep our coal plants running, nevermind guarantee political stability for 28 years (last year in June we suffered riots).
The risk of nuclear fallout is still relatively "localised", however that risk is dwarfed by the cost of disrupting centralised power production. A few nuclear plants are easy targets in the event of a war.
Distributed solar and concentrated solar w/molten salt seem like good options.
I share your feelings but I also find it “convenient” that we are all reminded of the dangers of nuclear power by a seller of gas and petroleum. Call me cynical…
This has always been my fear about nuclear. We don't think on the timescales to make it work well, nor with the engineering consistency and quality to keep it maintained.
However, abandoned oil refineries and other chemical plants are also toxic nasty messes for potentially hundreds of years, too.
Humanity has weapons capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people at a time. Nation-states deliberately using a power plant to kill "mere" thousands seems pretty low on the fear list.
It's normal to have those thoughts now, they are driven by fear. The situation is developing fast and most people are just sitting here and watching news and blame and get feelings and emotions. Just a waste of time.
A few peoples actually go to the borders or the stations to help the refugees arriving. Do that. At least you leave an impact.
I have already been very pro-nuclear and this does not change my views. Without nuclear, Russia would have had even more power. And it could have been weaker if we had built more of it. The dangers and costs are systematically overstated.
My thinking has been that we need smaller decentralized nuclear plants, that can fail without it being cathastrofic, instead of huge centralized plants that "can't fail".
Right. It makes the size of the problem more transparent, by amortizing the accidents over time.
We'd actually have some accidents sometimes. Either we'll get good at handling it, or we will give up on nuclear.
Better than pooling all the risk, lowering the probability, but keeping the same expected destruction.
With the centralized approach it's too easy to act like there's zero risk.
What do you think is the worse-case outcome here? It's the release of small amounts of radioactive gasses of only concern to the local area. It has a containment dome and is already shutting down. Another Chernobyl is not possible.
If Putin wants radiation everywhere, he has thousands of nuclear warheads which can do that.
They just want control of electricity sources, for that you take control of the plant or you strike the transport infrastructure around it, you don't strike the reactors themselves.
The day people start bombing nuclear power plants we'll be deep in ww3 already and we'd be fuck regardless
The German are uneasy because of irrational fear and exaggerated risks.
Even if the worst happen at that nuclear power plant, it will still be a small disaster compared to all the causalities that already have happened in Ukraine the last few weeks (you know: the war)
> "it will still be a small disaster compared to all the causalities that already"
Maybe I'm missing something regarding this specific reactor but how is a war that will eventually (hopefully) be over worse than a nuclear fallout that would make large areas unlivable for thousands of years and affect multiple countries and also killing a lot of people.
> make large areas unlivable for thousands of years
I think you are over-estimating the cost of this.
I contest the use of 'large'.
The 30km radius exclusion zone is nothing compared to the surface occupied by deserts, ice floe, or whatever of the many others existing unhinabitable places.
> and affect multiple countries and also killing a lot of people.
Because the war has been doing that already, at a even larger scale: thousands of civilians killed, many wounded, millions displaced. That's already worse than the consequences of a nuclear meltdown.
> The 30km radius exclusion zone is nothing compared to the surface occupied by deserts, ice floe, or whatever of the many others existing unhinabitable places.
Land location isn't fungible, though. That 30km radius exclusion zone is (was?) much more valuable land than some random patch of desert or ice. Being near other settled land, and having access to infrastructure, food, etc. is important. Taking valuable land like that and making it uninhabitable is much worse than it just being a random patch of sand in the middle of some desert somewhere, or a big piece of ice floating in an arctic region.
Usually nuclear power plants are located close to cities and populated areas and not in the middle of the desert or uninhabited ice fields.
> That's already worse than the consequences of a nuclear meltdown.
In the short term yes, but on a time scale that's longer than a few years I think you'll quickly realize that a meltdown is worse. Will the same war go on in 50 years? Probably not, but the radiation will be...for thousands of years.
Do we need more deserts, especially grain lands turned into radioactive desserts?
Russian invasion blocked wheat traffic from Ukraine, so it caused spike in prices for wheat. Just imagine prices for food when Ukraine will be poisoned permanently or occupied by RF, which may perform genocide of Ukrainians second time in less than 100 years. Wastelands are good for wildlife only, because humans are major danger to them.
"Another basic problem with MSRs is that the materials used to manufacture the various reactor components will be exposed to hot salts that are chemically corrosive, while being bombarded by radioactive particles. So far, there is no material that can perform satisfactorily in such an environment. A 2018 review from the Idaho National Laboratory could only recommended that “a systematic development program be initiated” to develop new alloys that might work better. There is, of course, no guarantee that the program will be successful."
Molten salt reactors are designed to avoid meltdowns.
But most of the harm at Chernobyl was from the explosion. There is nothing in a molten salt reactor that makes them any safer than Chernobyl if the reactor containment is breached.
Massive amounts of highly radioactive particles will be ejected into the atmosphere in exactly the same way as happened at Chernobyl.
Molten salt advocates will say "yes, but what could possibly breach the reactor if there is no meltdown". Well we almost saw the answer to that today.
> A steam explosion is what happened to the Chernobyl reactor in 1986. Although this lead to a serious disaster, it is much less destructive than an actual nuclear explosion (Wilkins, 2011). Due to the nature of molten salt reactors, the risk of either a steam explosion, a hydrogen explosion or a meltdown is effectively eliminated.
but also cannot realistically operate for very long becase structural components tend to deteriorate quickly from the combo of salt, high heat, and radiation.
Just realised that the point I've made in response to a comment probably should be a level higher:
Don't trust the radiation monitoring system, the actual monitoring system has been destroyed by a rocket impact three days ago.
The monitoring system has been shot down on 1 Sep.
Here is the statement from the Nuclear Agency in Ukraine:
On March 1, 2022 at 11:40 as a result of rocket impact, the communication network of Zaporizhzhya NPP was damaged. As a result, the Automated Radiation Monitoring System (ARMS) of the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant lost its full functionality and stopped the transmission of data to the international radiation monitoring network IRMIS. IAEA has been informed about the incident.
The link doesn't load right now (HN overload?) but I wonder, if the comms are down, shouldn't the system report "no data" as opposed to "all clear"? Why should there be an explicit warning about not trusting it when the system itself should easily be able to tell whether it's getting fresh data?
I can’t speak to why you’ve been downvoted, but it might be worth considering the incentives to fight aren’t the same between the “sides”. One is fighting to survive an attack by the other. It’s difficult to maintain safety measures while people are trying to kill you.
Hey that’s a valid point and one I agree with. The way the US has treated Cuba is also completely indefensible and based in no plausible threat scenario.
> One is fighting to survive an attack by the other.
This statement, while true, changes denotation depending on the scale at which you view this conflict. If you view it as a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the existential threat is to Ukraine. If you view it as a conflict between Russia and NATO, the existential threat is to Russia.
I don't quite understand Russia's paranoia around NATO. Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia already border Russia (+ Poland if you count Kaliningrad). Why is it such a big deal for Ukraine to enter a defense pact, unless Russia wants to retain the right to invade when they see fit? Not trying to be rhetorical, this existential threat to Russia is news to me.
Russia _hates_ that Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia are all part of NATO.
But when they were accepted Putin didn't feel strong enough to do anything about it.
Russia has been advancing it's "sphere of influence" political theory, whereby independent countries with that "sphere of influence" don't get the right to make their own alliances. That "sphere of influence" includes all Eastern European countries that border on Russia at least.
It hasn't been widely reported on, but the initial demand that led to this war was that NATO withdraw all infrastructure install in post 1997 expansions:
Russia published two lists of demands — for Washington and for NATO — the latter calling for the removal of all NATO military infrastructure installed in Eastern European countries after 1997, effectively attempting to rework the consequences of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, which left Russia weakened for years.
If you want to achieve victory, you must understand your enemy as well as yourself. The Russian attitude towards NATO expansion into Ukraine can be roughly viewed from an American perspective as well equivalent as the old Warsaw Pact attempting to bring Mexico into their treaty. Or, at least, this is part of the explanation used to frame it as an ‘existential threat’ for Russia. This, combined with a somewhat precarious economy based largely on fossil fuel exports and the fact that in some sense Putin serves at the pleasure of the group of oligarchs, and only as long as they can earn. This combo of circumstance makes it pretty easy to guess at how we got here, and frankly how easy it was to provoke. Unfortunately for Putin, and fortunate for pretty much everybody else, at this point, it appears that outside of complete and total victory and annexation of Ukraine, it looks like he loses no matter what.
Putin is a ham-fisted dictator, and the world will be better off without him, but his motivations here aren’t mysterious.
How would annexation of Ukraine further Russia’s strategic goals at this point? NATO expansion is getting more popular by the hour, as is joining the EU. Economic sanctions weaken Russia, and will continue for years to decades if Ukraine is annexed. Sure, the Russian army can get total victory given enough time, but winning the war doesn’t benefit Russia.
Not to mention full control of a Black Sea (and therefore entrance to Mediterranean) coastline with multiple ports. As well as a major agricultural products. As well as a huge transit country for Russian energy pipelines.
What does slightly more access to the Mediterranean get you when no European country will buy your goods? All of those things you mentioned are worthless without buyers.
Except the farm land. But it’s not 1444 — trade is vastly more profitable than agriculture nowadays.
IMHO, Putin is looking at this from a century perspective. I.e. in a hundred years, the sanctions will be gone, Europe will be trading with Russia again, and Russia will still have the land.
I dont think this take advances understanding of Russia. This is how Americans sees the world. Americans are not trying to make America larger, therefore they will project same lack of wish to get larger on Russia.
They are literally doing total war without provocation. The theoretical threat of NATO has not been a part of this conflict at all. Treating that imagined threat as if it’s equivalent to the very real war is navel gazing excuse for a mass murdering fascist.
Third, the theoretical threat of NATO is not so much to Russia: I agree that NATO is not a threat to Russia. However I do also see that NATO and EU are a threat to Putin's long term vision for a renewed Russian Empire.
To be clear, I agree that this vision is bogus and that a threat to a bogus vision is not a valid excuse for a war.
Please also be careful with accusing people of being fascists or Nazis. Putin and his predecessors in the USSR employed the same tactic. And whether anyone does or does not fulfill the textbook definition of a fascist is besides the point here.
This is total war. RF targets infrastructure and kills civilians on purpose. More than 2000 civilians are killed by RF in one week on territory controlled by Ukraine. RF uses weapons of mass(1) destruction freely, to force humanitarian crisis, then ask for tactical pause, to let civilians escape, while using reinforces to fortify captured land. They are shutting at hospitals, gas pipes, power lines, humanitarian convoys, to make situation desperate for civilians, to force tactical pauses. We learned this tactic very well.
(1) Not WMD like chlorine, or nuclear, of course, nor biological weapons except coronavirus released by accident from Vector lab in Siberia on Sep 16, 2019, just conventional weapons designed to maximize damage to civilian infrastructure.
> First, yes, Putin's Russia has started a war of conquest.
Glad we agree.
> Second, no, it is definitely _not_ a total war. See
It’s a total war.
> Third, the theoretical threat of NATO is not so much to Russia: I agree that NATO is not a threat to Russia. However I do also see that NATO and EU are a threat to Putin's long term vision for a renewed Russian Empire.
By this logic all conflicts are both sided. England is equally justified in bombing India because they “threatened” the British empire by rejecting being under its power.
> Please also be careful with accusing people of being fascists or Nazis. Putin and his predecessors in the USSR employed the same tactic. And whether anyone does or does not fulfill the textbook definition of a fascist is besides the point here.
I’m well aware of the importance of being precise and cautious with this term and I chose it carefully.
Air temperature 0 ℃
Wind N
Wind speed 0 m/s
Relative humidity 0 %
Atmospheric pressure 0 mm Hg
...
I hope that low pressure isn't from a vacuum bomb.
with the HN meme of AWS status pages reporting everything fine while AWS is down, here we have good evidence we cannot rely on this website reporting reliable data.
The monitoring system has been shot down on 1 Sep.
Here is the statement from the Nuclear Agency in Ukraine:
On March 1, 2022 at 11:40 as a result of rocket impact, the communication network of Zaporizhzhya NPP was damaged. As a result, the Automated Radiation Monitoring System (ARMS) of the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant lost its full functionality and stopped the transmission of data to the international radiation monitoring network IRMIS. IAEA has been informed about the incident.
I wrote a cron job that scraped the npp.zp.ua data every 15 mins for the past day. It is changing and doesn't seem offline. You think it's updating the date/time correctly and just cycling over old data?
... I hope that low pressure isn't from a vacuum bomb.
I think any monitoring system close enough to see 0 mm Hg pressure will have been destroyed by the shockwave before it could report that complete vacuum.
Do you know if these really show a significantly different pressure effect from conventional bombs?
I saw a chart showing a fatter tail on the shockwave, but it wasn't really that dramatic. I'm curious because I can imagine all kinds of vacuum effects in my mind's eye, but this is also informed by a _lot_ of the now-doubtful PR-style efforts on selling these things in years past.
> I can't conceive of a valid reason for shelling a nuclear power plant.
The classical excuse (see Operation Opera) is that it is part of an enemy weapons program from an enemy intent on nuking you. It would only be a small step from current propaganda for Russia to make this claim, having recently added the claim of an offensive Ukrainian nuke program to their propaganda.
If it provides 1/4 of the country's power, couldn't they leave the containment domes alone, and just hit the lines coming out of the plant? If you're the invading country, it'd be nice to have that power later when you're in charge, wouldn't it?
> I don’t know what would happen to a nuclear power plant operating without a load to take the generated power.
The same as any other power plant: the generator is automatically shut down by its safety systems (if it didn't shut down, the generator would overspeed and violently break apart). Once the generator shuts down, the safety systems for the reactor itself should either automatically shut down the reactor too, or somehow bypass the steam to the generator and reduce power to idle (I thought they would always shut down, but recently there was a failure on the generator of the nuclear power plant near where I live, and the reactor went to idle instead of shutting down, so it seems nuclear power plants have this mode too).
The issue is what happens after a shutdown; as seen at Fukushima, the cooling pumps in the reactor need external power for a couple of days until the decay heat reduces enough that passive cooling is sufficient. Without power from the outside, the emergency generators take over; if these are damaged or out of fuel, and backup generators can't be brought by truck from outside after a couple of hours, disaster happens.
If they were to spring a leak then it would be impossible to hide their activity from the population at home, so my guess is that's something they would try to avoid.
Elevated radiation levels originating from a significant distance away from measurement are not going to be the thing that breaks through the fog of Russian propaganda, for anyone who's along for that ride.
That almost seems irellevant, even if Putin cared what people think (I don't think he does for the most part), he controls almost all of the media in the country. He can just tell people "Ukraine did it" and they can believe him or not, it doesn't really matter.
The Russian government has already claimed that Ukraine is seeking nuclear weapons with US aid [0]. If it doesn't find a way to fit it's attack on, the fire at, and any resulting radiation release from the plant into that narrative with massaged details that make it both a heroic action by Russia and a dastardly one by Ukraine compounded by a Ukrainian propaganda effort to blame it on Russia...well, they aren't following the propaganda style they have been this whole invasion.
A large ecological disaster from an open air uncontrolled nuclear power plant fire would be a European wide concern. The results could be considered a WMD.
I expect if the invasion is protracted, Putin will at a minimum detonate a demonstration nuke. The downside consequences for Russia are modest at this point, and it'll be very terrifying to the people of Ukraine (and the world generally).
There is no “demonstration nuke”. If Putin sets off a nuke it’s doomsday.
The time between Russia being the second country to use nuclear weapons and our current concept of countries becoming totally irrelevant would be measured in minutes.
The rest of the world isn’t going to say “whelp, I guess it’s time to kick off the extinction of our species” and do a full set of city strikes over a tactical nuke being used. That would be absurd.
I’m just saying that the US isn’t going to engage in a massive species-ending strike over the Russians using a tactical nuke in a conflict with a non-NATO country.
The idea is that a tactical nuke requires at a minimum proportionate response. The history of large attacks is that the response is always disproportionate. A German plane accidentally drops their bombs on London leads to a dedicated air raid on berlin leads to the blitz.
A tactical nuke used against Kharkiv would certainly lead to either a Ukrainian dirty bomb strike against Moscow and or a NATO intervention. Why would Russia stop at one nuke when fighting NATO? For each tactical nuke against NATO you would expect at least one in return, or worse a megaton +x% for megaton exchange.
This spirals into full nuclear war very quickly once one side believes that they are going to lose without strategic weapons, or one side believes they have been or will be the victim of a strategic attack.
Speaking of, how long until the country with all of the old Soviet weapons facilities decides to re-enter the nuclear club?
I’m no expert, but my understanding is that thinking was based around a tactical nuke being used on US or Russian forces, leading to escalation and eventual use of strategic weapons, not against a non-nuclear power like Ukraine.
AFAICT, the person you were responding to wasn’t talking about a nuke being used against NATO forces.
If nuclear weapons are used it is doomsday. There are no qualifiers. The idea of getting away with a "tactical" nuke is fantasy. Our response would be total and immediate. There's no time to hesitate or wait for the effects.
If "tactical" nukes are a thing why hasn't anyone used them since 1945? Seems like they could have been handy in Syria or Afghanistan. There's no shortage of examples of nuclear powers going to war with non-nuclear non-NATO countries in the last 77 years. None of them involved nukes in any capacity.
demonstration nuke - it's called tactical nuke, which is different to strategic nuke. Imagine Ukrainian army winning and move towards Russia and Belarus. Putin may decide to fire a tactical nuke to "escalate to de-escalate"
If the Ukrainians push the Russians back to Russia then that is a de-escalation. The Ukrainians are not the aggressors here. I see no reason Ukraine would cross their own borders.
If Putin decides to escalate to nukes as a final act of failure then the de-escalation would be the complete annihilation of Russia as a country. In minutes.
The idea of getting away with a tactical nuke strike is insane.
> I see no reason Ukraine would cross their own borders
to strengthen their negotiation position "We give you back X, you give back Mariupol"
> complete annihilation of Russia as a country
you think US would die for some village in Ukraine? They were plenty of US politicians and generals which were against nuclear umbrella for West Germany.
If the Ukrainians can push Russians back why wouldn’t they do the same everywhere? Crossing the border becomes an act of aggression, only Russia has acted aggressively here. Everyone else is trying to avoid conflict.
If Russia detonates a nuke in Europe the entire country will be obliterated immediately.
I think “officials” are reporting increased levels, but if the website source above is good, I’m not seeing high values. I didn’t look at Wayback, so it could be “increased”, thus my comment for reference.
Yeah, but the fact that a Ukranian actually has one. I was going to make an "In Soviet Russia..." style joke, but a quick reading of the room suggested not good timing.
Can't say historical, but 1,000 μsv/year is the annual limit / point at which increase cancer risk exists.
Fukushima disaster levels were 400,000 μSv/h at peak. Short term dose of 10,000
μSv causes radiation sickness but probably not death. Beyond that it gets worse.
According to the Linear-no-threshold model [1], any level of radiation, no matter how small, causes cancer. According to this model, the 1,000 μsv/year of normal background radiation already cause cancer for 1% of people. And any additional dose increase the risk further.
However this model is contested. And the analysis on the cancers incidence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Chernobyl seems to indicate that this model is flawed. The exact model is difficult to estimate because of the low number of extra cancer is lost in the noise.
Well, I've been watching the video for a while before the fire started, and there was shooting going on towards the building that's on fire from the units stationed between the parking lots.
Then there was/is fire. Then presumably firefighters arrived, were not let through and departed away.
It’s amazing that in this context it could have at least three different meanings: being fired with guns, their contact being terminated, or just been thrown fire (less usual or even grammatically incorrect, I know)
yeah my brain removed the "at" for a couple of passes and I was wondering, what could they have done to get fired?
In some other universe there's a title from a complementary newspaper; "Russian soldiers fired for firing on firefighters fighting fire at nuclear plant".
I've not seen a credible sourcing to МІНІСТЕРСТВО ЕНЕРГЕТИКИ УКРАЇНИ anywhere.
edit: posts from head of the Zaporozhye Regional State Administration Alexander Starukh - looks like for 20m firefighters were not let through. Is that because they were fired upon? I don't know. He writes they are there working now though.
https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2022/03/4/7328008/ (link in Russian, that's a big newspaper in Ukraine) the units of chechen warlord Kadyrov are fighting inside the building of the power station, and are said to be laying mines, as a means of exerting pressure. What could go wrong...
This kadyrov is totally mad, they introduced Sharia law in their chechen republic, and putin doesn't want to interfer with this madness, as he fears to provoke them and also needs them for his military adventures...
of course you are correct, they coopted Chechnya, after the second Chechen war [1] Now a month ago they had a big scandal with an ex-chechen judge, forces under the command of kadyrov snatched the wife of the judge from a region that is not part of Chechnya. This was a big scandal, as the authority of the central government in Moscow is kind of put into question. Putin did avoid a conflict with Kadyrov, i think that makes sense in hindsight: he needed kadyrov and his forces for the planned war... See here: [2] All that happened a month before the outbreak of the war; that may be an indication, that the war was already a decided matter, at that point in time.
Thank you for pointing out that the plant is 6 times bigger. I watched the HBO series Chernobyl and it opened my eyes to the dangers of a nuclear meltdown. I hope the new containment tech is enough to avoid a disaster.
There is no "new containment tech" that contains a reactor breach.
Things like the (non-existent) molten salt reactor try to reduce the risk of a runaway meltdown, but do nothing to stop the danger if the reactor itself is broken open.
Same happened in Chernobyl. Workers in the plant granted the free pass and were allowed to keep running the plants. The young soldiers just can't do it and is in their most interest to keep the plant operations safe. A figth inside a nuclear plant can't be win and starting it would be a moronic disaster. Even the dumbest soldier is aware of that.
But is still a risk. People does not act rationally in a war. If it continues for a lot of time any depressed 19yo soldier could say I'm sick of this, decided to suicide and destroy half of the EU with him. The objective of probable Ukrainian genocide has been upgraded to possible European genocide as a bonus.
On the other hand, Putin seems to crave for another countries joining the war so he can "show the nazis" to Russia.
Nuclear power stations don't go boom so even if a war was raged inside a power station it wouldn't take out half of Europe.
What could happen is safety systems could be compromised causing a meltdown and that would carry the risk of spreading radioactive matter to the local environment. And if the local environment gets sufficiently contaminated then weather patterns, sea tides, etc could spread the radiation much further. But it's a slow risk (when compared to a nuclear weapon) so it is still possible to contain the damage to within a few miles, which I acknowledged is still bad but a much better outcome than half of Europe being contaminated.
The Chernobyl reactor suffered a steam explosion that destroyed the containment chamber and lead to an open air reactor core fire. Fukushima suffered several hydrogen gas explosions that also caused explosive venting of radioactive material and severe structural damage.
So yes nuclear plants can explode extremely violently and that can disperse huge quantities of radioactive material. They’re not nuclear detonations as in an atomic warhead, but the consequences can still be catastrophic and as at Chernobyl the fallout can be similar to that from a nuclear weapon. In fact when scientists in Russia initially detected the radiation from Chernobyl they at first assumed there must have been a nuclear explosion if done kind.
+ It's not the fission material that explodes (like in a bomb)
+ The explosion is relatively small
+ Radiation is then dispersed to the wider area via atmospheric or tidal conditions (like smoke drifting) rather than as a direct result of the explosion
All points I was making too.
> but the consequences can still be catastrophic and as at Chernobyl the fallout can be similar to that from a nuclear weapon
I never said there wouldn't be radioactive fallout nor that it wouldn't be catastrophic. I said it's a slower risk (days rather than seconds), easier to contain (relatively speaking) and it wouldn't take out half of Europe.
You're not actually disagreeing with anything I've stated despite phrasing your comment as if it were a correction.
Chernobyl was caused by several days of mismanagement. It wasn't something that happened over night. Fukushima took more than 24 hours after the tsunami for the first hydrogen explosion and the others were several days later. And it was a week after the tsunami before the situation escalated into a meltdown too.
To be clear: I'm not saying waging a fight inside a nuclear power station isn't a dangerous and stupid thing to do. What I'm saying is it's not comparable to a nuke exploding.
I disagree on the conclusion that damage to a nuclear reactor is a 'slow risk'. The Chernobyl explosion and open rector core fire, which spewed vast quantities of radioactive material into the atmosphere, occurred within a few hours and minutes of the mistakes that triggered them. It's plausible to imagine a few artillery shells into a plant's cooling system could lead to a similar chain of events and a catastrophic explosive contamination event.
> The Chernobyl explosion and open rector core fire, which spewed vast quantities of radioactive material into the atmosphere, occurred within a few hours of the mistake that triggered them.
Chernobyl was a very unique situation though. They almost engineered that disaster to happen with the mistakes that they made. We've learned a lot since then too. That all said, you do make a very strong argument with your next sentence:
> It's plausible to imagine a few artillery shells into a plant's cooling system could lead to a similar chain of events.
Edit: This is a joke based on TV series Chernobyl. A Chernobyl reactor did infact explode and the logic was that it exploding was impossible there for it did not explode.
Chernobyl disaster was first detected in Sweden, and in this nuclear plant would be like six Chernobyl, is closer to Europe than Chernobyl was and we can add the 3 reactors still active in Chernobyl also in hands of clueless 20 Yo soldiers. Some of those people claimed that they don't really know whom are fighting, or what are doing here.
By the way, I never say that I was concerned by an explosion blowing half of the continent, but the effects on Germany for example, were measurable and still last. We shouldn't be so naive as to ignore the risk.
I think that your prevision of just a few miles, enough so Putin will have this safe perimeter, is too much optimistic
Chernobyl was a different era and mismanaged for days too. If something happened to the Ukrainian power station we'd know about it sooner (the proof of that is the fact that we know enough to have this discussion to begin with) and could react sooner. We've learned lessons from other meltdowns and nuclear and radiation accidents and incidents that have happened since Chernobyl and thus are better equipped and educated to respond. This applies as much to Russia as it does Europe, Japan and America too.
> I never say that I was concerned by an explosion blowing half of the continent, but the effects on Germany for example, were measurable and still last.
Your comment is very misleading then if that's what you meant:
"If it continues for a lot of time any depressed 19yo soldier could say I'm sick of this, decided to suicide and destroy half of the EU with him."
^ that reads to me like a pretty instant cause and effect, which a nuclear meltdown is not. If you were talking about over a prolonged period with no decontamination nor mitigation efforts put in place, then it really was not clear from your comment. And I'd argue that is a result of far more than just the actions of a depressed 19 year old soldier in isolation.
> I think that your prevision of just a few miles, enough to Putin have this safe perimeter, is too much optimistic
You're now conflating accident with intention. If Putin intentionally wants to contaminate half of the EU then that's a whole different argument to an accident happening during a capture of a power station or a depressed solder committing suicide (which was the original context you defined and the context I was responding to)
I'm not trying to dispute that the risk of contamination if one damages a nuclear power station is both significant and worrisome. I'm just saying it's not an instant effect (as your post implies) and thus measures can be taken to contain the worst of it to relatively a localized area.
Anyway, I think we both agree that nuclear power stations don't make good war zones :)
Thankfully the reactors are behind the camera streaming the administrative building. Hopefully nothing goes wrong during the takeover. The reactor containment itself is robust, but the potential for human error in a war that keeps escalating should not be discounted.
Internet speculation is that the power plant will be shut down once taken over. Which at least minimizes the ongoing risk of human error. Heck, shutting down is probably a far simpler process than continuing to run - nuclear power plants are designed to be shut down if necessary.
Well, shutting down nuclear reactor is not a simple process — it has to be actively cooled for weeks after being disconnected, which requires power, which you don’t have because you shut it down. So there should be either on-site generators (burning fuel) or external power . That’s why power stations usually have multiple reactors which are serviced on schedule, so it always has some generation happening.
None of it can be relied on during the war.
Shutting down and not having power to cooldown is how Fukushima happened. Emergency shutdown drill is how Chornobyl’ happened
> Emergency shutdown drill is how Chornobyl’ happened
And not being informed of well-known (in higher Soviet echelons) serious reactor flaws, like the grafite on the rods being inserted into the reactor core initially spiking the fission process significantly.
Shutting down is a much safer condition than operating. The decay heat decreases massively over time (huge difference between minutes / hours / days /weeks) and gets safer the longer it has been off.
Also if it's online, the electricity needs to go somewhere: any disruption to the electrical grid and it'd have to go off - probably at a bad time. Better to go through the shutdown in a planned manner while the outside situation is (relatively) stable.
What would happen if the grid connection was severed by bombing? Is there no emergency shutdown mechanism where the output is just dumped into some artificial load?
Then again, a 5700MW resistor might require a bit of cooling.
The power would not be dumped into a resistor: the power would be dumped in form of heat with the turbogenerator disconnected from steam. I expect that you can "just" dump it in the condenser and use the standard cooling of the condenser to dump it into the local body of water. If that's insufficient, one can dump steam from the secondary loop into atmosphere (which necessitates adding water there). You can play with a vver-1000 simulator and see how many of these things work; the simulator whose manual I'm citing above can be easily found on the internet.
If you disconnect the load, you need to stop putting steam through the turbine and dump it somewhere else (i.e. a condenser). All steam turbine plants (including coal) have something similar.
I was about to mention that reactors often have fuel generators but I remember that the invading force is famous for selling the gas from their tanks to pocket the money…
Given the quality of Russian supply planning and execution it seems as if the biggest danger could be emergency generator fuel supplies getting forcefully repurposed. Good luck doing a safe shutdown...
Given the continuous need for cooling and containment, and within the context of a war, does it really matter if a fission power plant is running or shut down in terms of environmental security?
Russian forces have been destroying substations to kill electricity and this is the largest power station in Ukraine. It is not unreasonable at all to think that shutting it down and making it hard to get back up (to destabilize or shut down the Ukrainian power grid) is part of the Russian attack strategy.
Ukraine is a big country. Meanwhile, this power plant represents 40 % of Ukraine's nuclear power generating capacity, which in turn is responsible for ~50 % of power generation. So this one plant is around 20 % of the total generating capacity in Ukraine.
Since Ukraine is no longer connected to the Ex-Soviet power grid, it is now an isolated grid and has to generate all electricity domestically. That's why the Ukraine is trying to create an interconnection with the EU grid as quickly as possible.
Anything can go wrong AFTER takeover. Russians can convert power plant into nuclear landmine and blow up it on retreat. This is war between two nuclear states, so nuclear weapon will be used eventually.
We promised to not have it in return for not being invaded, so technically we are a nuclear state without any weapons present at this moment (as far as publicly known).
Since we have both technological expertise and practical means (from uranium ores to delivery systems), it’s a matter of time.
Can you point to an official document, such as voting by UN members, to put RF into security council of UN? I cannot find any. RF is not a founder of UN, so it puzzling for me, how they are able to sit permanently in Security Council. Is there an exception for RF in UN statute written somewhere?
I wondered the same thing recently. Found this legal academic analysis of the succession of member states.
The conclusion part made me think that the subject was negociated between constituant parts in the devolution treaty. However the paper does highlight that the UN is under ever more pressure for rule-based functioning and transparency, so who knows.
Personally if it were me, I'd rather try and get Russia's membership or voting rights suspended, based on the fact that article 4 states that the UN is for peace loving nations. In the current climate this has a chance of passing in the general assembly, where the veto can not be used. Russia has evoked article 41 'right of self-defense' but that seems problematic.
Another question is if you want to exclude Russia. It sets a precedent, and erodes the position of the UN if not (near-) unanimous. The previous vote had 144 out of 193 voting against Russia, with only 5 against (Russia, Belarus, Venezuela, etc)
> It looks like nobody holding their promises right now, i.e. USA, Brittain, RF, France are traitors, thus Ukraine has full right to not obey this agreement either.
No, the only traitor is Russia. Look at the actual contents of Budapest memorandum [1]. This is in summary what the parties committed to:
1) Respect Belarusian, Kazakh and Ukrainian independence and sovereignty in the existing borders.
2) Refrain from the threat or the use of force against Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
3) Refrain from using economic pressure on Belarus,
Kazakhstan and Ukraine to influence their politics.
4) Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".
5) Refrain from the use of nuclear arms against Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
6) Consult with one another if questions arise regarding those commitments.
I do not see any of these items being violated by western powers.
> RF started to prepare their citizens for such scenario already.
There actually seems to have been a promise made, back in 1991, that NATO wouldn't expand eastward beyond Germany. Somebody did some research deep and found an assurance like that in protocols, Spiegel reports
> It looks like nobody holding their promises right now, i.e. USA, Brittain, RF, France are traitors, thus Ukraine has full right to not obey this agreement either.
Nobody wants to start WW3 over Ukraine, except maybe Putin who has been left with very few options and doesn't care much about the lives of others, including his fellow Russians. The way he sees it is that he's liberating Ukraine from "nazis" and that the US has orchestrated a coup in 2014 replacing his puppet Yanukovych with their own. He has also signalled that he's ready to use the nuclear arsnal to deter anyone who interferes. What the West can do without potentially triggering WW3 is to economically cripple Russia, supply Ukraine with small arms, personnel carried anti tank and anti airplane weapons, ammo and possibly mercenaries. Any direct engagement between NATO and Russia could potentially trigger WW3 and nuclear warfare.
What you are doing is making unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine might be developing nuclear weapons. The very same false claims were in fact voiced by the Kremlin.
-Unless the Russian forces have way better connections than we give them credit for, they can not control which way the wind blows. At the moment, the winds come from the southeast, so a lot of the fallout would end up in Russia.
I wouldn’t count having nuclear power plants as being a nuclear state. There’s a world of difference between power plants and weapons. A war between two countries with nuclear weapons would be on a whole other level.
I’ve read/heard the point is to destroy the reactor for the Russians. They’ve attempted to reach out to the Russians to no avail. It produces 1/4 the country’s power.
Nobody shelled a nuclear plant. Russian forces drove into the parking lot of a nuclear plant, had two RPGs fired upon them from an administrative building and fired machine guns back at the administrative building. There were fires and after some time the fighting was sorted out and firefighters put out the fire.
All headlines are about Russians shelling a nuclear plant. You can say that's fake news, but at least provide a shred of evidence (like any article?).
> KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian forces pressed their attack on a crucial energy-producing Ukrainian city by shelling Europe’s largest nuclear plant early Friday, sparking a fire and raising fears that radiation could leak from the damaged power station.
I think the best stance is what we should all know by now: Ukraine is highly propagandistic because their victory scenario involves getting NATO directly involved and escalating a regional conflict into a World War.
So let's treat any information coming out from them as such and wait 1 day for more accurate accounts to come in.
To be fair, I'm certain that the Ukraine does not want to spark a world war, but they certainly would appreciate some direct support from NATO, even just air support. (which is likely to lead to a world war, but that's not Ukraine's intention, they are just trying to preserve their country).
Despite any inaccuracies due to the "fog of war" or even propaganda, the basic facts of this unprovoked invasion are more than enough to justify NATO intervention.
“Just air support” means a hot war between the US and Russia, which would be an extremely dangerous thing. It’s extremely irresponsible to advocate for that. There is a reason they weren’t allowed into NATO before, and that reason has only gotten stronger.
I'm not advocating for any direct NATO involvement, I was just saying that Ukraine would love NATO support, even if just air support (which they've already asked for), but even that would likely escalate this into a world war.
I'm not sure how you read that as me advocating for NATO involvement.
But I disagree with your assertion that the reason to not let them into NATO has gotten stronger, I think this invasion shows that the reason to let Ukraine in to NATO has gotten stronger.
Sorry, I don’t understand, how is air support not direct NATO involvement?
The reason has gotten stronger because if we let Ukraine into NATO now, that obligates NATO to defend them, which makes this into WW3. That would be extremely bad for humanity on a much, much larger scale than Ukraine represents. NATO is not a tool for humanitarian aid.
It is direct NATO involvement, I never advocated for it -- Ukraine did.
Obviously we wouldn't let Ukraine into NATO now during a conflict, but if this conflict somehow ends and Putin withdraws then I think there's a strong case for giving them NATO membership. Letting Ukraine join NATO later is a deterrent from another invastion, letting them join NATO today is just the start of WWIII
Ah ok, I agree. Sorry, I must’ve misunderstood what you meant by “the basic facts of this unprovoked invasion are more than enough to justify NATO intervention” in your original post.
Oh, I definitely think NATO has ample justification to join the battle, and if the adversary were not Russia (or China), I think they already would have.
But I also think it would be a horrible idea to get into a direct war with Russia.
I watched the same livestream the AP is screenshotting. There weren't any signs of "shelling". There were two RPG blasts, and then later on tracer rounds fired back towards the source of the RPG blasts.
Edit: Saw an explanation that media journalists are probably mistakenly identifying the lighting flares launched in the video as shelling. They're way too slow moving to be shells or explosive rockets.
You are welcome, also I saw you commented about rising radiation levels somewhere else earlier. I think this has been covered perhaps before you chimed in, a physicist claimed that the higher radiation levels, assuming they are actually recorded, could very likely be caused by the weapons used in the are and not reflect the true levels. I unfortunately don't have the necessary expertise to explain that further, but I assume it's simmiliar to smoking a ciggarette into a air pollution sensor.
edit: seems like you just asked for a source, I misread the comment chain
The experts on there are NOT concerned. At least yet.
Lots of scope for misinformation and panic here (understandably) as it’s a live developing story, but I don’t think we all need to retire to our bunkers just yet.
Would urge caution about reading too much into this until we have a bit more info. Rushing to try and interpret live radiation levels and talk of “this escalates to nuclear war” is a bit premature.
> If true, then that’s another war crime to add to the growing list.
So what?
Russia (like the USA btw) does not acknowledge the jurisdiction of the ICC. The dictator in Moscow (and his minions) will just laugh at any conviction from there.
If who exactly sets foot in a country that recognizes the convictions? No country is going to try to start a war with Russia by detaining their President.
Once Putin is detained the war will end. At the very least a condemnation/conviction in absence will be another prestige blow, if that's possible. Germany started an independent proceeding btw: Once you violate the sovereignty of other countries and or human rights, you lose your own formal
indefeasibility. It's called "Weltrecht".
The war with Ukraine is not just due to Putin. This idea that everyone is just following the orders of one man is absurd. It isn't going to be like a movie where once they take out the leader everyone puts down their weapons. Detaining him would not end the conflict and would be seen as an attack on Russia that could provoke the use of nukes.
You don't do war crimes unless you expect to get away with it, which means either you're fighting a war that more powerful nations don't care about, or you expect to win it.
Putin can't win against NATO but he can make both sides lose.
I used to think he was rational and only minorly evil, but now I'm not so sure of the rationality... and clearly he's more than minorly evil.
1) The West has already weaponized the law. It is currently operating on the Latin American dictator model of "for my friends, anything; for my enemies: the law!".
2) The United States strongly opposes the ICC treaty and does not accept its jurisdiction overs its nationals and is even willing to use military force to free any of its nationals should the ICC ever try to enforce jurisdiction over an American[1]. In similar, but less violent terms, Russia withdrew from the ICC back in 2016.
So my point is, why would Russia care what some court with no jurisdiction says? It's already obvious it won't matter. The West is already going full Treaty of Versailles on them - so what difference does it make? There is little credibility left for the West, either in terms of rule of law or moral authority to be telling anyone what is right or wrong.
This is something that most of the world sees by now, but the West is comically unable to look in the mirror and see this and I'm afraid they will only notice when it's too late. It's absurdly self-destructive but the West consider it "winning", yet the history books will almost certainly mark this as the most obvious inflection point where the West lost the plot.
Thank you very much. This is how citizens and governments in nations outside of the Western world perceive the West and its mad war propaganda. And they're correct.
Westerners, that are scrutinizing every single move of Russia today, ignored every time it was pointed out that the U.S. was waging a proxy war in Ukraine for 8 years.
The Minsk agreements, mediated by NATO members, were NEVER applied, and there have been 14000 deaths in the Donbass war since 2014. All the while, U.S. politicians have been publicly gloating that they "are fighting Russia in Ukraine". Their involvement in this is clearly documented -- except Westerners do not even care to look.
The current act of freezing the assets of the Russian state -- completely arbitrary thievery -- just sends the following message to outside governments that have seen this unfold: the West is not to be trusted.
He is likely “rational” but so out of touch after so many years with the actual world that he can only reason about the distortion bubble that gets built up around people with so much power, wealth, and political influence.
You don't do war crimes unless you expect to get away with it, which means either you're fighting a war that more powerful nations don't care about, or you expect to win it.
I think it's the later - Putin is not going to lose this war since he's racking up hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars of damage and compensation for injury/death that Russia would have a hard time paying for if he admits defeat.
Right now, I think that's the best the world could hope for. But seems decreasingly likely the longer this goes on, they already have ample incentive to do so now.
IMO you have to consider there is an information war going on so to me the only rational thing to do is take everything you think you know with a grain of salt.
There probably is a tactical advantage from the Russian side to putting out the idea that Putin has gone crazy.
Or he really has gone crazy. We can't really know but the fog of war spreading to social media does not seem like a great development.
There probably is a tactical advantage from the Russian side to putting out the idea that Putin has gone crazy.
What other explanation is there for invading a European country with close ties to the USA and NATO -- one claim for the invasion is that Putin was worried that Ukraine would join NATO, if they are that friendly to NATO, then he must have known that NATO would help fight.
There are quite a few loyal or sympathetic to Russia in Ukraine, due to propaganda and history, how many is hard to say and colored by your opinions. Hard to think not significantly fewer now than in the recent past.
Putin thought he would win quickly, get troops to lay down arms and overthrow the government. For whatever reason he was wrong, it seems clear this is what was expected but pushback has been more effective. Probably in no small way because organizing the logistics of such a large operation is hard and has not gone smoothly.
> one claim for the invasion is that Putin was worried that Ukraine would join NATO, if they are that friendly to NATO, then he must have known that NATO would help fight.
Well, look at what's happened. Look at what has happened previously in Crimea, look what happened in the Ukraine separatist regions before. Look at what is happening now. He would not necessarily have to be totally irrational to believe objectives could be achieved there.
Whether or not Russia is a Protocol I party doesn't particularly matter here as the war crime at issue is viewed now as a matter of customary international law and is explicitly within the jurisdiction of the ICC; Rome Statute Article 8, 2.(b)(iv)
The same ICC the USA has a law on the books to invade the Netherlands if it charges US troops? Russia isn’t a signatory either. It’s edifying to observe that only the losers ever get tried for war crimes. A major nuclear power may fail to win a war, but it can’t lose one except if everyone loses.
OK, but Russia withdrew from the ICC. And Ukraine has signed but not ratified. And as Russia can veto a U.N. Security Council resolution referring a crime to the ICC, I'm not sure how this happens? And it seems Russia is not a party to the Rome Statutes either.
Doesn't matter for ICC jurisdiction over war crimes committed in Ukraine, because Ukraine, while not a state party, has acceded to voluntary ICC jurisdiction for war crimes and crimes against humanity on its territory from 21 November 2013 forward. (If you are relying on Wikipedia, it seems to systematically omit mention of voluntary jurisdiction.)
> And as Russia can veto a U.N. Security Council resolution referring a crime to the ICC
A UNSC resolution is not required; for cases where the ICC would have jurisdiction, it can begin investigations on the initiative of the prosecutor with permission of the ICC judiciary, or on referral of a state party (which need not be directly involved.) After the ICC prosecutor announced the intention to seek permission for an investigation, based on both a completed preliminary examination which found sufficient indication of ICC-covered war crimes and crimes against humanity before the recent escalation, as well as additional concerns arising from the recent escalation on his own initiative, but noted that a state-party referral would streamline the process, 39 state parties to the Rome Statute submitted referrals relating to the situation in Ukraine to the ICC.
The risks of nuclear war from a NATO militarily intervention are far too high to even consider it. I’m sorry to say, but there is really nothing that could happen in Ukraine that would be bad enough for us to accept the risk of nuclear annihilation.
If NATO got involved my guess is that the chance of an all out nuclear war would increase to near 100% because Russia can not win a conventional war with NATO which means nukes would need to be deployed to level the playing field.
Once one Nuke is fired it's likely they'll all be because the only real defence against a nation using nuclear weapons against you is to try to wipe them out before they wipe you out.
In this situation hundreds of millions would be likely die directly from the attack and a similar amount would probably die from starvation shortly after as the global economy collapses and crops fail on mass.
There's just no situation that this is something we'd even want to consider. As much as I'd love NATO to be able to intervene it's just not possible. The best we can do is put pressure on Russia and show other nations that this is not acceptable and not in their national interest because of the harsh economic consequences.
> the only real defence against a nation using nuclear weapons against you is to try to wipe them out before they wipe you out
Thankfully, that has been thought of and, as much as possible, planned for.
How do you decrease the incentive for a preemptive strike? By building your nuclear arsenal so that it can survive one. There are 3 main things that help achieve this:
(1) Put your nukes somewhere where even a direct hit from an enemy nuke will not destroy them. That's why missile silos are underground.
(2) Hide your nukes. The enemy can't take out your nukes if they don't know where they are. Fixed-location nukes are bad at this. Mobility is good, but road and rail are not the best forms of mobility. Nukes in planes are better. Nukes in submarines are really good.
(3) Have lots of nukes. If the enemy can destroy 90% of your nukes with a preemptive strike but 10% of your nukes would still easily be enough to wipe them out, then a preemptive strike still doesn't achieve its goal. One way to increase nukes cheaply and effectively is with MIRVs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targeta...), which means one missile has multiple nuclear warheads that can independently hit different targets.
Basically, all this was thought out pretty thoroughly during the Cold War. The well-known acronym MAD stands for Mutually-Assured Destruction, and the importance of the assured part has not been overlooked.
Source: needed a government credit in college, took a class that was all about nuclear deterrence theory.
Given the accepted MAD doctrine, which kept the "peace" throughout the cold war, you would think nuclear escalation would be unthinkable as a means to stave off a conventional defeat on foreign soil.
He will lose in many respects, but even so, Moscow and St. Petersburg are not going to be radioactive craters. All evidence suggests he wants to be remembered as a Russian hero. I think he is intelligent enough to know that bringing nuclear destruction on Russia will not put him in that category. And it's not possible for him to act alone anyway. Worth noting that the two people in human history who have acted to stop a nuclear catastrophe were both Russian soldiers: Stanislav Petrov and Vasili Arkhipov.
It is completely mind numbingly crazy how much is at stake based on a single psychopaths whims, and possibly the courage of a few people selected by the same psychopath.
Absolutely. I think democratic governance and rule of law should be table stakes for participation in the "Western" economy and its international institutions. Countries that don't respect those values in their own societies won't respect them in international relations either.
Why do you think there's been so much effort to keep Iran and North Korea out of the nuclear club? Once someone has a high probability of having nuclear weapon and the capacity to deliver it, your tolerable options decline sharply. Russia is the worst-case form of that problem since they have many advanced weapons and even if their maintenance standards have been deplorable the odds are far too high that enough would reach their targets to cause death counts in the range of hundreds of millions.
Bingo. Unfortunately NATO made it very clear to everyone over the past eight years that it's not going to spill blood over Ukraine.
... But now that the opportunity to trap Putin in a quagmire has presented itself, it does seem to be ready to flood the region with weapons. Had it done so at any point in the preceding eight years, war might well have been avoided.
Which leads me to think that avoiding war was never the goal.
I think it's a bit of a catch-22: given one of Putin's stated aims is to demilitarise Ukraine and remove Western weapons, NATO arming Ukraine earlier would have caused Russia to invade earlier.
Invasions take a lot of preparation. You can't just tell your army to attack some country - they need to plan exactly how they will do it, and practice.
The turnaround time on this sort of thing does not favor the aggressor.
It makes me wonder if there is a Russian information campaign to try to get public opinion in the West for NATO to enter, knowing that the US is not going to enter and then fracture NATO or cause division within NATO.
All the sudden all these Curtis LeMay types are coming out of the woodwork trying to drum up nuclear war.
We know Russia has ran information campaigns on social media in the past so it seems pretty irrational to believe they aren't running campaigns when actually at war.
Everyone should take what they think they know about the situation with a huge grain of salt. It is totally irresponsible to read a news headline that may or may not be correct and then from that headline extrapolate that it is time to go to DEFCON 1.
What would be the difference if Putin invaded a NATO state and NATO was forced to defend? What would be the difference if he starts losing the war and needs to kick it up a notch? Is there any less chance he'd use nukes? Serious question. Threatening nukes is a rational move. Actually using them is not.
In general, the side that cares about the conflict more is more likely to engage in direct conflict, and escalate to nuclear use if their goals are being thwarted by conventional war.
To Russia, Ukraine is a core interest, and thus they're the most likely to escalate to tactical nuclear weapons if NATO intervenes and Russia starts losing.
With a NATO country, that calculus changes, and if for some crazy reason Russia actually attacked a NATO country, we would have a good chance of being able to fight back and expel Russia's attack without the war going nuclear, because Russia has far less interest in winning that war, as existing NATO countries aren't core interests to Russia.
A nuclear would most likely mean the end of the world.
Russia's core interest should be preventing the end of the world. If Putin is rational, he will never initiate a nuclear war. If he is irrational, he will not stop with Ukraine.
There are paths of escalation that merely risk nuclear annihilation rather than guarantee it. In particular, in a war with NATO, where Russian forces would be heavily outmatched in conventional warfare, Russian forces would consider using "deescalatory" tactical nuclear strikes on NATO troops. The side that has the most invested (e.g. for Russia where Kyiv is seen as integral to its historical Slavic / Rus heritage) is most likely to engage in escalation and brinksmanship while the other side has to consider whether to follow it up the escalatory ladder or back down.
I keep telling people this and people seem bewildered. But how many times has this already happened in the last 80 years? We already know there’s nothing they can do to trigger a war.
I’ve been wondering if that convoy outside of Kyiv is really stopped because serious thought is being given to the idea of a nuclear attack to save a long bloody insurgency.
I don’t know if NATO would respond to a nuclear attack on Kyiv. Would NATO attack knowing the destruction of London/Paris/NYC/etc would be almost guaranteed?
That was written under the assumption they'd have occupied Ukraine in 3 days or so, not the embarrassment that is happening now. At this point, Kremlin will put out any false flag and use it to justify levelling Kyiv and his population will suck it up.
Now that the Ukrainian people are resisting "unification" and he has failed to achieve goals, he's ordered revenge attacks on Ukrainian cities to level them like Grozny or like Nazis destroyed Warsaw block by block after the uprising. This follows his own words too: he does not think that Ukraine has a right to exist. It's a textbook example of genocide and it's as rational as Hitler's desire to murder all Jews.
why would you believe a single word that Putin says though?
This is the guy who among many other lies said on camera in 2014 that the green men that took over Crimea and were armed to the teeth were just some random locals and not Russian military.
Just a couple of days before the current invasion denied any intention to do so while detailed attack plans were signed long before etc.
And besides taking pieces from your neighboring country, waging long shadow war in Donbas, telling everyone how Ukraine is not really a country anyway and then invading doesn't really seem such a great plan for unifying nations.
As far as I understand relations before Russians and Ukrainians were pretty OK before 2014 events. With his own actions Putin has made a country that has roughly 1/3 of the population of Russia mostly against him. Healing these wounds and relationships will take decades even once the war ends.
You could say this about any military aggression from Russia though.
"Putin taking Estonia isn't as bad as nuclear annihilation."
"Putin taking Berlin isn't as bad as nuclear annihilation."
"Putin taking DC isn't as bad as nuclear annihilation."
What if he just goes, "I'm invading western Europe now too, and if you fight back I launch the nukes"? Do we just roll over and say that it's better to surrender than fight?
The only country which used them and on actual civilian cities leveling them to the ground is the US. Also, launching nukes is not one person job. His generals need to be mad too for that to happen.
I’m not sure what Hiroshima and Nagasaki have to do with the discussion. The context is so completely different as to be irrelevant.
I’m sure Putin doesn’t have a big red launch button on his desk, but between the US and Russia, who do you honestly think will have an easier time getting those missiles launched? The guy who mixed up Ukrainians and Iranians during a speech last week or the guy who ordered an invasion of a neighboring country? My money is on Putin.
Bluff? Putin wants to live out his golden years in unabated luxury after anointing a loyal successor. If he nukes the entire world, he will live in squalor and misery while being hunted by the entire human race. He won't do it. Me hopes. Me also hopes someone in his inner circle gets a nice clean view of the back of his head and does the world a favor.
I mean you're right, but... he already lives in unimaginable luxury, wanting for nothing. Has for decades. Could continue to do so for 100 lifetimes. And yet here we are.
> I’m sorry to say, but there is really nothing that could happen in Ukraine that would be bad enough for us to accept the risk of nuclear annihilation.
Would that hold up if you insert "anywhere" instead of "in Ukraine"? I am not so sure that e.g. the Baltics would be protected by NATO if Putin invades.
How can anyone intervene when Russia has 6,400 nuclear weapons? It will provide no comfort in our final moments to know Russia is facing the same fate.
We're going to keep telling ourselves that it would risk nuclear retaliation right up until the point where there's nothing in Ukraine worth defending because Russia nuked every place in Ukraine still standing.
The only exit that isn't a destructive spiral out of control is the one where Putin is no longer in power.
1. NATO Article 5 invocation, i.e. an armed attack on a NATO nation
2. or a disaster so terrible that the security of Europe requires that NATO enter the war i.e. a nuclear reactor meltdown<
3. a NATO ally such as Poland deciding to enter the war on Ukraine's side.
An NATO Article 5 invocation is the most likely. Russia is taking heavily loses due to NATO arms shipments to Ukraine. To reduce these arms shipments Russia must either bomb the shipments near the border or control the border. Both of these could result in an accidental attack on Poland. Russian bombers often have difficulty navigating and use unguided bombs. If they stray into Polish airspace they make be shot down. If Poland decides that war with Russia will happen sooner or later, they make choose to enter the war on Ukraine's side sooner when Russia is least prepared.
These are 80's era Soviet VVER PWRs. They are better designs than Chernobyl style RBMKs, but they're not at par with Western PWRs. In particular they lack much of the automation expected in Western designs.
The danger here is if these were still operating at power when the Russians rolled in and residual heat is not removed because operators have fled or the power gets cut then the core(s) will melt. Melting cores generate hydrogen gas which then explodes. Also, there is probably a large quantity of spent fuel on site, some of which needs active cooling as well.
I highly recommend this lecture by Finnish army intelligence expert to those looking to understand the deeper roots behind Russia's actions. Lecture in Finnish, but it has English subtitles. Truly wakening stuff, it really helps you to understand the situation much better.
What do you recon are the key points for people who don't have 1h to watch with subtitles. Specifically related to the nuclear power plant news from today.
The key points of this terrible demagoguery, from what I could tell:
1) Russians have been conquered a lot and are very insecure
2) They're part Mongols and inherited fear and lies as state of being
3) Russians only respect strong Tsar and let the Tsar do whatever he wants as he appears strong and manufactures the fear through the lies
4) Russians are stupid and not capable of creating anything, only destruction. They stole anything technologically worthwhile.
5) Russia is a terrible autocratic imperialist country that is completely geopolitically irrational.
Any person taking this video at face value should conclude that Russia should be suppressed and destroyed, that would be a great service to the human kind. Yes, everything makes sense now.
"From the Russian perspective, taking out Ukraine's power is strategic and demoralizing." It would seem to me as though the Russians are living in a glass house when it comes to energy sabotage. The map of Russian petroleum pipelines going through Ukraine is substantial.
At this point it seems as though Putin won't back down for fear of being perceived as weak. He'd rather be seen as a madman. Which may be why some of these choices seem, well...mad.
War is the ground-truthed rule of kill or be killed. This is artillery being used to cause a nuclear incident. Maybe it’s to draw international troops in for emergency remediation. Maybe it’s to spread radiation to demonstrate the consequences of resisting.
Russia is trying to move northwards to Zaporizhzhia city. Leaving Ukrainian troops roaming freely in the Energodar town would have left their supply lines / flanks exposed, so they needed to drive in and clear troops out of the town (which mostly consists of a nuclear power plant).
I'm guessing the Ukrainian troops fell back to the nuclear power plant hoping they wouldn't get attacked there.
I wonder if Russia thinks it gives them a strategic advantage to be able to turn the power on and off at will? (Hypothetically, if they have full control of some city, they can turn the power back on and the people are less likely to revolt.)
This whole situation reminds me of the Mosul dam in Iraq, which was controlled by ISIS for awhile. The dam is kept stable by continuous grouting operations, which I believe were on hold for awhile.
I'm thinking maybe their long-range plan is to turn the reactor off and then damage it in some way that it can never be used again without rebuilding from scratch. Russia's main export is fossil fuels, and it's in Russia's economic and strategic best interest for Ukraine to be dependent on them for energy. Nuclear enables Ukraine's energy independence, and thus can't be tolerated.
Without knowing the particular reactor designs, I'll just say it's extremely unlikely they can turn it on and off like a tap (or even up and down significantly) due to the resulting poison transients.
That is indeed the fundamental issue still. The invasion of Ukraine is simply insane and will absolutely hurt Russia far more than it can ever benefit. That's the really scary part which makes this all terribly unpredictable.
That's not the point. People don't really seem to get that Russia is basically a terrorist state right now. The goal is not only to cut power but to terrorize - striking a nuclear plant and preventing firefighters from intervening is, as you currently see, scary as fuck. They're sending a message.
If you want an actual explanation for the extension of NATO into the former communist countries, look no further. East Europeans have a collective memory about how the Russian military operates.
Stock futures plunged because of fears of a meltdown, I presume. For that to happen requires a specific chain of events, not just a fire at some non critical part of the plant. Nuclear power plants are designed to withstand a lot. Likely the plant was shutdown anyway. Now stock futures have recovered almost all losses, would have been a good buying opportunity based on this fear. Shows how having an knowledge advantage helps greatly when trading based on headlines.
Is targeting electricity production a de-facto attack on EU infrastructure?
Would taking out Ukraine's electricity generation increase its dependence on Russia (who could sell it), and significantly increase the EU's dependence on Russian gas?
Just nitpicking, but AFAIK nuclear power plants already "go critical" whenever they're operating (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_(status) "Criticality is the normal operating condition of a nuclear reactor, in which nuclear fuel sustains a fission chain reaction.")
Because a reactor explosion is a small chemical reaction, with the yield of a single medium-sized conventional bomb, that also happens to scatter some amount of radioactive crap into the surrounding environment.
Whereas a nuclear explosion is a self-sustaining nuclear reaction, which produces a fireball that can engulf an entire city.
Given the option, I'd far rather stand a mile downwind of an exploding reactor[1], than a mile from ground zero of any modern nuclear weapon[2]. The solution to the first problem is walking away, and trying not to breathe too much of the crap in. There is no solution to the second problem, because you, and everything in miles around you would be instantly incinerated.
[2] https://youtu.be/r3l0G3XOUv4 - the fireball is a mile across. Anyone for miles outside the fireball zone will be turned into charcoal. Each modern ICBM carries 6-12 of these. That is what nuclear war will look like. Both sides in a nuclear conflict will fire hundreds of them, against opposing cities.
Because the effects of a nuclear meltdown are closer to that of a chemical attack and far away from that of a thermonuclear detonation. Blurry red lines cease to be lines.
When we have the stomach to go through with a plan so overwhelming that it would cause Putin to submit in fear.
That is a very high threshold.
No doubt there are people working on black flag political assassination attempts, but really the only other options are convincing non NATO members to intervene or launching bombers towards Moscow and making an ultimatum that won’t be perceived as a bluff.
Ultimately though i think Ukraine has to mostly handle this on its own and if it doesn’t win the only thing to be done is let it happen and completely isolate Russia from the global economy until they are broken. It is not a pretty picture when your only options are backing a nuclear power into a corner.
It appears that EURDEP (European Radiological Data Exchange Platform) data isn't being shared with the public at the moment. I'm not sure if this is because of the war, this attack in particular, or if they're having problems with their infrastructure due to people like me wondering what's going on.
Their simple map (https://remap.jrc.ec.europa.eu/Simple.aspx) shows the last update as being 03/03/22 22:00 UTC, but selecting a station doesn't give any current or historic readings.
Greenpeace wrote a report about nuclear power plants in Ukraine two days ago.[0] The short summary is, that a npp needs to be managed after shotdown, and the most likely scenario is a loss of offsite power like happened in Fukushima. Additionally, there is quite a bit of spent fuel on the site outside of the containment.
Operators of nuclear plant are civilians. They are not part of force. Civilians can be captured, they cannot surrender, because nobody asks them to do that. I never heard that police or army asks somebody unarmed to surrender.
"I never heard that police or army asks somebody unarmed to surrender."
I don't understand the statement. Either it is completely oblivious to daily reality, or it is hinging on some pedantic / language dependent semantic detail that should really be explicitly addressed.
Really? You have never heard anyone ever describe regular citizens surrendering to the invader? I feel like you are arguing a technicality here - if you are faced with people with guns of course you'd say "I surrender" even if technically that's not what you're doing.
TBH, Putin is not calling a war a war, the turkish governemnt took some time to say it's war too, etc. ('cos calling it a war would mean triggering consequences). So, government's are super technical too... (not saying it's good or bad, I don't know, just saying that they are extremely technical with their words)
Given recent moves to allow Ukrainians everywhere to bear arms in response to the invasion. It's rather reasonable to see that the Civilians, once they enter into defending a stronghold (in this case, just a power plant), that they are now considered a militia, which can surrender.
I looked up surrender in a few dictionaries, and none of them even mention this constraint as a secondary definition, much less the primary meaning. It just means: to give oneself up, submit, yield; relinquish possession or control over
So yes, those in charge of the plant surrendered it to the attackers.
Fortunately that kind of not a thing. Pulling fuel out of a reactor without special tools and training would 100% kill you, and trying to build a bomb with a fuel rod assuming you got it out would also kill you. Transporting that bomb without thick concrete or lead shielding would also kill you. Blowing it up would put a bunch of heavy dust in the air that would fall out quickly and could easily be washed off of anyone it got on without significantly endangering them as long as they don't consume it. And after all of that, NATO might get involved.
TL;DR it would take a concerted effort to build such a bomb without killing yourself only to build a worse bomb that would draw in NATO.
If they destroy the containment buildings, which might take more than mortar fire then the reactor would probably SCRAM since it's a PWR. There might be a steam explosion, and maybe some localized radiation leak. Really heavy arial bombardment could, if it broke containment, spread fissile material around the immediate area, cause a huge fire, and throw some radioactive debris into the air. That would all be quite bad, but not Chernobyl bad.
Chernobyl was a graphite pile reactor with no containment building, and none of those exist anymore fortunately.
I should aadd that VVER's like the reactor in question have missile shields for precisely this reason, and a bunch of other passive features. It shouldn't explode.
2nd Edit: what I’m concerned about is artillery hitting spent fuel containment. I don’t know if they used hardened casks, or if they’re using pools that might be in a less hardened building. Whoever is shelling this thing is insane, or very stupid.
Going through the livestream I may have found the missile that hit [1]. Timestamp is in the top left corner. Seems there were other weapons fired though.
Washington Post: “The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog soon said the blaze had not affected ‘essential’ equipment and that Ukraine’s regulator reported no change in surrounding radiation levels.”
Russia signed a pact guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for their portion of the Soviet nuclear stockpile [my misremembering, this was incorrect: and a large amount of money]. You can see how much signatures are worth with Putin.
This wasn't "messing around". For sure, that Russian unit was sent to capture the reactor. Wanting to control infrastructure like generators is an obvious and (fairly) rational strategic goal. Presumably the commander that ordered it felt it was worth the risk. That may not be a correct analysis (we'll see, I guess), but it surely wasn't done on a whim.
#Ukraine regulator tells IAEA there has been no change reported in #radiation levels at the #Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant site.
anyways, the news cycle nowadays and the misinformation is insane
CNN literally reporting "Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is on fire, according to the mayor of a nearby town."
Which again, sensationalist title the plant itself is not on fire. CNN and FoxNews literally saying it's another Cherynobyl - "Fears of disaster greater than Chernobyl as Putin's forces attack largest atomic plant in Europe"
Idk man, I get it's a war and shit is serious, but the information overload of propaganda from all sides is insane and is really fucking with people's anxiety and mental state.
I get what you are saying, and you are right stuff is sensationalized, but there is video of the facility getting shelled. The fire didn't start itself. People need to be anxious about this shit. The sad part is that we don't need any sensationalism to be anxious right now.
The Russians shelled an adjoining building from where they were being fired upon. This was captured on video and heavily sensationalized to an eye-rolling extent.
Frankly, I am not sure why Ukraine/West feel the need to broadcast propaganda - its not even necessary.
The hackernews crowd wants to pretend they are smarter than the facebookers who fall for fake news. But this is exactly what they do. Even though the original article is now updated to show the fire was not in the plant but outside its perimeter, you are downvoted and I was flagged for saying so. Even with ghost of kyiv nonsense making it extremely clear, western media/online nerds cannot accept that Ukraine is spewing out fake news. Out of desperation? understandably? Sure maybe. Still fake and you're still stupid for swallowing it
Risking to be heavily downvoted… but does nobody question the story line at all?
It makes no sense for Russia to start shooting at a useless office building. If they wanted, they’d drop a few bombs on the critical infrastructure and that’s it.
Maybe the rumors Ukrainian forces evolved them into an attack and planted the fire has some substance? This news is the perfect headline to further lure in the west to help, without any actually critical damage to your own land.
That's one of the biggest concern of this war. Ukraine is outnumbered and outgunned, and that's with Russia avoiding critical infrastructure and not leveling cities to the ground. For all practical purposes they're on their own.
A nuclear incident is pretty much their only (unlikely) hope to get some kind of foreign or NATO involvement.
He attacks a nuclear plant and creates the risk of a meltdown. The result will be to remind the EU about how scary nuclear power is and ensures public opinion stays firmly against the one power source that can wean them off Russian oil.
Also, it has strategic value as limiting power to the rest of Ukraine makes it harder to wage war. No power, less internet and communication, slowing the stream of awful (for Putin) pictures and videos of his brutal war.
And capturing it would be a propaganda coup at home. Putin stopped the evil Ukrainians from blowing up a massive dirty bomb.
I am quite sure he's just evil. A nuclear disaster as a result of russian shelling will for sure result in a direct NATO involvement. And despite all of it's propaganda, Russia cannot win a conventional war against NATO and nobody wins in nuclear confrontation. So I'll call him an idiot, because there's no wining this one. It's just stupid bully tactics.
There is no way to predict where exactly the toxic cloud will go[1] and it can affect Russians as much as the rest of Europe. Just settings part of an outside structure on fire is too risky and is not "Pure evil genius" but total insanity or military incompetence.
I would be happier if they blew up Chernobyl again as at least there is no more pressure cooker that can blow this shit high into the sky a seconds time.
"Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a 'special operation' that is not designed to occupy territory but to destroy its neighbour's military capabilities and capture what it regards as dangerous nationalists. It denies targeting civilians."
How very Reuters of them. I should have expected nothing less.
The problem is treating war criminals like they deserve an equal opportunity to explain their position.
It's indisputably a war of baseless aggression. Giving their narrative of it being a special operation to de-nazify is no different than giving nazis equal opportunity to explain their position on the Holocaust: an operation of de-bolshevization (which is what they actually said at the time).
Consider that there have been terrible things happening to people throughout the world, every day, for years. This is bad, of course, but I'd caution you that you're letting the media dictate your emotions. Did you feel this mad during the (still ongoing) Syrian conflict? How about when Russia invaded Georgia? Or the first Ukraine invasion in Crimea? In all three cases the threat of nuclear war was probably as high as today. And the atrocities during this war so far pale in comparison to those other three. And that's just conflicts involving Russia. Over the last few years there have been unspeakable atrocities committed across the continent of Africa - that make this look mild.
It's not that this is good or acceptable, but if you're just now getting mad, or just now seeing humans for what they're truly like, then perhaps this is a good lesson and an important milestone in the maturation process. Human nature has not changed so much over the last 80 years. It's good to be reminded of that, though the reminders are difficult.
The more I think about this kind of take, the less it makes sense. People on this site talk about American president and American race relations more then about China too. Because there are many Americans here. There are many Europeans here too and thus they talk about about war right next to EU. Indians here run to every discussion involving india. Asia biased forums do talk about events in Asia a lot too.
People in countries around Syria talked about war in Syria a lot. And in that conflict, America seems to be blamed for both intervening and not intervening enough. It is guilty of Russia bombing cities and Assad actions ... and also for helping rebels in actual fight. Because, in relation with Ukraine war, it is important to make America guilty of literally every bad thing everyone does in every conflict.
For me the difference between now and Syria is when Syria started, I'd see one or two stories a day in the AP when I checked the news. I didn't frequent HN so can't speak to if it was constantly on the news. I realize a lot of the reason were getting the info is because this is a war in Europe instead of Asia or Africa. I've had to use pihole to block several sites on a schedule to keep me from doomscrolling, maybe I need to increase my blocked time?
I'd love info on how people experienced World War II without TV as well as Vietnam and the first Gulf war when we had tv but before 24/7 news coverage on the internet and social media.
How do the atrocities in this war pale in comparison to those of the war in Georgia or Crimea? A Reuters article from two days ago says there have already been 2,000 deaths of Ukrainian civilians from the invasion alone.
Others have pointed out that, unfortunately, the threat of nuclear war never really went away, we just got better at ignoring it except at times like this.
At all times there are submarines just floating around out there in various oceans waiting to nuke someone with a ballistic missile. They can operate underwater for 3 months without surfacing. Someone can get a call and press some buttons and just vaporize a town filled with people they have never met. I lie awake at night thinking about this a lot.
Unironically, it is exactly that crisis that is key to understanding Russias actions right now, as there are many similar parallels. That, plus the 2.5T barrels worth of shale that Chevron and Exxon prospected underneath the Crimean peninsula.
If Russia really did go to war over securing some natural resources and a geopolitical strategic location, over a false pretense of something like liberation, it would sound so much like...well, us.
So let us take a quick moment of pause and realize that this demon lives well within our own borders, too.
Russia may or may not care for it's own wealth in the shale prospects, but it can't allow for Ukraine to have them. They've shown interest in being a western aligned democracy, and having such resource exports would make Ukraine much more wealthy. A wealthy, friendly Ukraine as an energy provider is much more attractive to Europe than Russia. They would have a much easier time being admitted to the EU and NATO, and it would be a severe blow to Russian pride and potentially economy, and the strategic position provided by being an energy exporter.
Yes, this is spot on. Russia has spent the last 10 years or so rebuilding pipeline infrastructure to avoid Ukrainian tariffs. Ukraine in response has begun to align itself with the West as it seeks to ramp up its own energy production, threatening the overwhelming majority of Russia's GDP. Sometimes these things really are simple. This isn't to excuse what Putin is doing, and he is performing some serious brainwashing on the Russian people. Let us hope that the Russian people wake up to the lies they've been fed and finally rid themselves of this man. The fact of the matter is, the majority of the Ukrainian and Russian people have much more in common than what separates them. My hope is His Holiness Kirill can also wake up from his slumber, set aside his notions that God cares about the restoration of the former glory of the Kievan Rus, and see what is going on around him, because he can act as a major unifying force if he chooses to do so.
If we equate Saddam Hussein with Zelensky, then sure. I'm not so sure the parallels are actually there, though. Intelligence tells us Putin's actual reasons for invading ukraine have a lot more to do with restoring the glory of the Russian Empire. Putin's "denazification" and "liberation" rhetoric seems more like a bone thrown towards those who are fair-minded and want to believe in an equivalence between Putin and W. I get that impulse, but I also think the just world fallacy can take us to some strange places and drag us all down to hell. Sometimes people are just evil.
Maybe projecting nihilism is a strategy of its own. If I act as if there is nothing I care about except my goal you will never convince me to give up. So you have to give up to spare casualties.
I have, however, heard the opposite argument: nuclear power plants are now extremely safe because of safety regulations, so we should build more of them.
It's actually quite common, I've experienced it personally many times because I am interested in the topic. Their price is basically uneconomical, and the argument in the end always boils down that the danger aspect is overblown, thus making them safe to an unnecessary degree. Example, first sentence in the article:
> Should any discussion of nuclear power go on for long enough, it becomes inevitable that someone will rant that the only reason it has become unaffordable is a proliferation of safety regulations.
This would have needed to happen a long time ago to have the altnerative energy sources in production today. Which also begs another counterfactual scenario: what if we had spent even a slightly larger fraction of the taxpayer r&d subsidies on renewables rather than the extremely capital heavy nuclear research on both military and civilian sectors, with many decades long dead-ends (breeders, gas cooled, liquid cooled, fission, etc), we'd be decades further along with solar and wind.
r&d in nuclear pretty much died down over past couple decades, it all went into wind and solar. and i think it's a mistake. safe compact nuclear reactors have been developed even with reduced capital, imagine where we could've been if we continued developing.
To have more nuclear power now the plant constructions would have needed to take place starting 30ish years ago, to account for the 15 year lead time per unit and to space apart the large number of construction starts to get an appreciable number of them operational. To have better renewables in the counterfactual r&d scenario, the earlier we diverted the resources the better acceleration payoff it would have had, ideally in the 50s to 70s.
What kind of sick mind one needs to have, to push this anti nuclear bullshit when the real issue is a fucking fascist invasion of Russia into Ukraine? For fucks sake..
You need to have some kind of an authority to argue like this. E.g. did you do anything about it? But even then it takes a special kind of stupid to behave like this.
yes, i've donated to ukrainian army that is fighting to stop the fascist russian scourge and i'm helping to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid so that people aren't dying because of fascist russian scourge. all of that hopefully helps ukraine last enough for russia to collapse and become a dead wasteland with no oil or gas exports.
I asked what are you doing to stop the world's dependance on russian gas because you brought it up in. Considering you are avoiding the answer in an emotionally charged way I bet the answer is nothing and that you own at least two motor vehicles and heat your home on natural gas (from Russia).
The argument you made is about the importance of nuclear because of russian gas. So the question is - see above. If you already forgot what you wrote I would be extremely happy to quote you.
Gentle reminder that the fog of war is in full effect and both sides of this conflict are guilty of spreading propaganda and misinformation. It goes with the territory but a dose of healthy skepticism is the best course of action for observers.
In times of war, the first casualty is the truth.
P.S. According to Reuters/MSNBC/US Official - There is no evidence Russia attacked nuclear reactors in Ukraine.
They have no intention of bombing the plant of course, or doing so in a way that would cause any serious destruction, especially when Putin's clear intentions are to take the entire Ukrainian territory; to me this is just psychological warfare to fuel the fear among other nations about nuclear dangers, so that both leaders and the public opinion will be against going at war with them. In theory, we (as EU) could intervene with traditional weapons so that the burden of escalating it further would still be on them; not an easy decision though.
None of those. Destroying critical infrastructure like power plants and radio towers is a common step on the invading a country checklist. Of course considering this was a nuclear plant, one should hope that they were careful enough to limit the damage to prevent nuclear fallout.
You're making a pretty serious assumption that they're doing something haphazard rather than something calculated and planned. What's your reason for first assuming incompetence?
IMO we want to believe that the second best military on the planet is not competent because it is more comforting than the idea that the second best military actually planned out this assault on a sovereign country.
The last time I checked, being Russian doesn't make you immune to radiation. Controlling land is pretty pointless if you've poisoned it into uninhabitability for the next few generations or so.
What makes you think that what they're doing has significant risk of making the land uninhabitable? All we know is that there's a fire at the perimeter. That's it. It could be that what they're doing has little risk. From reading the twitter threads, seen elsewhere in this comment section, that seems to be the case. Not surprisingly, nuclear power plants are made pretty well.
I don't think there's any evidence that they're acting irrationally, from within their context. Making the land uninhabitable would be irrational, for everything we know of their context.
I'm not sure I understand. Were they captured? Were the drivers killed? Did the drivers perhaps have relatives/friends in Ukraine? Were they told to leave them there?
They can already easily cut (or threaten to cut) main power lines anywhere nearby. It’s not like ukrainian army controls all the area except for the the plant itself.
So we’re back to the question: how can they be so stupid to attack the facility itself?
It could be for psychological reasons. Threatening nuclear war has been part of Putin's strategy and this reinforces that message. It is also a very visual way to drive the message home that they have leverage over Ukraine's power.
A lot of what people believe about what's happening at the plant is based on the statements of Ukrainian officials, who by some accounts are using it to call for NATO to impose a no-fly zone. A disaster at this plant would cause huge problems for DNR/LNR/Crimea, which Russia does not want. Amid the fog of war it's often a good idea to take a step back and wait for more evidence to present itself.
My best mental model for the leadership of Russia's Ukraine invasion is an abusive parent who can't get his kid to bend to his will. Repeated failed attempts cause the parent to become more emotional, destructive, and out of control of himself, so we've gone from just an unprovoked invasion with airport attacks, attacks on radar sites, and occupation of the exclusion zone; to trying to assassinate Zelenskyy and starting to target refugees, residential areas, and shooting at nuclear plants.
As Ukranians continue to fight back and the West plays economic games instead of taking decisive military action, the escalation will continue until, by the end, everyone will agree that we should have just risked the initial nuclear threats of Russia rather than having Putin start launching nuclear weapons after having also leveled most of Ukraine and done whatever other increments of catastrophic forms of abuse come to his team's minds unyil then.
Alternatively, Putin wins before he feels backed that far into a corner, or maybe he's deposed before we reach nuclear weapons. But I really can't picture him backing down from confrontation, given that he was of a mindset to invade Ukraine.
Right now, the trick would be to drop a line of bombs on that stalled convoy heading for Kiev, and to establish a no-fly zone. That would turn the tide of war. I don't think that's more likely to risk nuclear retaliation than actions we'll be forced into in two weeks. It is more likely to risk nuclear retaliation than simply moving NATO troops into Ukraine two weeks ago.
As with COVID, we seem to always do too little too late.
I agree completely (except I think your timeline for troop movements would be a little late). Putin even told us 'your move' when he called the troop movements an exercise. If we had responded forcefully, they would've gone away with nothing to show for it except some new propaganda.
I think a more accurate modal is an incel. Russia is a corrupt country nobody wants to be with. Ukraine wants to be more western and rejected Russia's advances, so Russia lashes out at Ukraine instead of improving itself.
The 'training mission' trope is as old as the Red Army and it's bullshit.
They pulled the same shit in 1956 when they got captured by the Hungarians and in 1968 when they invaded Czechoslovakia: 'We were told it was a training mission'. This is straight-up a survival tactic for the prisoners. They're playing dumb and acting innocent. It's impossible not to know by now where, what and why you are doing in a foreign country, in a fucking military convoy.
how could any of them possibly still think this is a training mission? they're in a different country shooting actual people and buildings, and actual people are shooting back at them.
Wow! These scenario role players are incredible. I'm getting so much training value! They fall down, cry, bleed out, and die just like somebody would in real life!
nice thread (this account is good to follow) disproving Ukrainiang propaganda, Western media saying Russians attacked nuclear power plant and put it on fire, while Russians entered without any shooting and then were shot at by Ukrainians causing fire in administrative building, so much for relying on Western media making money on causing panic and spreading misinformation
I gradually stop seeing this as a war just for the freedom of the Ukrainian people. This is a war for the progress of humanity. A war between the new and old worlds.
With more breakthroughs in nuclear fusion energy and policies [1], the gradual adoption of nuclear (as well as EV tech) will soon mark the end of old world. The implication of this is beyond anything anyone can conceive as we do not truly know what becoming a Tier 1 civilisation means. This could also mean new military tech that would render all existing fossil-fuel-based weapon systems inefficent things of the past. In this new world social mobility would mean different things too (as energy gets cheaper (which is the cost of pretty much every basic thing a modern industrial society depends on), things get more decentralized), old status quos will crumble as the cost-to-transform skyrockets.
Systems that come with top-down execution structure always optimize for cost-to-execute and not cost-to-transform [2]. This would give you advantages eg in a Nash equilibrium, etc, but it also means losing touch with the every-changing reality that is the world now.
It's less a war than a temper tantrum by the world's only mafia-country trillionaire, facing his own guaranteed death soon turning 70
And he doesn't have to "win" via occupation, all he has to do is destroy the place setting it back decades.
If any country undoes all the sanctions and seized property while he's still alive, he's "won".
He doesn't care about the lives on either side and there will never be justice for that even if he ends up hung by his own people (impossible fantasy outcome).
Imagine how even more destructive he'd be if he had unlimited "free" power via fusion, I am really certain fusion will initially cause more war than stop them because the money saved will go into military spending and once you have that buildup, someone always wants to put it to use.
Even if ITER finished today and worked - aren't we still AT LEAST 15 years away from Fusion energy being cheaper than solar?
It seems like the current renewable trend will phase out most fossil fuels BEFORE the most optimistic timeline for Fusion energy being a viable alternative.
Well.. Do not underestimate the incompetence blighting this world and the potentials and ingenuity in people that want to change. That's what I like to remind myself in uncertain times.
I would argue that this is a near equivalence of nuclear war with Ukraine. A well-/mis-placed Russian artillery shell could cause a loss of reactor integrity and meltdown, no?
EDIT: according to child comments, a meltdown is unlikely/impossible, but spread of radioactive particles due to a direct strike is possible.
Potentially. I'd worry more about coolant and power (to run the coolant pumps if the plant has to shut down) than about direct hits on a containment structure, but it's not like that won't eventually also cause problems if they keep doing it.
This is, so far as I know, the first time anyone has carried out a military attack on an operating nuclear plant. Nobody knows yet how that really plays out. But it looks like we all get to find out.
The bombed an unfinished plant that they believed would have been critical in paving the way for a belligerent dictator to obtain nuclear weapons courtesy of short sighted idiots in Europe.
Both the Iranians and the Israelis actually bombed the site one different operations in different years. Thereafter Saddam is now known to have said.
"Once Iraq walks out victorious [over Iran], there will not be any Israel"
It was both justified and didn't represent the risk that attacking this reactor represents.
No. It is many orders of magnitude less dangerous. It would potentially cause thousands of deaths, not hundreds of millions. This is true even if a melt down was caused, like Chernobyl, which others have already explained is quite improbable.
Chernobyl caused between ~100 and ~16,000 deaths, depending sensitively on how one models the effects of small (sub-natural-background) radiation increases over a large population.
Still, maybe we should be amending the list of war crimes to include certain types of sabotage of nuclear power plants.
In a war situation, shutting off highways and disabling power plants or oil refineries are all strategic targets that affect both the military and civilians. But shutting down a refinery is different than dumping all of the chemical tanks into the water supply, setting oil fields on fire, or making the nuclear plant blow up.
Yes, I agree. Its plausible to me nuclear power plants should have special protection during time of war.
The chief issue is that, unlike something like cultural artifacts, power plants have significant strategic military importance. Perhaps a rule that (a) fighting be confined outside a certain perimeter and (b) plant workers have special protected status like medics, and are required to obey shutdown orders if the invading military takes control of the perimeter (so that the invaders don't have incentive to physically destroy the plant).
It's not equivalent to nuclear war with Ukraine in either the sense of relative risk (for the reasons I gave) nor in the sense in which the term "nuclear weapons" is actually used. Russia intelligence agents poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium, but this was not called a nuclear attack because that's not what the term means.
One could argue, at most, that this would be equivalent to a radiological weapon ("dirty bomb"). But even then it wouldn't be correct because of the important difference between purposeful radiological dispersal and radiological dispersal as a side-effect of a legitimate military action.
Ah, behold, my fist is an atomic weapon because ultimately the damage it inflicts is because of the Coulomb repulsion force of the fist atoms with other atoms.
A single nuke would be more like 100k deaths, still several orders of magnitude safer. But yes, the actual danger posed by radiation is far less than what it is imagined to be
A few artillery shells probably won't breach the containment. Missile shielding is part of the plant design (I don't know what level of shielding; US plants are designed to withstand a strike by an airliner).
Not saying that the attack is thus acceptable, just saying that it will take a concerted effort to breach the containment.
How old's the plant? To what design is it built? I feel like the CFIT design basis is already a little optimistic, but we also don't know that that was the design basis in this case.
completed in 1989, with a 6th reactor added in 1995.
For what it's worth, the russian convoy is firing on the administrative building, not the power units themselves, but I don't know specifically what is in said admin bldg or what the ramifications for operation/shutdown of the power units/cooling systems works if the admin building burns down and/or gets shot up.
I'm certainly no expert, but I read a little bit about it before I commented. The reactors here do have a building intended to serve as containment. I didn't really see much assessment of how robust it is.
This is from last week and discusses the practical impacts of war around the plant being a major issue even if the plant isn't involved:
"In addition, Ukrainian power units are ready even for an aircraft crash, because the containment and the reactor vessel designed to withstand corresponding risks."
Russia doesn't need to control the immediate areas around nuclear plants in the initial phases of their invasion, it's lunacy that they aren't carefully avoiding them.
> Russia doesn't need to control the immediate areas around nuclear plants in the initial phases of their invasion, it's lunacy that they aren't carefully avoiding them.
We are over a week in, I think this is beyond the initial invasion timeframe. Russia has faced fierce resistance so I can understand a desire to weaken that defense.
It’s a lot harder to stage a defense when you have no electricity. Strategically it makes a lot of sense for Russia to overtake or shut down the power grid. If they do that with physical damage then there’s no need to control the immediate vicinity.
Because they would have to occupy the area where the lines were cut to prevent repairs? I don't know. I'm not justifying what Russia is doing, but it isn't surprising.
You'd think that nuclear energy would be pretty compelling economically if other power generation methods had to be designed to withstand a strike from an airliner
If an unprotected solar farm gets hit by a plane, some property damage happens. If an unprotected nuclear reactor were to get hit, we all know what would happen.
the danger of radiation has been greatly exaggerated and pales in comparison the existential risk of climate change. even accounting for black swan events like getting hit by an airliner, coal plants emit drastically more radiation than nuclear.
it's not a rational risk assessment.
making nuclear energy economically unfeasible by mandating that things be drastically overbuilt has doomed us all to climate catastrophe
I don't disagree that nuclear energy is good; I'm pointing out that you're strawmanning. A solar farm doesn't have to be protected from missiles, because if it gets hit with missiles, only it is destroyed. It harms nothing around it, if it gets destroyed or fails in some fashion.
If you want to represent nuclear, do it honestly; there are a million reasons why it's a good thing, a weak strawman doesn't help your case.
it's not a strawman. designing to requirements driven by fear and not rational risk assessment can make feasible technology infeasible.
if we designed airliners with a safety factor in line with people's fear of flying and not the actual risk of failure, they would never be able to get off the ground.
yet we require that nuclear power plants tolerate any conceivable failure mode, no matter how unlikely, or dangerous.
It's far less rational to keep building expensive and unsafe generation when cheaper and safer generation is already available - and can be built more quickly.
And that's before equivalent spending on research, plus tax breaks and subsidies.
That may be true for the number of actual plants we have, but public sentiment against nuclear is why we don't have 10, even 100 times as many plants as we do now. If you start shifting decimal points two positions to the right, and diminishing the distance between plants, between plants and critical habitat, by an order of magnitude (separation is square root of density per area), those numbers aren't quite as rosy.
100 might sound like hyperbole, but if, somehow, nuclear was guilt-free power, we'd be using at least twice as much power as we currently do. Eventually that much waste heat becomes its own problem (requiring more cooling to 'deal with')
Earth is _very_ big, safety numbers are given per kWh, waste heat is insignificant compared to total insolation and all other generation methods generate the same amount of waste heat (that’s the law). Solar wind and hydro kind of cheat with the accounting though.
These are the same sort of average calculations that are the reason the general public don't understand why 1.5ºC is going to be a shitshow. Peaks and troughs and local maxima are what humans will notice, and the averages lie a great deal.
I was more talking about the distance between plants as a function of the odds of encountering the Precautionary Principle with regards to radiation events, but heat pollution is something that I've already seen happen in a town near where I grew up, where an artificial lake intended as a cooling pond ended up being unfit for recreation due to encephalitis-inducing microbes that enjoyed the heat of the cooling system.
Heat pollution at the plant can be problematic depending on where the plant is and what cooling system you use. On the consumption end it exponentially contributes to the heat island effect. Not a huge exponent, but an exponent nonetheless. Doubling power consumption more than doubles heat pump power budgets, and pushes nearby systems that previously relied on passive cooling into requiring active cooling, which pushes more systems into active cooling, on and on.
I think the only time I ever really disagreed with George Carlin was his bit about how arrogant humans are to think that we can possibly ever do enough to alter the climate. Turns out we can. There are just so many of us doing our own little game of externalities. I wonder if he were alive today what he'd have to say about it.
Well, recall that the Fukushima meltdowns were due to loss of emergency power, resulting in the inability to circulate coolant through the reactor core. Any kind of damage to the power plant that results in such power loss or damage to the coolant system could plausibly result in a meltdown / hydrogen explosion in the reactor core.
Loss of coolant can have effects on the reactor and/or the spent fuel pool or container if there is such in the facilities. Any of these could go critical very quickly and ignite/explode.
But based on what happened in Fukushima, critical electrical/cooling systems and backups would have to be damaged in order to pose catastrophic risk.
While this is unlikely I'll probably lose some hours of sleep on this.
I very much doubt the Russians would do this on purpose (fallout would risk the whole operation and possibly Russian territory too) although the fighting around there is incredibly stupid.
Probably not. Reactors generally can't melt down the way Chernobyl did anymore. The most significant risk is a breach of the reactor chamber fragmenting the fuel rofs and spreading radioactive particles around, or a hit to the spent fuel stores doing the same.
Neither are good, but they wouldn't be nearly as bad as Chernobyl or a nuclear weapon strike.
> Reactors generally can't melt down the way Chernobyl did anymore.
a) "the way Chernobyl did" is technically correct (the VVER reactor that Zaporizhzhia is uses a difference containment strategy), but a distinction without meaning - a meltdown is a meltdown.
b) "anymore" - Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant was built between 1980 and 1996.
It's true that it is a safer design than Chernobyl, but yes it absolutely can still meltdown.
> The most significant risk is a breach of the reactor chamber fragmenting the fuel rods and spreading radioactive particles around
Note that this "spreading radioactive particles around" is probably more dangerous to health than a meltdown.
I'd say that how much radioactive waste gets expelled or leaked and how much energy goes into it makes all the difference in the world and each meltdown is probably unique.
nuclear scientist @CherylRofer is worried about the ongoing fighting around the administrative building. some highly trained people keep that place from melting down and now they've got bullets whizzing by their head and fires breaking out in their offices.
Ok this is good to know, thanks for clarifying. While not nearly as bad as the two scenarios listed, spreading radioactive particles near a population center of civilians could be grounds to consider this a nuclear war, intentional or not. Not on the same scale as a deliberate nuclear attack of course.
If radiation escapes it would be a "dirty bomb" equivalent event, it will speed up sanctions and nations will urge Russia to allow experts to inspect the damage.
A meltdown/explosion is possible if they damage safety systems/shielding. Still won't be seen serious as a "nuke detonation" event, but countries that receive fallout will be pissed off.
If Russia continues causing more nuclear pollution that affects it neighbors, yes, it could mean war scalation.
> Ukrainians who started firing at a Russian convoy with RPGs.
The way this is phrased makes it sound like the Russian convoy was minding its own business and suddenly Ukrainians started picking a fight -- which is clearly not the case.
Combat and fires could kill power supply that is actively cooling cores. Unless you have a detailed, up to date design diagram of the entire facility that proves the on-site and/or off-site power supply is not in jeopardy then you don't know what you're talking about.
Thank you for the link. I will keep an eye on this page. I wouldn't imagine that some damage to the exterior would cause an immediate spike in radiation. However, if damage has been done to critical components, these levels may slowly increase.
I searched Bloomberg (as you claimed that you saw it mentioned there), and this [1] appears to be the only coverage of it at the momement. There is no mention of radiation levels increasing in the area.
Thank you. Their article mentions a government employee saying elevated radiation levels were detected. They also say that this is unofficial until a public announcement.
But also in the same article: “..shells were falling directly on the Zaporizhzhia plant and had set fire to one of the facility's six reactors. That reactor is under renovation and not operating, but there is nuclear fuel inside, he said.”
"#Ukraine tells IAEA that fire at site of #Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has not affected “essential” equipment, plant personnel taking mitigatory actions."
I get it's a war, but I can't take the news cycle anymore. Full of unconfirmed BS. Ghost of Kyiv, Snake Island, etc.
Aside from the obvious "knocking the power plant out to cripple the city" argument there are probably better ways to do this than blowing it up. For example, controlling the area and literally turning it off. It seems wild, even by Russian doctrine, to do such a thing.
On the other hand, the Ukranian military has every reason to "salt the earth" with a potentially critical reactor in order to do as much damage to a Russian occupation as possible. Are the Ukranians this crazy? Well, to do this they wouldn't have to be much more crazy than Russians shelling it.
Something doesn't smell right here. In the article there is this quote:
> In an emotional speech in the middle of the night, Zelenskyy said he feared an explosion that would be “the end for everyone. The end for Europe. The evacuation of Europe.” “Only urgent action by Europe can stop the Russian troops,” he said. “Do not allow the death of Europe from a catastrophe at a nuclear power station.”
The undertone of this seems more threatening than fearful. Especially given Zelensky's overall response to NATOs lack of response. Additionally, Zelensky isn't much less corrupt than putin (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...).
I do not intend to sound like a Russian apologist here but rather be the devil's advocate. This doesn't make sense inside either country's war doctrine. It seems more like it's being used as propaganda by one side or the other. Very suspicious indeed. I don't think Russian conscripts are stupid enough to blow a reactor to turn it off. I also don't think Ukraine is stupid enough to use this to salt the earth. Yet, I find the official story fairly hard to believe.
- "A government official told The Associated Press that elevated levels of radiation were detected near the site of the plant, which provides about 25% of Ukraine’s power generation."
I mean, I agree that it'd be an incredibly inhumane thing to do, and a very bad idea that shouldn't occur
...but war crimes seem like they should only really be applicable to an aggressor. How can we tell another nation how it's allowed to defend itself? If you don't want to suffer inhumanity from an aggrieved nation, perhaps stop invading it.
The main idea behind a war crime is that it is an act which has limited military utility or in many cases is counter productive from a military standpoint but causes human suffering. That is, it is a clear and unnecessary act of violence. For instance killing prisoners of war since it is often more beneficial for a military to accept a surrender than to offer no quarter.
Most ethical systems argue that human beings have a right to protect their own life with deadly force, but if during a self defense encounter you intentionally go out of your way to execute bystanders you can not use self-defense as a justification. This is because in that case you are just using self-defense as a cover to murder people.
I don't understand why? Are you saying that they needed to melt it down now because they can't do it later, even though you then say that it'll be a prime target for future bombing which will most likely lead to a meltdown?
Or do you mean that "meltdown" is a safe state that would secure the reactor against future bombing?
Put yourself in the chief operator's perspective: An armed force has indiscriminately killed the plant's security that have guns far more powerful than anything allowed near the control room. If the reactor is in a state that would require the control rods to be reinserted to prevent melt down along with activating any authorization requirement to allow reinsertion, then when the orders come with guns pointed at your head and if you are allowed to talk you demand the occupiers leave and be permitted to re-insert the control rods to bring the reactor under control otherwise if they immediately kill you, then its their problem. Why demand they leave on first contact? A person pointing a gun or in this case shelling you with artillery is untrustable. If they initially obey, then it not only has bought you time, but an understanding that the attacker cares about the plant is established, which the operator has been entrusted with having as a value.
It becomes the highest priority as it is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and has been the largest Ukrainian power plant. Strategically, it makes sense to seize an asset while keeping it in tact, but bombs are not known for precision.
So, aside from the obvious nature of messing around with Nuclear generating station being an idiotic move. From a tactical move for Russia - clearly they want the generating station offline to cause further chaos in Ukraine and that it supplies 1/6 of the power I believe(?). Was the generating station fighting to say online / not surrender or did Russia just show up guns blazing?
It's clearly a tactically important source of energy for Ukraine.
Also - wouldn't it just be easier for Russia to destroy the substations nearby? I assume there would be some problems with all that excess power being generating if the substations were blown. The whole thing is pretty nuts.
I can't imagine being the ISO trying to balance the grid or ISO equivalent of the grid over there right now (amongst other impossible jobs/positions people are in Ukraine right now).
If the reactors are on, destroying any of the infrasture around it can be devastating. The reactors need external power to operate. If external power disappears, the reactors now need emergency power from diesel gen sets. If those fail due to any reason, the reactors will probably melt down - unless they have already been off for quite a while (~weeks would be necessary). If the reactors melt down, the VVER has both a core catcher and a containment. That's not bad and much better situation than Chernobyl. But other things may go wrong such as a pressure failure and potentially related control rod ejections that could cause the temperatures to rise and pressures to become higher than what the containment can handle.
The surrounding war environment, the stressed operators, etc mean that any of these failures are now more likely. It is reaonsable that external power will not be available, it is possible the gen sets will fail, it is possible the operators will do something stupid.
To put it simply, warfare is not a design basis accident for current light water reactors like VVER-800.
Yes, the power plants now need a stable supply of electric power or diesel for cooling in coming days, weeks and months as they have been shut off last night. A failure of cooling is what lead to the newclear disasters in Fukushima.
That's not correct.
It only takes a couple of seconds to shut down a reactor. https://qr.ae/pGdkkv
The article you link disagrees with you.
The chain reaction can be shut down in a matter of seconds. However, the reactor continues to generate a huge amount of heat for weeks afterwards. It's not as much heat as a fully-running chain reaction, but it's still enough to cause a catastrophe if cooling is not kept running - we're talking multiple megawatts of heating here. The cooling requires an external power supply. It was the failure of this external power supply that caused the problems at Fukushima.
There are newer reactor designs that are specifically engineered to be capable of cooling themselves on shutdown without an external power supply. However, most reactors in the world do not have that capability.
Your link supports the comment you are replying to; it says that after the reactor is shutdown, additional cooling is needed for some time, and that eg the Fukushima and Three Mile Island incidents both involved damage done by an inability to cool the reactors after they were already shut down.
No they are technically correct. In the reactor world "shut down" explicitly and specifically refers to chain-reaction-running mode. The reactors do still require active cooling for several days+ to avoid plant damage scenarios. Several comments on this page seem to not have a clear understanding of this difference.
Once the chain reaction is shut down - there is basically no way for the reactor to come alive (chain-reaction-wise) again on its own - not even if it's being bombed, shelled, etc. And run-away super(prompt)critical reactions are not even possible with this reactor design. These reactors are water-moderated - which means that water is used to slow down neutrons to increase their reaction probability. As the reactor heats up, the water gets less dense (even if it is still a liquid) making it a less effective moderator - this density decrease is enough to passively/automatically keep the reactor in a shut-down state. Residual decay heat from radioactivity of the fission byproducts post-shutdown is enough to damage the reactor internals for several days - hence the need for active cooling post-shutdown.
I've seen lots of crazy-exaggerated news reporting on how "bad" or "dangerous" this entire situation could be. It's not good, but neither is the war in Ukraine. It's not even remotely possible for this to be anything like Chernobyl, and I think unlikely to be nearly as bad as Fukushima (which in the grand scheme of the Tsunami - wasn't really that bad). In the war context, I don't think this nuclear plant situation is particularly notable beyond it providing a large fraction of Ukraine's power.
I am a nuclear engineer FWIW.
The only public statement I've read is that the Russian Army is concerned the Ukrainians would use their Nuclear Power Plants as dirty bombs.
It doesn't surprise me if they believe that considering the ridiculous stream of fantasy being spewed out of Russian leader and media.
anything is possible in war. if Ukraine was on the brink of losing everything and they had nuclear weapons, would they not use them against Russia? that's the whole point. if your state is about to cease to exist, you are desperate. for now, the war has not reached this point. if Ukraine where to try to use nuclear material now they would lose allies. but you don't know what the war will look like in 2 weeks. so I don't think it's fantasy.
No? Considering the nuclear power plants are in Ukraine, and whichever way the wind blows, it will at a minimum impact Ukrainians. And then you can't know where it will end up - maybe Russia, maybe Germany.
yes, whether Ukraine would actually launch such a bomb is debatable. it's not like it would change the tide of the war, it would be mostly for revenge. war is very unpredictable. I wouldn't rule out anything.
If the Ukranians are willing to sacrifice everything for the independence, chances are, they will get their independence, nukes or not. At least as long as they keep getting support from the west. If Russia keeps getting thousands or tens of thousands of body bags back each year, for 10, 20 or 30 years, eventually, they will tire of holding on to the Ukraine.
The cost may be millions of Ukrainian lives, so this all comes down to how much the Ukranian people is willing to endure for their eventual independence.
Every country has its propaganda and lies, but they're generally couched in half-truths. It's truly remarkable how the Russian flavor of misinformation sounds just like a pathological liar making up wild bullshit that nobody could possibly take seriously. That's been a tradition for decades, as far as I know.
This is a deliberate part of KGB style propaganda. It's not designed to convince people of any specific lie, but rather so muddle things that people become cynical about knowing the truth period. There's a book on the topic where the title kinda tells the whole story: "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible"
Keep in mind that you are likely seeing the Russian propaganda through a filter of western propaganda and interpretation.
With the internet and Google translate, you can easily go read for yourself. And it’s still pretty nutty with no western filter applied. The accidentally published victory unification speech is particularly crazy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20...
I think the gp was referring to the filter in your own brain, that was set up by watching western media.
The idea that you are somehow immune to this is unsustainable - I'm sure avid Putin fans feel the same, after all they have access to Google too.
It's just that we are privileged to live in a relatively free societies, where bias is self imposed groupthink as opposed to mandated by the government.
For an extreme version of this in action, you can see the early reporting in the American media of the Iraq invasion.
I was mostly referring to the filter outside the brain.
You are right that we also have filters inside our brains. But just like with the outside filter, we can make some efforts to get around them. Even if our efforts don't always lead to perfection.
To borrow your framing, collectively internal filters will manifest as emergent external filters. It can be considered emergent/systemic propaganda. Even the freest societies fall victims to this.
That's not at all to say we're doomed to be brainwashed; along what you're saying, with conscious awareness, effort, openness to reassess, and honesty (first and foremost to oneself) we can better ourselves and the social groups we're each part of.
Thanks for the link!
Yes, I agree that it's pretty nutty. It's just that to actually verify that we have to do a bit more work, like you suggested; otherwise we might just be bullshitting ourselves.
Reminds me of a recent US President. Very recent ...
It's certainly true for politicians too. Many politicians cherry-pick the facts that suit them best, but very few are so completely detached from reality as that guy was.
Makes me think of Baghdad Bob:
https://www.liveabout.com/baghdad-bob-quotes-4068522
> It's truly remarkable how the Russian flavor of misinformation sounds just like a pathological liar making up wild bullshit that nobody could possibly take seriously.
IIRC, the correct term is disinformation, and I believe the idea (at least sometimes) is more akin to "jamming" than any kind of persuasion (e.g. encourage passivity because it's too much effort to sort out the truth from the lies).
The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model -- Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
> The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model -- Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
Completely off-topic, but what a strangley formatted document. The pages of the PDF are 9x8 in.
The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth. And one of those (pravda) is a kind of a half-truth used to keep moving from the current situation.
Russians know they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever.
>The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth.
I looked into this, and found this blog post [1]. The comments are quite interesting, but the main post points out this isn't much different from English. In English we use synonyms for truth/true (e.g. authentic, factual, legitimate, etc) and lie (e.g. fabrication, falsehood, misrepresentation, disinformation) with different meanings too.
Maybe we shouldn't use vocabulary of a language to draw/imply further conclusions about a culture.
[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29814
The eskimos have fifty five billion words for snow but only one word for Bitcoin.
Pravda means truth. Pravda was also name of state journal. The half-truth is said as half-pravda. English has many words for lie too: misinformation, lie, untruth, false, deceit, deception, dishonesty, disinformation, distortion, evasion, fabrication, falsehood, fiction, forgery, misrepresentation, perjury, slander, tale. I got them from synonyms dictionary.
That does not say anything about English speaking people other then their language is rich and can express nuance.
English has a lot of synonyms, redundancy, alternatives, ways-to-say, and overlapping constructs. In that context, the many English words for lie is an uninformative truth. English has so many words for lie because English has too many words for everything.
> they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever.
Same can be said about the west. What matters is that there is free press, call it "picking your favorite lies", but it makes a big difference.
From my relatively uneducated knowledge pravda stems from pravo (legal rights) e.g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russkaya_Pravda it changed meaning over the centuries though
Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, noted that people more easily believe colossal lies, totally out of whack with reality, exactly because, well, who would say such a wild thing if it were not the terrible truth?
Unfortunately America has just shown us that it too can advance a wildly inappropriate and simply stupid individual to the highest levels of power.
But then he got replaced 4 years later. Unlike what happened in Russia.
But there's a real treath that he can become president again. The real problem is that there's big gap in how the democrats see the world vs how republicans see the world. From the outside it's really mindblowing how differently they see and interpret the world. And the same is happening all over the world.
When it comes to defense, republicans and democrats see the world similarly. It's the one topic which you could say there's no gap in their desires. Republicans and democrats place utmost value in the American hegemony.
That didn’t happen with Bush, who conjured up a premise with multiple lies in order to justify going to war. And then 3 years later, he got re-elected.
That was by far the most disappointing US election. Electing a bad president is clearly a risk of democracy, but re-electing a bad president, that's incomprehensible. And yet that was the only presidential election in decades where the Republican candidate got the majority of the votes.
> And yet that was the only presidential election in decades where the Republican candidate got the majority of the votes.
That election was 2004 of course. Reagan got 58.8% in 1984, so two decades prior (decades as you noted).
Obama got 52.9% in 2008. And prior to that for a Democrat? More than two decades prior, wherein Jimmy Carter barely scratched out a majority popular vote at 50.08% in 1976.
Lyndon Johnson of course got 61% in 1964. The monster that put us deep into Vietnam and wrecked the country got the highest popular vote percentage for the Democrats in the past century.
The two highest in modern US history, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon. What does it say about the people of the 1960s and 1970s? It says a lot of terrible things about their ability to judge character and make rational decisions.
I think parent actually meant plurality, at least that’s how I read it.
However these numbers are quite interesting. Some people attribute Nixon’s second election to his promise of withdrawing from Vietnam and one can easily blame the war for the problematic 1968 election for the democrats. LBJ was probably even gonna be the first sitting president to loose in a primary before he announced his non-bid.
I’m guessing the 1964 for election he was pretty much just riding the popularity of the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy. (Plus the war hadn’t escalated at this point).
So it took 7 more years with Bush. Again, not comparable to Putin - not even close.
Actually just 5. I miscalculated somehow that there are 3 years between 2003 and 2004 (?)
However the significant bit here is the fact that Bush was re-elected despite lying about the reasons going to war.
Yes, because Trump is no Putin when it comes to maintaining power, and the US is a much more stable democracy with strong checks and balances.
Definitely a strong case for term limits. If Putin had left after 8 years, he would now be considered a great president. He wasn't perfect, but he stabilised the Russian economy after the bankruptcy of the 1990s.
He could have left a great legacy, but his addiction to power has become his ruin. And quite possibly that of Ukraine and Russia.
Didn’t Putin get his term limits removed? He did stick to them initially when his PM Medvedev was President.
i wonder how putin got there.
Yeah, the capitol coup guys weren't well trained and failed, fortunately. Everybody has a lot of luck
...this time.
We have a history of that, unfortunately.
I mean… Trump was lying about how many electoral votes he got. It was easily verifiable. Also such a stupid lie because he did have enough electoral votes to win the election anyway. But still! He fabricated that number. He was also truly in pathological liar territory.
Also consider his insistence that his inauguration crowd was larger than Obama's, when the photos clearly showed that wasn't the case. It's a completely meaningless lie. He doesn't accomplish anything if people were to accept it as truth, and it was quite obviously at odd with reality, and yet he just kept going on about it.
That's not a strategic lie, that's a pathological lie. That's someone who simply cannot tell the truth.
No matter how much I consider Trump a dimwit liar, I can't completely shake off the other explanation, that of yesmen telling him whatever they thought he would like to hear. I suspect that in a position like that, even making up falsehoods is conveniently delegated. You don't lie, you just select convenient sources to parrot. Putin must have spent recent years in an even worse yesmen-bubble, the shift from him being considered dangerously competent to him being considered dangerously senile should really not come as surprising as it does.
I'll take the downvotes too. We had a president who idolized Putin and still praises him to this day. If we think this sort of thing can't happen here, or aren't clear eyed about the threat he and his enablers still pose, we are in even more danger.
Yes, propaganda and political lies is certainly not confined to Russia or backwater dictatorships. In America you also had that president's opponents concocting lies and peddling insane and baseless conspiracy theories for years about him colluding with Putin to hack the election and other such nonsense. That was even more infantile and simple than the propaganda that comes out of Russia.
We’ve got all the money we need from Russia
From the uranium we sold them?
Everything in the Mueller report was true. No republican has denied that, or come to any other conclusion in their committee reports. Trump was cleared in the impeachment not because of the contents of the report, but whether what happened technically constituted collusion, or whether republicans felt that convicting him was necessary for what he and his associates did in fact do.
This is what the last report from the republican majority senate intelligence committee wrote [0]:
> It is our conclusion, based on the facts detailed in the Committee's Report, that the Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process[,] and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modern era.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_...
The Mueller report clearly states they did not find evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded or conspired with Russia to interfere with the election. That nonsense was all a conspiracy theory. For example Adam Schiff never had the "ample evidence" for it, despite being on the house intelligence committee. That was bald faced and repeated lie peddling this conspiracy theory. Unfortunately many fall for these "stolen election" conspiracy theories. Probably as a coping mechanism more than anything.
I know you're not responding in good faith, but I want to respond with actual quotes from the Mueller report, since this is on a public forum.
> "While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."
> "[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment."
> “Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” Mueller wrote. “The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”
> "the President engaged in a second phase of conduct, involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation."
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/what-the-mueller-report-sa...
In case it's not obvious, the point of obstructing justice is to prevent facts from coming out.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/obstruction-justice-mueller-repo...
You're the one not responding in good faith because I never said anything one way or the other about obstructing justice. That's clearly a far more complicated and nuanced question seeing as he was head of the executive at the time.
The idea he colluded with Putin to hack the election was always an utter baseless fantasy. There was no evidence for it ever. Not from Mueller, not from Schiff, not from 17 intelligence agencies. It was a conspiracy theory.
You ever wonder about people who fall for baseless conspiracy theories about stolen elections? How could they possibly fall for these politicians and other assorted nutjobs telling them the election was stolen, without ever providing the evidence? Dumb uneducateds! They're nothing like us enlightened intellectuals.
Your red herring arguments and whataboutism is noted. Stretching arguments about obvious ties to russia to being "election = stolen", while ignoring the actual 40℅ of the country who still believes trumps bullshit. I will also note that there were dozens of confirmed contacts between trump and Russia and you see the bromance still playing out to this day.
I'm clearly saying you didn't fall for the baseless idiotic conspiracy theories about Biden stealing the election or Trump colluding with Putin to hack the election, or being a "foreign agent". Not sure what you're all worked up about.
And I'm not talking about "obvious ties to Russia" whatever that means (everyone seems to have weird ties and uranium sales and gas company deals with Russia, Ukraine, etc). I'm talking about the delusional baseless conspiracy theory that Trump colluded or conspired with Putin to hack or otherwise influence the election. That was the conspiracy theory that so many were repeating and so so many gullible people fell for.
Gave him free media attention without any more media dislike than he already suffered, I guess?
There were world-wide protests against that war [0]. You might consider that many of the people commenting here will have been involved in those protests, or are otherwise well aware that the justifications were a huge flight of fantasy. That doesn't mean that current news from the Russian media isn't also a huge flight of fantasy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...
Iraq was a terrorist state full of abuses
Russia is a terrorist state full of abuses invading a peaceful democratic country.
This is incomparable.
"Democratic" is used as a thought-terminating cliche. Just a few years ago Ukraine had an insurrection because of their election results and overturned the election to install a new leader. It's a corrupt kleptocratic state very similar to Russia, it's just more of the money comes from American interests than in Russia, and that upsets the Russian kleptocrats who don't want American influence in Ukraine.
Similarly, although Ukraine is clearly much more peaceful relative to Russia, there has been low-level conflict for years (including violence in the insurrection and fighting in the contested territories) and there are verifiable claims of them having committed atrocities.
All this can be true and Russia can still be engaged in morally (strategically may be a different story) unjustified aggression.
That's objectively and demonstrably false. The revolution (not an insurrection) didn't happen because of election results (the election was in 2010, the revolution started at the end of 2013 and continued into 2014). It started because the president decided to halt the integration of Ukraine with the EU and was peaceful until the government had decided to escalate.
And if you're talking about the Orange Revolution from 2004, that was peaceful all the way through, and lead to a second round of the election, not installing a new leader.
You’re going to have to explain the difference between an insurrection and a revolution to me.
How does that justify Russian actions right now?
I agree that remembering these events is a crucial enterprise in a moment like this.
And, since both wars are based on bombastic lies, it seems consistent, given this act of remembering, to call the aggressor in each to account.
With these memories still fresh in terms of the cognition of the collective internet, perhaps now we can begin to get serious about a future in which the streams of fantasy which are reliably produced by hegemonic states (or mutually-assured-destructive states) are muted indefinitely, and the capacity for capricious warfare stemming from them dismantled.
This whataboutism has to stop. One bad thing doesn't excuse another. Would you suggest that it's OK to use nuclear weapons because the US used two of them in WW2? I hope not.
The invasion of Iraq was based on lies and this is terrible. The invasion of Ukraine is based on lies and it is also terrible.
Didn't read it as whataboutism. Was more a call to consider the "ridiculous stream of fantasy being spewed out of <country> leader and media" is rhetoric which is almost always applicable somewhere. The spewing's given some credit elsewhere, just not here because they've been pretty cleanly labelled as the enemy. Also maybe because it's batshit, but the people who are unsure of that will have a harder time having a discussion about it because so many people are jumping to emotional or canned responses.
Russian ship, go fuck yourself.
Russian bot, convert yourself into a sunflower.
One thing that I've seen is "preemptive whataboutism" - essentially, when Russian state media make a wild unreasonable claim, one that's not merely false but invokes a "WTF how and why would someone even think of something like that??" feeling, then sometimes it turns out that this is something that they are planning or doing at the time, and that is why they have considered that this is a plausible thing that others might do as well and can be reasonably accused of actually doing.
I also noticed for a long time, bad actors tend to project their behavior on to others to try influence negative public opinion toward their opponents.
Seems a popular strategy as it acts as a seed for those who don't question, it provides plenty of false arguments to raise when debating an issue.
Out of Ukraine and Russia, now we all know which country is more likely to use a dirty bomb.
I'm not sure I understand you. Of those two Ukraine is surely more likely to use a dirty bomb; purely because they don't have access to a traditional nuclear arsenal.
If Russia wants to use Nuclear weapons then they only need to enter the codes. That would probably be the final straw for western powers putting boots on the ground though.
Why would you use a dirty bomb in your own country?
Now Russia has control of the power plant and actual means to do it, if they decide that they want to depopulate that region a bit. Launching nukes might trigger a retaliatory strike, so I don't think that it was ever on the table.
Nuclear gaslighting.
devious ukrainians even built a whole plant in advance to ensure their genocides
Neo-Nazi Nuclear Power Plants. Sounds like Putin plays Wolfenstein.
And we're all fungible sprites.
Isn’t one major problem with nuclear is that it’s hard to shut down when you don’t need it? Hopefully they understand that
They're easy to shut down, but when the reactor is first turned off the core is full of unstable isotopes that are byproducts of the fission reaction. Those isotopes continue decaying even with the reactor "off" until the become stable, and they put out enough heat to cause a meltdown on their own. This means the reactor needs active cooling for a couple of weeks until it reaches a safe state. That's what happened at Fukashima; the reactors were shut down when the earthquake hit, but then the tsunami disabled the backup generators that were powering the cooling pumps, and they weren't able to restore cooling before the core melted.
I did not know about that aspect of nuclear plants and in my non-expert view it would be a major point against nuclear plants in the discussion how to solve climate change (at least until we learn how to secure them in case of a war). Am I wrong?
EDIT: I would also like to ask if you can recommend some source where curious layman with no knowledge of physics could learn a bit more about this.
You are not wrong that it's a major point in the discussion, but even with that it can still be better than the alternatives for baseline production (the part that intermittent sources like solar and wind can't cover). Remember that coal power add insult to injury by continuously releasing radioactive pollution.
You’re right about old nuclear design.
The new designs are built with the expectation that power can be cut off. The new design shut themselves off passively without any damage (that we know of) when the power is gone.
Seems to me like it should have been this way from this start. Catastrophic meltdown caused by power loss, no matter how many power backup systems there are should have been a non-starter. Basically requiring a 100% SLA, 6 nines not enough, with catastrophic consequences for failing to adhere to 100% uptime. That is scary as hell.
> I did not know about that aspect of nuclear plants and in my non-expert view it would be a major point against nuclear plants in the discussion how to solve climate change
It's a reasonable criticism to make, but I think it tends to be a bit overblown. Modern reactors have redundant layers of systems to prevent such a disaster from occurring. In the ~60 year history of nuclear reactors Fukashima is the only time this type of failure has happened (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were very different), and even then it was due to a cascading series of problems:
* In hindsight it was a really poor idea to locate a nuclear plant by the ocean in a region known for strong earthquakes and tsunamis.
* The backup generators flooded because they were located in the basements, another poor decision for an area at risk of tsunamis.
* TEPCO had additional generators and batteries on site within 6 hours of the earthquake, which was in time to prevent a meltdown, but they were unable to connect them to the plant's electrical system (I don't recall the details of why).
It's also worth mentioning that this is only a problem with large reactors. Smaller designs like those used in ships and submarines still have decay heat, but the reactor core is physically smaller so that it doesn't contain enough isotopes to cause a meltdown. Many nuclear advocates believe that we should be building more nuclear plants with smaller reactors for this reason as well as smaller reactors being easier to operate without getting into a dangerous state.
As far as reading, I highly recommend Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey [0]. It's very well written, aimed at a total layman, and covers basically everything that has gone wrong since we as a species started seriously messing with nuclear materials in the 19th century.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1605986801
Russia most likely designed and built that reactor and the others in the country, back when it was part of the Soviet Union. I think it's safe to say they fully understand and are capable of operating nuclear reactors like it.
edit: Construction started on it in 1980. This is a Soviet designed and built reactor. Russia should have no problem maintaining it.
It is highly unlikely there are be nuclear scientists with that knowledge amongst the armed forces currently invading Ukraine. The type of reactor may be known but each reactor and its instruments, controls and protocols will be unique in some way. The only people who are qualified to run this reactor safely are the staff who work there every day.
It's not impossible, though. Russia seems to have pressed a lot of civilians into service. Ukraine recently captured an entire squad of school teachers.
Per Wikipedia, all 6 units are VVER-1000 [0]. So, unlike RBMK, water-moderated / negative void coefficient.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Design
Usually they have fail safes that will more or less immediately shut them down. On any reactor designed in the last 50 years, they pretty much default to a safe state, as they require power to keep the failsafes open.
Starting back up after is the slow part.
The one snag is that even with the reactor shut down (just drop all the control rods in) you still have to deal with the decay heat.
Which, in the case of a controlled manual shut down shouldn't be a problem.
It's not a problem if you can continue to run the cooling system for quite some time. If you bomb the plant or its connections to the outside, that might be a problem - just as in Fukushima, where a key cause of the disaster was that the cooling system could not be properly powered when required.
No clue how old the Ukrainian reactor (and its design) is. Perhaps more than 50 years?
My understanding is that it's relatively easy to shut down, but costly/time consuming to start back up.
The plant has been offline for some time due to renovation.
I read it was just the one reactor (the one whose building was damaged in the attack).
Purposely causing nuclear disasters is one way to ensure a country can never join NATO or the EU
Putin doesn't have to occupy the country to "win", all he has to do is set them back to the dark ages and make everyone (who can) flee.
He can't be allowed to get away with this. Ukraine needs a "no fly zone" ASAP
You realize that instituting a no fly zone means the US shooting down Russian aircraft, right? Which means a hot war between US/NATO and Russia. That is something that the US should absolutely not engage in, because the stakes at that point are the survival of the species, rather than just Ukraine.
We need to not normalize the idea of a no fly zone, no matter how gut wrenching watching this war gets.
Ukraine is already winning the war in all domains except air. Air support is all we need to have a clear win here. At this point NATO has a choice of engaging Russia at Ukrainian territory now, or at NATO territory later.
You're operating under an assumption that Putin will only use nuclear power if we cross some imaginary line. We analyze agreements, fine print, war conventions. Those things don't matter to him. If he feels he is losing this war he will threaten nuclear weapons anyway. He may threaten it if he doesn't get exactly what he wants. We need to stop normalizing the idea that there is some holy line which is we just stay away from bad things won't happen.
Putin just moves the line wherever he wants and you will keep dancing around it. This naive thinking really needs to die already.
As abhorrent as it sounds, if the Russian government authorizes use of nuclear weapons, it might only be exclusively to get Ukraine to surrender and end the war on Russian terms. I don't think their designs will be to go nuclear on rest of Europe.
That's just the nuclear salami method. Declare you're only using nukes locally and everyone else better not piss you off. Take that slice. Repeat.
Nuclear salami doesn't work on NATO territory, so we can assume that is an unlikely scenario... But, hey, what do you know... if Putin is really as unhinged as the Western media claims him to be. As for me, I can't bring myself to trust the Western media in the times of war. Not after the farce that was WMD.
A no-fly zone is no justification for nuclear escalation. Internationally, the only justification for a nuclear attack is in retaliation to another nuclear attack. That is it.
Putin has made it clear that he will also launch a nuclear attack in case of an "existential war", which means a war where Russia itself is being attacked with the purpose of conquering or destroying it.
A no-fly zone is not that. There is no reason for Russia to escalate to nuclear, except for Putin's vengeful ego. Because everybody knows that if Russia goes nuclear, it would be the end of Russia. Everybody in the nuclear chain of command knows this. Even if Putin is actually insane enough to order a nuclear attack (he might be, I don't know), anyone of any competence in the military will ignore those orders, because it would end their country and kill their family. (Although you could ask whether there is anyone of competence left in the Russian military; Putin seems to replace competents with loyalists, and the incompetent execution of the attack on Kiev doesn't inspire much confidence here.)
And if Putin's vengeful ego will make him order a nuclear attack, then losing this war will probably do that anyway, whether or not NATO or EU had anything to do with it. And there is no way Putin can win this war. Ukrainians have made clear that they will continue to fight, no matter what. If Kiev falls, they will continue to fight. Any city that Russia takes, will be Ukrainian again the moment they leave. For Ukrainians, there is no surrender possible to a man who wants to enslave them. If this war continues, it can only become a massacre. Putin would have to kill every single Ukrainian, and I'm starting to believe that he would. It would be another holocaust.
I think a no-fly zone is the only option.
> A no-fly zone is no justification for nuclear escalation.
Not directly, no - but by induction, probably.
NATO fighter jets attacking Russian aircraft & SAM sites would likely be used by Russia to justify strikes against the airfields those NATO planes operate from. So then you have Russia attacking airfields in NATO countries. Already that's terrifying because you have missiles launched by Russia flying at, say, Germany - and you don't know until they hit if they're nuclear, chemical, conventional, or what. Next step you probably have NATO counterstrikes on Russian land. That puts you right on the edge of nuclear scenarios very fast. No world leaders should even remotely be considering going there.
> Internationally, the only justification for a nuclear attack is in retaliation to another nuclear attack. That is it.
Neither the US nor Russia accept this premise.
> Putin has made it clear that he will also launch a nuclear attack in case of an "existential war", which means a war where Russia itself is being attacked with the purpose of conquering or destroying it.
Are you sure about that, to the point of risking the continuity of the species and all of our modern civilizations upon that? If one can claim that the Jewish population in Ukraine is actually Nazis and have many of their citizens believe it even as the economy is collapsing, i doubt that justifying even greater crimes against humanity or other horrible actions is out of the question.
It breaks my heart to see that bullies like Putin are allowed to largely get away with what's going on (apart from support for Ukraine by the international community, though that's essentially funding a proxy war and civilians and the culture at large will still suffer immensely), but you also have to understand the reluctance of other countries to escalate.
And to prevent anyone dismissing the above arguments due to my biases towards the western perspective, i've seen people on /r/russia attempt to justify their military's actions by recalling past actions of western regimes. Just to be clear, i condemn all actions like this, regardless by whom they're perpetuated: two wrongs don't make a right. Humanity should learn to talk, though i fear that there are irreconcilable differences as well.
I absolutely do understand the reluctance to escalate, and I share it. I don't want that war to escalate at all; I want to de-escalate. Away from bombing civilian targets.
And I understand that western countries are reluctant to impose a no-fly zone out of fear that Putin has gone insane and might resort to nuclear escalation, but I think the risk of him resorting to nuclear escalation already exists if he can't have his way with Ukraine. And there are a lot of Russians who strongly disagree with this war and would probably support a no-fly zone.
I fully admit that if Putin has indeed gone nuts and isn't merely playing games, then we have to trust the Russian military in control of the missiles to do the right thing, but I think that trust is also warranted; many Russian soldiers already don't want to fight, and I'm sure the more competent commanders are well aware that a nuclear attack would be suicide.
> And I understand that western countries are reluctant to impose a no-fly zone out of fear that Putin has gone insane and might resort to nuclear escalation
No, the fear is that Putin is basically sane and operating under something like normal great power expectations despite his crimes of aggression, and thus will not attack NATO countries for fear or nuclear retaliation, but will escalate against NATO countries if they intervene directly against him, potentially and quickly leading to nuclear war.
If they thought Putin was insane, the marginal risk between aiding Ukraine and intervening directly would be less, not more.
Putin has never claimed that the Jews in Ukraine are Nazis.
He is claiming that the Neo-Nazi units of the Ukrainian military operating in the south of the country, who harbor Nazi tattoos and whose flags represent the Black Sun and the rune used as the symbol of the "Das Reich" SS division, are probably Nazis. The Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant mentioned, in his manifesto, that he had visited those guys.
Last year a UN resolution was motioned to condemn Nazism and Neo-Nazism. Only two countries voted against: the United States and Ukraine.
This doesn't justify any war of aggression, of course, but you cannot pretend that there is no Nazi problem in Ukraine either.
Of course he is not claiming that the Jews in the government in Kiev are Nazis, because that would be absurd, but it's pretty clear that they are tolerating Nazis in the military for very cynical reasons (they're actually very effective fighters and are employed to fight the separatists in the Donbass region).
This is bananas. They need our help.
We absolutely need to keep pushing for a no-fly zone and enforce it. This is now the world's war, and has reached far beyond the politics internal to Russia and Ukraine.
Yeah no, it would be bananas to engage Russia directly. We engaged in plenty of proxy wars during the Cold War, we never went direct.
> We engaged in plenty of proxy wars during the Cold War, we never went direct.
In fact, we went direct fairly regularly, but only in circumstances where we (or they, or, in a few cases both) maintained superficial (not always really plausible, as both sides would often protect the fiction to avoid escalation) deniability.
That is why, for instance, radio intercepts of North Korean pilots in the Korean War showed they tended to switch from Korean to Russian a lot under stress.
Haha interesting! I thought that we usually stopped at providing weapons, training, etc. I wonder if there’s something similar possible here.
If RF will blow up nuclear reactor, Ukraine and EU will be uninhabitable, but USA will be safe.
> Purposely causing nuclear disasters is one way to ensure a country can never join NATO or the EU
Why? Nuclear disaster is bad, but how would it ensure that a country can _never_ join NATO or the EU?
Ukraine already had the Chernobyl disaster on their soil, and I don't see that one as keeping them out of either organisation _forever_.
>> Purposely causing nuclear disasters is one way to ensure a country can never join NATO or the EU
> Why? Nuclear disaster is bad, but how would it ensure that a country can _never_ join NATO or the EU?
> Ukraine already had the Chernobyl disaster on their soil, and I don't see that one as keeping them out of either organisation _forever_.
And didn't the EU pay a lot of money to help them build a new containment building for it?
It's a bizarre leap to say a nuclear disaster would disqualify a country from joining NATO or the EU.
Even though it was on Ukrainian soil, still: USSR had Chernobyl disaster, not Ukraine. It’s one of the reasons Ukraine separated from USSR.
I suspect that legally speaking Ukraine is one of the successor states of the USSR?
Doesn't matter too much for the point I made in any case:
If a nuclear disaster were to happen in Ukraine now, NATO and EU would also not blame it on Ukraine.
So, USA used nukes 2 times, while USSR blow up 1 nuclear reactor.
2:1
If you want to count it like that:
Both USA and USSR nuked themselves a whole lot more when testing nuclear weapons. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests
gp was saying that if you blow up the country enough, there's no country left to join NATO.
If they ride up to aspirant stairs with the EU, soon there would be a country again rising of the ashes.
EU is no elixir, though.
That's a fair point in general. Exploding all nuclear reactors in Ukraine isn't going to do that though.
And, of course, Russia could do much blowing up with conventional weapons, too.
Just one nuclear reactor can be used to create continent wide Red forest. Chornobyl disaster was just an incident without evil intent. Small fraction of nuclear fuel was released into atmosphere. With evil intent, much larger percent of nuclear fuel can be turned into thin dust and released into atmosphere. Larger reactors contain much more nuclear fuel. With evil intent, much more radioactive elements, such as radioactive iodine or radioactive noble gases, can be breed in reactor before blow up. With evil intent, safety systems can be disabled to produce maximal amount of dangerous elements. Depending on time given for preparation and technique used, it can be from 1 Fukushima to 10k Chornobyls. If NATO will give initiative to Russians, they can blow up reactor in good weather, so RF will not be affected, but EU will gone.
Maybe. I am sure you can do more damage, if you optimize for that, than an accident would do.
However: for a nuclear power like Russia, blowing up nuclear reactors only makes sense if they can make it look like an accident.
Otherwise: just use your nukes.
Putin might nuke Warsaw an hour after the no-fly zone is imposed. He's that crazy.
No he isn’t, then he’d be at war with at least 3 other nuclear powers. You know Poland is both EU and NATO right?
He has a difficult time winning the war already, he’d never be able to win if he pulls in more countries.
In the meantime I fear he is indeed that crazy. He repeatedly stated that his goal is to wipe out Ukraine at any costs. He is a like a little child that doesn't get his way and then blindly hits at everything in his reach.
It is a political move to appear that crazy.
Russia is desperate to deter EU/USA from involving itself more in the war, and the only way it can do that is by treating to escalate to nuclear war.
But that threat is only effective if people actually think that you will do it, so they must play this so that they seem crazy enough to start a nuclear war.
It's a bit like someone blackmailing you for money for something illegal you did together, only way to get you to pay is to show that they are really willing to expose your secrets, even if they might be exposed also. And once you believe them and start paying they will continue to demand money from you.
Can you post a link to a video him saying that, I never heard it
Would also be curious to see that video as it'd be very damning. Else it's just more Fake News, just from the other side this time.
As always, apply the Falsifiability principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
One occasion was the latest phone call with Emanuel Macron (French President) Putin stated:
> the Kremlin said that Mr. Putin had told his French counterparty
> that his main goal was “the demilitarization and neutral status of Ukraine.”
> Those goals, the Kremlin said, “will be achieved no matter what.”
The only English source I could find quickly was this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/world/europe/putin-macron...
What does crazy mean? Irrational? I don’t think so. He is currently following the Nash equilibrium strategy for fighting a war with a non-nuclear power.
Edit: by your terminology I would consider Ukrainians to be crazy. This a good thing and the reason why I’m rooting for them. They’re the underdog. The rational thing for them to do was to capitulate as soon as the invasions started. It takes a “crazy” level of conviction to the do the irrational thing here.
No, capitulation would be irrational, because it would mean they would be controlled and enslaved by Putin. Ukraine has lived under that yoke before, and will do everything possible to prevent it from happening again. There is no surrender possible for them, and that's why Putin cannot possibly win this war.
The only rational response to that would be a nuclear attack on Moscow. Likely, though, he just wants to make you think he’s that crazy. Madness is a major component of MAD.
Indeed. A responsive deterrent is only a deterrent if you believe the other person will absolutely, 100%-of-the-time, without-blinking-an-eye execute the strike.
If you think they might not, because ethics and morals, then the deterrent's value is discounted by your percentage of doubt.
I know I'm steelmanning like a crazy person right now, but a valid reason for Russia to seize those power plants might be to prevent Ukrainians from using them as huge dirty bombs in a desperate last strike.
Why would they dirty bomb their own land? If anything it's a reason to have already taken some materials offsite to dirty bomb Moscow later. Or for the invaders to threaten dirty bombing if they're about to be driven away (like they're already doing with their nuclear arsenal).
In this scenario, I imagined that they would have totally lost the country and just wanted to do as much damage as possible.
But yeah, it was a stupid theory, too bad I cannot delete it anymore. At least it triggered better theories in this thread, though.
Nah. They just want control of the power. It's a lot of leverage, and they want to take over the country, so they will need it.
The Ukrainians are fighting for their own land. I don't think that there's a single one of them that would deliberately cause another Chernobyl (remember that they have some experience with what happens when reactors go kablooey).
But they seem to be quite persistent, in not just just rolling over and letting the Russians have their way. I suspect that they've got plenty of other nasty little surprises in store.
One of the things that the last 50 years' worth of guerrilla wars has been, is an object lesson on how to do asymmetric warfare against technologically-advanced, and overwhelming armies.
I suspect that every military in the world has been taking notes.
> They just want control of the power. It's a lot of leverage, and they want to take over the country, so they will need it.
If they are going to “find” evidence to support Putin’s claim of an offensive Ukrainian nuclear weapons program supported by the US, presumably it will be at one of Ukraine’s actual nuclear reactors.
While it's not a hard limit on propaganda, actually having physical control makes a story about such a find more plausible.
That’s a good point.
It seems awful transparent, when they do this “false flag” stuff, but I think they are playing to a domestic audience.
> It seems awful transparent, when they do this “false flag” stuff, but I think they are playing to a domestic audience.
I think the US managed to get and share enough intelligence to forestall most effect of the false flag stuff they wanted to use for international justification, leaving them with basically “But NATO...” on that front.
At the same time, the solid international opposition and the sanctions impact make the domestic propaganda front more critical, and there's a lot more that they can do on that front given the degree of control they have over domestic information channels.
The real-time visibility of the domestic propaganda probably further aggravates the international situation, but I think they probably have written that off except direct intervention, which they think, probably correctly, is deterred by their nuclear arsenal.
This is pure propaganda. Ukrainian forces would never do that, which I cannot say about those who oppose them.
its not out of the question, especially since resistance in its very nature becomes more decentralized and dirty the second the government is weakened or falls.
Take a place like syria, it went from a centralized government to a heap of insurgencies and many sides killing people en-masse.
If anything though, that's Russia's goal. You invade a country you create insurgencies and those insurgencies will be much more evil in character than the government Russia is intentionally destroying.
Ukraine has 4 working nuclear power plants plus Chornobyl. Also, Ukraine has some nuclear facilities left from USSR times or freshly built. Ukraine has more than enough nuclear material to build dirty bombs or nuclear warheads.
For example, China Nuclear Corporation tries to buy Russian part of nuclear fuel facility almost built in Smolino[0], central Ukraine.
It's not just on fire, it has been shelled by the Russian troops and there's a live feed where you can watch it as it happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYUT36YGOh8
You can see munitions impacts about 2 hr ago as well as somewhat later (will edit in a moment).
Flares ~1:36 ago.
These timestamps relative to ~1715 PST.
https://twitter.com/AlexandruC4/status/1499546302786510853 more recent firing, from about 15minutes ago as well.
someone elsewhere in this thread wrote that bombing a nuclear plant was considered a war crime, if this is on video, will it likely be used in the current UN investigation of Russian war crimes?
It will almost certainly be a subject of the current International Criminal Court investigation, I would think.
But, there is no shortage of work for that investigation.
They already commited a lot other of war crimes in past 9 days, it doesn’t really matter for Putin. It seems he has nothing to loose and until his people will stand against him, he will just continue “according to the plan”.
This has been a real reckoning for me, as somebody who has historically been very pro-nuclear.
Quite simply, humanity is too good at screwing things up to harness such a fundamentally powerful and dangerous source of power. It requires a commitment to long lasting peace and stability that we're just not capable of.
This touches on why I think humanity will not survive for much longer. Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat, and yet it continues to be more or less ignored. Vast swathes of the population believe that their egos can determine reality, no matter the actual physical reality they so hubristically ignore.
> we’re not capable of
I don’t think so, either. This sentiment tends to be met by the techno-futurists on this site with swift downvotes, though, so is not a popular one to espouse here. Nevertheless I believe it to be true based on the evidence at hand: humanity is too short-sighted to prevent its own doom.
I believe nuclear power is essential to the survival of humanity. I also think you are likely correct: humanity cannot be trusted with nuclear power. If true, this is yet another data point against our survival.
Not saying you’re wrong, but espousing the idea that “humanity is too short sighted” is just as daft as saying “we are definitely going to colonise the universe”. It’s not particularly helpful, you’re reasoning more on emotion than fact (we’ve gotten this far) and most of all you’re talking as if this is something you or I cannot change. I think that’s why you get downvoted. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable opinion you hold, but it’s not a very constructive outlook. And HN is full of people who want to make things better, not sit on the sidelines pronouncing doom. If you see a problem, work to fix it. People can and do change the direction of humanity.
If we can make energy storage simple and cheap enough I do not see why nuclear power would have any upside left except maybe for when traveling outside the solar system.
Regarding survivability of humanity I have similar fear but my current hope is that while weapons will continue to be more attainable their relevance might diminish. Why fight your neighbor if you have everything you need? But warlords create a problem of their own because they seem to exist to attain superiority for its own sake.
The materials needed to make those batteries are finite. They will become "the new oil" in N years.
Energy storage is going to be a big part of any sane energy future, but it's going to have to make heavy usage of non-battery means: giant flywheels? Pumping water? I don't know.
You're right that the current state of battery tech is woefully inefficient for any kind of grid-level storage.
But energy can be stored by pumping heated water to deep wells in the bedrock for example or you can use excess power to generate hydrogen and feed it back to the grid via fuel cells when needed. All of this is doable, but also slow to build and currently expensive.
The materials in those batteries can be recycled into new batteries indefinitely.
And when we need to create additional batteries...?
What element in a battery is destroyed during its lifetime that cannot be recycled?
What percentage of batteries are actually recycled? How much energy does recycling them take? What toxic byproducts are produced as part of the recycling process? What will future demand for batteries be, and how long will our supplies of lithium etc. last? Who controls the lithium supplies?
This is not an argument against recycling batteries, by the way. Chemical batteries are a big part of the future, and we should recycle them. But let's not be glib about any of these choices.
Is it possible the raw materials to make these batteries are so abundant right now that it’s much cheaper to just make new ones than recycle old ones?
> They will become "the new oil" in N years.
The existential problem with oil is climate change, not finite resources.
> I do not see why
One word serves to explain why what you imagine won’t happen in time: profit. More specifically: oil profits.
> Why fight your neighbor if you have everything you need?
Clearly this line of logic is not working, seen in Ukraine. At some point there is a person with enough power who wants to fight just because they can. Essentially humanity is at mercy of random power-hungry sociopaths to not bomb the nuclear power plants.
Are you so sure you're not yourself trapped in an irrational thinking loop?
Global warming is not a civilization-ending threat. Even nuclear war is not a civilization-ending threat, outside a few places in the Northern hemisphere. I could be wrong about both of these claims. But you could be as well, and you're taking an extremely pessimistic view based on what you know, which is not the whole picture.
We have quite some understanding that a mayor nuclear war will cause nuclear winter, by generating huge amounts of smoke at high altitudes which will block the sunlight.
We also know that it causes an extinction event, since it was one of the effects of the K-t extinction event 60 million years ago. It is the one that killed the dinosaurs, and many more: A huge number of species, including almost any large land animals, dies. It is unlikely that homo sapiens would survive this time.
How are these things not a civilization ending threat? Nukes can literally kill everything and global warming, if unchecked, will probably do the same long term.
Even if all nukes would go off (spread evenly) they would not kill everybody.
The worst case scenario of global worming would not kill everybody. People living north of 40o will survive.
it's not the nukes itself that would kill. it's the nuklear winter. with highly reduced sunlight this planet will become a freezing hell. no plants -> no food
The nuclear winter calculations by Sagan et al noticed that some fuels create more problematic smoke than other fuels. A lot of trees and wood structures would be ignited in a nuclear war, but the smoke from those fires falls out of the atmosphere relatively quickly compared to smoke from burning oil tanks, which Sagan et al said would contribute most of the cooling effect.
Then Saddam lit thousands of oil wells on fire as a big fuck-you to the miltary coalition arrayed against him, more oil than would be set on fire by any nuclear war. The cooling effect was detectable, but hardly serious.
In what realistic scenario would all nukes go off "spread evenly"?
There isn't one. Maximal theoretical damage (not practical) would not end civilisation.
> Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat,
Global warming is a threat that will have tons of negative impact. But is it really "civilization-ending"?
Potentially, yes.
There are the typical threats (which assume society remains more or less stable) such as ecosystem collapse leading to food shortages etc.
Then the non-typical threats. It is hard to predict what an unstable society will do, and some of those choices could be civilization ending.
We've built an extremely fragile massively interdependent system. It is conceivable that the US power grid could go down, and due to supply chain issues could not be restored in < 5 years. Unlikely, yes, impossible, hardly.
Is that enough to end civilization? How would we distribute food, assuming we have it?
Note that a reactor meltdown isn't "civilization-ending" either. The world carried on fine after two of those.
Yes, of course, if we take a look to the history and cities marooned after a several years dry spell lead to war and migration.
Plenty of cases of lost civilizations in America, Asia and Africa linked with desertification and climate going unstable
No, the positive impacts will most likely outweigh the negative impacts.
Yeah. Across the universe, what percentage of advanced species managed to harness nuclear power and not end themselves by nuclear energy, directly or indirectly?
It can't be a very large percentage.
I would like to be wrong.
I can relate. I've been pro nuclear my entire adult life, but in more recent years have added a lot more hesitations and conditions to that. Fukushima put me onto a similar thread of thinking. If there were any society and government you'd expect to have sober thinking and solid engineering around nuclear, it'd be Japan, let the way TEPCO and the Abe administration behaved in the opening stages of the emergency was quite shady.
That gave me pause for thought that our governments and institutions just might be up to the task of running something like nuclear. If you understand the physics and engineering, then nuclear done right is a no brainer. I have less faith in us doing it right that I did in the past.
Add to that the huge capital costs, and the trendlines in renewables + storage capital costs... it's hard to be enthusiastic about anything nuclear that doesn't fundamentally change the economics. And so far every attempt at that (eg SMR) has failed rather definitively.
Just when I was ready to abandon my anti-nuclear stance and ready to accept nuclear power as transitional technology before we can transition to fully sustainable energy.
And now we can retake this conversation from just 3 months ago with a fresh view.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29251780
Same here.
Humanity is fine, just some parts are quite far ahead of others. We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism. There will be some slides backwards as people in difficult situations value their opinions and risk aversion more than others’ freedoms, and there are plenty of places where people are just fine with their autocrats continuing to rule.
Progress, for the most part, can’t be given.
It is hopeful that Ukraine is having some real success fighting back and for the most part without an external force coming in and trying to do it for them.
> We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism
And why not criminals while we’re at it?
Sounds like utopia.
The desire for power might be baked into humanity at a deep level.
>The desire for power might be baked into humanity at a deep level.
I think we confuse the direction of causality a bit here. People in power tends to be those that want power. To get a powerful person you only really need one person who wants power. I think it's a false conclusion to think that people in general seek power.
How To Win Friends and Influence People is an historical best seller. Almost everyone wants to be rich. Money is power.
I don’t know how many people would be able to resist the One Ring if it was within their reach.
> The desire for power might be baked into humanity at a deep level.
Currently, it is disguised as politics and capitalism.
> Humanity is fine,
It is, but the reckoning for me is how a single dictator among billions could make so much harm. So it is not enough that humanity is 99.9999% fine. We need fail-safes for things going terribly wrong, and in this particular scenario, having an autonomous colony outside of Earth or underground on Earth could be one such.
> We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism
As if it were so easy!
A centuries long project which has, without doubt, seen much success.
It's not easy, but we've made massive progress throughout human history.
> We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism.
Nothing to it - piece of cake. Forget about millennia of human history.
"We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism"
Is that all? We can get that done with a new app I think.
It's not that nuclear is easy or perfect. But until we scale up renewable energy by orders of magnitude, or somehow scale down demand, nuclear is the least-bad choice by many measures.
It is a very costly choice. We don't know how to store waste securely. We don't know how to process the waste efficiently and somewhat without it being an ecological disaster. We don't know how to extract and process nuclear 'fuel' without it bei g an ecological disaster as well. Just because the atom doesn't produce smoke at the plant doesn't make it an alternative.
Additionally there is the whole thing about the dangers of an accident and the cost for insurance against it. The cost of building and maintaining a somewhat secure reactor and the later cost of dismantling it and storing the additional waste.
Nearly all these costs for externalities were not factored into the price of energy. Calculating in all these costs mskes renewable energy look more than interesting. And also makes the question of storing excessive energy an interesting case. But governments/lobbies argue for cheap (read subsidized) nuclear, while not factoring the same subsidiaries into energy storage for renewables.
Investing into the future with a broad renewable energy and storage infrastructure program could ensure not only less dependency on Russia (for oil or gas) but also have a positive impact on the topic of climate change.
On the other hand. The German/European dependency on Russian gas and Russias dependency on the money from the sale of said gas was done to reduce the risk of war. The idea being that both sides could loose too much in the case of war and that would act as a deterrent. Even during the height of the Cold War Russian gas flowed towards the western world (aka Europe/Germany).
- As a species, we've been running hundreds of nuclear reactors (440 currently) for a while now.
- Their cumulative track record is (very roughly) "one Chernobyl every 25 years."
- The cost of a Chernobyl-scale incident is that it renders a region uninhabitable and kills several hundred people.
- With plants getting safer and safer, we might reasonably expect the risk to be more like "one Chernobyl every 50 or 100 years" for modern plants.
- Waste storage is obviously a challenge. The US has apparently produced enough nuclear waste "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." (64,000 metric tons)
That is steep but manageable.
Relative to fossil fuels, this is less-bad by orders of magnitude. It is regrettable (to put it laughably mildly) that the Fukushima and Chernobyl regions are no longer inhabitable, but fossil fuels have pushed us to the point where everything near the equator is going to be uninhabitable soon.
As for the waste issue, again, compare it to the alternatives. 64,000 cumulative tons of nuclear waste in America's history versus 6,500,000,000 tons of CO2 emissions last year. Obviously a ton of nuclear waste is not directly comparable to a ton of CO2 emission, but at least nuclear waste can be collected and sequestered. It is a local problem, not one that irrevocably poisons the entire planet.
Yeah, green energy sources are better than nuclear, for sure, and maybe fusion will save our butts eventually. But we need energy in the meantime. We should use the least-bad thing until we get something great, and nuclear is the least-bad option by such a ridiculous margin that it's not even funny.
I have to say you lost me at:
> The cost of a Chernobyl-scale incident is that it renders a region uninhabitable and kills several hundred people.
There are quite a few interesting numbers regarding Chernobyl:
31 deaths, for example, is an official figure. But the credits for the TV series also state that estimates of deaths would vary between 4,000 and 93,000 victims.
A bit more about the numbers and some additional estimations:
The environmental organization Greenpeace estimates the total number of dead as a result of the Chernobyl accident at 93,000.
Kate Brown, a professor at MIT, considers up to 150,000 deaths realistic for Ukraine alone.
The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) says Chernobyl caused 50,000 to 100,000 deaths and up to 900,000 disabled.
34,499 rescue workers died, according to the Ukrainian Commission for Radiation Protection. However this figure is considered to be wrong because there is usually no such precise information on this scale. So the number just seems to be doctored to look more precise than is possible at estimations like these.
So now we can pick and choose to support our ideology. I don't pick and chose, but state that there are quite a few nuclear reactors that sit in areas way more densely populated with massively more inhabitants in the zone of imminent danger.
So any extrapolation from Chernobyl numbers (whichever one selects) would need to factor this into their argument imho.
Edit: One question ==>
> Waste storage is obviously a challenge. The US has apparently produced enough nuclear waste "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." (64,000 metric tons)
Does this number include the parts of the reactor buildings being contaminated?
>
This is indeed quite worse than the parent suggested, and I agree with your numbers.
I am curious, though, to how many people die due to the normal, continued operation of coal plants (both from mining and from the plant's actual operation). Is that something we can quantify with a reasonable degree of accuracy (like to a rough order of magnitude)?
Because even if we have a Chernobyl every 25 years that kills 150k people and gives another million some sort of disability, we have to acknowledge that operating coal plants -- as a "normal" part of their operation -- kills people too. I don't know if they are better or worse than the "amortized" 6k/year killed by nuclear in our estimate here. But it's certainly not zero.
And beyond that, burning fossil fuels destroys ecosystems, causes extinction of various animal species, and, if we do not arrest the affects of climate change, will kill millions of people due to its various effects. (Arguably, this has already killed lots of people during extreme weather events linked to climate change.) Maybe 150k people dead every 25 years in a nuclear disaster is, unfortunately, a "bargain" in comparison.
If we could scale up renewables at the same rate we could scale up nuclear, then it'd be a no-brainer: choose the former. But it's not clear that we can meet our energy needs with renewables today, even if there was a giant, global push to go fully renewable on a short time scale. Maybe it's better to risk nuclear power incidents in the medium term than continue to vomit fossil fuel byproducts into the atmosphere. But of course the general public will never make this kind of decision rationally; ultimately most of these are political decisions.
I dug a little deeper for those interested. In Germany there are currently reactor being demolished. None is done, so the numbers are still estimates.
For a 1.3MW reactor block the amount of highly contaminated material will probably be in the range of 3000 to 5000 metric tons.
For the US with around 96 active reactors (2020) this would imply something (back of a napkin calculation) 280,000 to 470,000 metric tons of additional waste on top of burned nuclear fuel. Depending on the peculiarities of the reactors and so on. I know there are error margins.
Highly contaminated material that needs to be secured for thousands of years.
This is a multi generational cost factor for our generations convenience. For the ability to burn electricity like there is no tomorrow.
Today the lower half (poorer half) of US population is living a live that would enable the US to reach Paris Climate goals. The same applies roughly to most western/northern countries.
People like me in the upper income half are the culprits so to speak (statistically speaking).
This is bad, but nuclear isn't uniquely dangerous here: just imagine the same kind of shelling around a large dam.
> a large dam
It would be catastrophic but much more localized. Fallout from Chernobyl went around the world several times, poisoning most of the humans alive or being made at the time (not to mention the rest of the biomass)
Chernobyl killed about 10k people. A single dam collapse killed 170k people a few decades ago.
Chernobyl killed millions of people over time. Tons of thyroid cancers that would have never existed if Chernobyl didn’t explode.
Do you have any kind of source for this? As far as I am aware, estimates for deaths based on thyroid cancers are ~160 [1]. Not 'thousand, just 160 – you claim is off by five orders of magnitude. Estimates for the total death toll are up to 60000 if you assume the linear no-threshold model [2], so might be much lower in reality.
[1] See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di....
[2] The model assumes that any amount of radiation is harmful and estimates the harm of low doses as a corresponding fraction of the harm of large doses. Empirical evidence is unclear, at best, but it functions as worst-case estimate.
How about the 2009 epidemiology study that estimates > 900,000 dead by 2009 with no end in sight? Quoting from a summary (easy to find the original):
> In 2009, the New York Academy of Sciences published a book Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. A team of European scientists led by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, assembled over 5,000 research studies, most written in Russian and not previously published.
> The results were staggering. Yablokov’s team estimated that just in the first 20 years after the Chernobyl meltdown, some 986,000 deaths attributable to it occurred, many in parts of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The percent of children living in these areas considered in good health plunged from 80% to 20%. Rates of certain cancers soared, including childhood thyroid cancer in Ukraine (20 times higher) and Belarus (200 times higher). Rates of disease in covering many organs in the body all increased in areas closest to Chernobyl.
> Yablokov’s team indicated that the number of casualties would continue to grow, well after publication of the book.
Thank you, that is indeed a source and I have raised my estimate of the probability larger casualties slightly. (For the record: above excerpt is from an article in the online magazine CounterPunch [1], which itself refers to the 2009 book [2].)
However, its methodology and rigour have been criticised [3]. As I am not an expert in this area I cannot evaluate the source directly, but several general heuristics apply. The source is a single book. (I am aware that the book claims to rely on numerous non-english sources, but I do not believe that they make the same claims.) The book relies on observational epidemiological data, which is generally hard to get right, and dose-response curves seem to be not analysed (seeing a relationship between doses and effect sizes is a good way to exclude spurious correlations). Finally, since the article mentions Yablokov's prior occupation I will also note that he founded and lead the Soviet chapter of Greenpeace, an organisation with a strong anti-nuclear position.
So I do not think that this is strong evidence. (But as I said earlier, I do currently consider it weak evidence.) In any case, the book claims one million deaths, not multiple millions, and only a fraction of those is attributed to thyroid cancer.
[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/02/russian-takeover-of-...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110419144513/http://www.strahl...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
You're cherry-picking negative responses from the wikipedia article, as opposed to the following:
> The IAEA/WHO have often sought to justify their dismissal of eastern European epidemiological studies by citing questionable scientific practices: but epidemiology is not an exact science, and the same shortcomings exist in western studies uncriticised by the IAEA. The IAEA also point to shortcomings with pre-Chernobyl Soviet cancer registries, but cancer registries in western countries had similar issues at that time.
Indeed, where is the criticism for the IEAE and WHO applying a very selective "conservativism" about epidemiological research, much like big tobacco and DuPont? They're the reason nuke fanboys make risible claims like "< 100 people died because of Chernobyl" and don't get laughed out of the room.
Pointing out that the author was affiliated with Greenpeace without noting the systemic bias of nuclear organizations against epidimiological data is questionable.
Not at a dangerous level, say more than eating a banana.
The dam breaks killed and hurt magnitudes more people.
> Fallout from Chernobyl went around the world several times, poisoning most of the humans alive or being made at the time [...]
> Not at a dangerous level, say more than eating a banana.
Born 1986 in Germany and I got a rare metabolism illness that only ~2000 more people have, all born around June/July/August in 1986 in Western and Middle Europe with some exceptions distributed around as late as born in September and October. But the Spring of 1986 was probably just a famous year for pregnant women eating exceptionally many bananas I guess?
At least I agree that dams killed more people than that specific event. But wait till you see the numbers for fossil fuels ...
Yes, I brought up the dam since hydropower is something that's typically seen as good; but still has the potential for big disasters. (I totally think hydropower is good on balance.)
Fossil fuels, and especially coal, have worse impact in total but they are typically more diffuse. So I left them out of the discussion.
A single dam break did not killed and hurt magnitudes more people then singly Chernobyl.
> In 1975 the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam and other dams in Henan Province, China caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history. The disaster killed an estimated 171,000 people and 11 million people lost their homes.
Were they able to rebuild their homes in the years past that in the same spot? Yes.
Are people able to move back into the Chernobyl fallout zone in the next few thousand years? No.
See https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/17/chernob...
Are you saying that 180 (old) people who refuse to leave out of 50000 who were displaced are a representative sample that should show us that living in a fallout zone isn't a problem?
I did not claim that living in the zone is without problems.
I hope you realize how bad of a comparison that is. If a dam would break and flood some area it would kill people but after a year the chaos will be cleaned up and things will be back to normal.
If the same thing happens to a nuclear power plant the area can't be lived in for millions of years.
> If the same thing happens to a nuclear power plant the area can't be lived in for millions of years.
Some people have been squatting in the Chernobyl exclusion zone for decades now, and are still alive. See eg https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/17/chernob...
I wouldn't want to live there myself, and cancer levels might be slightly higher than normal.
Living secluded in a big exclusion zone with ~180 other people, no stores or infrastructure and higher levels of cancer is definitely something we should strive for.
The lack of stores and infrastructure comes from lack of other people, which could be fixed.
I'm not sure if there is a higher level of cancer. But I grant you that we can assume that.
It's not pretty, but it's also not something that prevents people from living. Remember when everyone used to voluntarily increase their risk of lung cancer by crazy amounts? Back when everyone smoked? Civilization still persisted.
Actually, the estimates for when the region will be habitable range from 3 centuries to 20 000 years. [1] "Millions" is off by several orders of magnitude.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Exclusion_z...
I used to be in in favour of nuclear. Nuclear works if you can guarantee political stability for 100+ years, but here in South Africa we can't even keep our coal plants running, nevermind guarantee political stability for 28 years (last year in June we suffered riots).
The risk of nuclear fallout is still relatively "localised", however that risk is dwarfed by the cost of disrupting centralised power production. A few nuclear plants are easy targets in the event of a war.
Distributed solar and concentrated solar w/molten salt seem like good options.
I share your feelings but I also find it “convenient” that we are all reminded of the dangers of nuclear power by a seller of gas and petroleum. Call me cynical…
This has always been my fear about nuclear. We don't think on the timescales to make it work well, nor with the engineering consistency and quality to keep it maintained.
However, abandoned oil refineries and other chemical plants are also toxic nasty messes for potentially hundreds of years, too.
Humanity has weapons capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people at a time. Nation-states deliberately using a power plant to kill "mere" thousands seems pretty low on the fear list.
It's normal to have those thoughts now, they are driven by fear. The situation is developing fast and most people are just sitting here and watching news and blame and get feelings and emotions. Just a waste of time.
A few peoples actually go to the borders or the stations to help the refugees arriving. Do that. At least you leave an impact.
I have already been very pro-nuclear and this does not change my views. Without nuclear, Russia would have had even more power. And it could have been weaker if we had built more of it. The dangers and costs are systematically overstated.
My thinking has been that we need smaller decentralized nuclear plants, that can fail without it being cathastrofic, instead of huge centralized plants that "can't fail".
That only makes for more, albeit smaller problems. Each of these is a potential dirty bomb.
Right. It makes the size of the problem more transparent, by amortizing the accidents over time.
We'd actually have some accidents sometimes. Either we'll get good at handling it, or we will give up on nuclear. Better than pooling all the risk, lowering the probability, but keeping the same expected destruction. With the centralized approach it's too easy to act like there's zero risk.
Yes. Where are all those who claim nuclear is a sustainable, safe energy source? With humans in the game, it is not and will never be.
What do you think is the worse-case outcome here? It's the release of small amounts of radioactive gasses of only concern to the local area. It has a containment dome and is already shutting down. Another Chernobyl is not possible.
If Putin wants radiation everywhere, he has thousands of nuclear warheads which can do that.
Nuclear costs should factor in the need to run a larger military budget to make up for their vulnerability in a conflict.
They just want control of electricity sources, for that you take control of the plant or you strike the transport infrastructure around it, you don't strike the reactors themselves.
The day people start bombing nuclear power plants we'll be deep in ww3 already and we'd be fuck regardless
And this is part of why a lot of Germans have always been uneasy with nuclear power.
And that is why Germans are in an uncomfortable situation, being so dependent on Russia for gas.
The German are uneasy because of irrational fear and exaggerated risks.
Even if the worst happen at that nuclear power plant, it will still be a small disaster compared to all the causalities that already have happened in Ukraine the last few weeks (you know: the war)
The war has somewhat been going on since 2014, with 15k dead in Donbass, fwiw.
> "it will still be a small disaster compared to all the causalities that already"
Maybe I'm missing something regarding this specific reactor but how is a war that will eventually (hopefully) be over worse than a nuclear fallout that would make large areas unlivable for thousands of years and affect multiple countries and also killing a lot of people.
> make large areas unlivable for thousands of years
I think you are over-estimating the cost of this. I contest the use of 'large'. The 30km radius exclusion zone is nothing compared to the surface occupied by deserts, ice floe, or whatever of the many others existing unhinabitable places.
> and affect multiple countries and also killing a lot of people.
Because the war has been doing that already, at a even larger scale: thousands of civilians killed, many wounded, millions displaced. That's already worse than the consequences of a nuclear meltdown.
> The 30km radius exclusion zone is nothing compared to the surface occupied by deserts, ice floe, or whatever of the many others existing unhinabitable places.
Land location isn't fungible, though. That 30km radius exclusion zone is (was?) much more valuable land than some random patch of desert or ice. Being near other settled land, and having access to infrastructure, food, etc. is important. Taking valuable land like that and making it uninhabitable is much worse than it just being a random patch of sand in the middle of some desert somewhere, or a big piece of ice floating in an arctic region.
> occupied by deserts, ice floe
Usually nuclear power plants are located close to cities and populated areas and not in the middle of the desert or uninhabited ice fields.
> That's already worse than the consequences of a nuclear meltdown.
In the short term yes, but on a time scale that's longer than a few years I think you'll quickly realize that a meltdown is worse. Will the same war go on in 50 years? Probably not, but the radiation will be...for thousands of years.
Do we need more deserts, especially grain lands turned into radioactive desserts?
Russian invasion blocked wheat traffic from Ukraine, so it caused spike in prices for wheat. Just imagine prices for food when Ukraine will be poisoned permanently or occupied by RF, which may perform genocide of Ukrainians second time in less than 100 years. Wastelands are good for wildlife only, because humans are major danger to them.
This is an old power plant. Do your concerns hold true for newer designs?
Can newer plants be bombed? Can they be abandoned?
See molten salt reactors. There are automatic mechanisms that are supposed to prevent worst case situations.
"Another basic problem with MSRs is that the materials used to manufacture the various reactor components will be exposed to hot salts that are chemically corrosive, while being bombarded by radioactive particles. So far, there is no material that can perform satisfactorily in such an environment. A 2018 review from the Idaho National Laboratory could only recommended that “a systematic development program be initiated” to develop new alloys that might work better. There is, of course, no guarantee that the program will be successful."
https://theconversation.com/nuclear-power-why-molten-salt-re...
Molten salt reactors are designed to avoid meltdowns.
But most of the harm at Chernobyl was from the explosion. There is nothing in a molten salt reactor that makes them any safer than Chernobyl if the reactor containment is breached.
Massive amounts of highly radioactive particles will be ejected into the atmosphere in exactly the same way as happened at Chernobyl.
Molten salt advocates will say "yes, but what could possibly breach the reactor if there is no meltdown". Well we almost saw the answer to that today.
> A steam explosion is what happened to the Chernobyl reactor in 1986. Although this lead to a serious disaster, it is much less destructive than an actual nuclear explosion (Wilkins, 2011). Due to the nature of molten salt reactors, the risk of either a steam explosion, a hydrogen explosion or a meltdown is effectively eliminated.
https://www.thmsr.com/en/safe/
> Due to the nature of molten salt reactors, the risk of either a steam explosion, a hydrogen explosion or a meltdown is effectively eliminated.
Do they somehow stop the risk of artillery? Because to be absolutely clear: that's what the risk here was.
but also cannot realistically operate for very long becase structural components tend to deteriorate quickly from the combo of salt, high heat, and radiation.
That's why I'm a big believer of modular nuclear reactors, where active cooling is not needed.
Live stream from plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYUT36YGOh8
Automated Radiation Monitoring system: https://www.npp.zp.ua/en/safety/arms
Just realised that the point I've made in response to a comment probably should be a level higher:
Don't trust the radiation monitoring system, the actual monitoring system has been destroyed by a rocket impact three days ago.
The monitoring system has been shot down on 1 Sep.
Here is the statement from the Nuclear Agency in Ukraine:
https://www.facebook.com/people/Державна-інспекція-ядерного-...The link doesn't load right now (HN overload?) but I wonder, if the comms are down, shouldn't the system report "no data" as opposed to "all clear"? Why should there be an explicit warning about not trusting it when the system itself should easily be able to tell whether it's getting fresh data?
Maybe they forked AWS' status page.
Damn, maybe one of the sides should consider fixing that before they proceed with shooting at each other.
I can’t speak to why you’ve been downvoted, but it might be worth considering the incentives to fight aren’t the same between the “sides”. One is fighting to survive an attack by the other. It’s difficult to maintain safety measures while people are trying to kill you.
What's there to understand? Cuba is still under embargo 50 years after the Russians tried to put weapons there.
Hey that’s a valid point and one I agree with. The way the US has treated Cuba is also completely indefensible and based in no plausible threat scenario.
> One is fighting to survive an attack by the other.
This statement, while true, changes denotation depending on the scale at which you view this conflict. If you view it as a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the existential threat is to Ukraine. If you view it as a conflict between Russia and NATO, the existential threat is to Russia.
I don't quite understand Russia's paranoia around NATO. Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia already border Russia (+ Poland if you count Kaliningrad). Why is it such a big deal for Ukraine to enter a defense pact, unless Russia wants to retain the right to invade when they see fit? Not trying to be rhetorical, this existential threat to Russia is news to me.
Russia _hates_ that Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia are all part of NATO.
But when they were accepted Putin didn't feel strong enough to do anything about it.
Russia has been advancing it's "sphere of influence" political theory, whereby independent countries with that "sphere of influence" don't get the right to make their own alliances. That "sphere of influence" includes all Eastern European countries that border on Russia at least.
It hasn't been widely reported on, but the initial demand that led to this war was that NATO withdraw all infrastructure install in post 1997 expansions:
Russia published two lists of demands — for Washington and for NATO — the latter calling for the removal of all NATO military infrastructure installed in Eastern European countries after 1997, effectively attempting to rework the consequences of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, which left Russia weakened for years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/17/ukraine-russ...
From what I understand of world politics, what is viewed by one as defensive is often viewed by another as offensive. Eg Monroe doctrine.
It makes more sense when examining their history. This is probably a decent place to start: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/ru...
Don't forget Norway.
Did I miss something today? Did NATO deploy troops into Russia or Ukraine?
If you want to achieve victory, you must understand your enemy as well as yourself. The Russian attitude towards NATO expansion into Ukraine can be roughly viewed from an American perspective as well equivalent as the old Warsaw Pact attempting to bring Mexico into their treaty. Or, at least, this is part of the explanation used to frame it as an ‘existential threat’ for Russia. This, combined with a somewhat precarious economy based largely on fossil fuel exports and the fact that in some sense Putin serves at the pleasure of the group of oligarchs, and only as long as they can earn. This combo of circumstance makes it pretty easy to guess at how we got here, and frankly how easy it was to provoke. Unfortunately for Putin, and fortunate for pretty much everybody else, at this point, it appears that outside of complete and total victory and annexation of Ukraine, it looks like he loses no matter what.
Putin is a ham-fisted dictator, and the world will be better off without him, but his motivations here aren’t mysterious.
How would annexation of Ukraine further Russia’s strategic goals at this point? NATO expansion is getting more popular by the hour, as is joining the EU. Economic sanctions weaken Russia, and will continue for years to decades if Ukraine is annexed. Sure, the Russian army can get total victory given enough time, but winning the war doesn’t benefit Russia.
Moscow from Ukraine border: ~520 km
Moscow from Latvian border: ~620 km
Not to mention full control of a Black Sea (and therefore entrance to Mediterranean) coastline with multiple ports. As well as a major agricultural products. As well as a huge transit country for Russian energy pipelines.
What does slightly more access to the Mediterranean get you when no European country will buy your goods? All of those things you mentioned are worthless without buyers.
Except the farm land. But it’s not 1444 — trade is vastly more profitable than agriculture nowadays.
IMHO, Putin is looking at this from a century perspective. I.e. in a hundred years, the sanctions will be gone, Europe will be trading with Russia again, and Russia will still have the land.
Cool story ethbro
It’s for the gas pipelines, but 100 year perspective. Sure.
And your counterargument is?
Above.
So you think the EU is willing to continue sanctions on Russia for decades, if Russia holds onto seized land?
good luck keeping Ukraine after what is happening now past the death of Putin
I dont think this take advances understanding of Russia. This is how Americans sees the world. Americans are not trying to make America larger, therefore they will project same lack of wish to get larger on Russia.
I don't agree 100%, but I don't think you deserve the downvotes.
I think you could say in the wider scale it can be interpreted as an existential threat to Putin's Russia?
They are literally doing total war without provocation. The theoretical threat of NATO has not been a part of this conflict at all. Treating that imagined threat as if it’s equivalent to the very real war is navel gazing excuse for a mass murdering fascist.
First, yes, Putin's Russia has started a war of conquest.
Second, no, it is definitely _not_ a total war. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war for background.
Third, the theoretical threat of NATO is not so much to Russia: I agree that NATO is not a threat to Russia. However I do also see that NATO and EU are a threat to Putin's long term vision for a renewed Russian Empire.
To be clear, I agree that this vision is bogus and that a threat to a bogus vision is not a valid excuse for a war.
Please also be careful with accusing people of being fascists or Nazis. Putin and his predecessors in the USSR employed the same tactic. And whether anyone does or does not fulfill the textbook definition of a fascist is besides the point here.
This is total war. RF targets infrastructure and kills civilians on purpose. More than 2000 civilians are killed by RF in one week on territory controlled by Ukraine. RF uses weapons of mass(1) destruction freely, to force humanitarian crisis, then ask for tactical pause, to let civilians escape, while using reinforces to fortify captured land. They are shutting at hospitals, gas pipes, power lines, humanitarian convoys, to make situation desperate for civilians, to force tactical pauses. We learned this tactic very well.
(1) Not WMD like chlorine, or nuclear, of course, nor biological weapons except coronavirus released by accident from Vector lab in Siberia on Sep 16, 2019, just conventional weapons designed to maximize damage to civilian infrastructure.
You realize that Russia would kill way more than 2,000 civilians in a week in a total war?
The same sentiment was said about US wars since 2000 and we can’t even agree on how to count the number dead, and more or less stopped trying.
The US has not run any 'total wars'.
> First, yes, Putin's Russia has started a war of conquest.
Glad we agree.
> Second, no, it is definitely _not_ a total war. See
It’s a total war.
> Third, the theoretical threat of NATO is not so much to Russia: I agree that NATO is not a threat to Russia. However I do also see that NATO and EU are a threat to Putin's long term vision for a renewed Russian Empire.
By this logic all conflicts are both sided. England is equally justified in bombing India because they “threatened” the British empire by rejecting being under its power.
> Please also be careful with accusing people of being fascists or Nazis. Putin and his predecessors in the USSR employed the same tactic. And whether anyone does or does not fulfill the textbook definition of a fascist is besides the point here.
I’m well aware of the importance of being precise and cautious with this term and I chose it carefully.
Whut
shooting is one of those things that you just gotta do first. hard to deprioritize
this particular post: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=3241517597...
Not great, not terrible.
Yeah, and here's the current meteorological data:
Air temperature 0 ℃ Wind N Wind speed 0 m/s Relative humidity 0 % Atmospheric pressure 0 mm Hg
... I hope that low pressure isn't from a vacuum bomb.
with the HN meme of AWS status pages reporting everything fine while AWS is down, here we have good evidence we cannot rely on this website reporting reliable data.
Here is the European Commission Radiation Map: https://remap.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
And here a volunteer map from Geiger counter manufacturer GQ Electronics: https://www.gmcmap.com/
The monitoring system has been shot down on 1 Sep.
Here is the statement from the Nuclear Agency in Ukraine:
https://www.facebook.com/people/Державна-інспекція-ядерного-...1 September ? It doesn't seem likely it was shot 6 months ago. You mean 1st March ?
That's what the quote says, too.
I wrote a cron job that scraped the npp.zp.ua data every 15 mins for the past day. It is changing and doesn't seem offline. You think it's updating the date/time correctly and just cycling over old data?
https://imgur.com/a/GsBb1Oy
... I hope that low pressure isn't from a vacuum bomb.
I think any monitoring system close enough to see 0 mm Hg pressure will have been destroyed by the shockwave before it could report that complete vacuum.
> low pressure isn't from a vacuum bomb
Do you know if these really show a significantly different pressure effect from conventional bombs?
I saw a chart showing a fatter tail on the shockwave, but it wasn't really that dramatic. I'm curious because I can imagine all kinds of vacuum effects in my mind's eye, but this is also informed by a _lot_ of the now-doubtful PR-style efforts on selling these things in years past.
Any vacuum would only exist for a few seconds as there’s nothing to contain it.
CNN's homepage currently has video of the Russian shells impacting the plant, shot from the same camera doing that live stream. Extremely unsettling.
Those look like flares, not shells. Still a fire hazard, but less destructive.
flares? not tracer rounds mixed in with regular rounds?
The radiation numbers look similar to Feb 26 based on Wayback machine's last crawl.
The best containment domes won't survive persistent shelling. I can't conceive of a valid reason for shelling a nuclear power plant.
> I can't conceive of a valid reason for shelling a nuclear power plant.
The classical excuse (see Operation Opera) is that it is part of an enemy weapons program from an enemy intent on nuking you. It would only be a small step from current propaganda for Russia to make this claim, having recently added the claim of an offensive Ukrainian nuke program to their propaganda.
It's an awfully effective way to distract people from focusing on defending the perimeter of whatever city they're trying to defend
If it provides 1/4 of the country's power, couldn't they leave the containment domes alone, and just hit the lines coming out of the plant? If you're the invading country, it'd be nice to have that power later when you're in charge, wouldn't it?
Doesn’t the power has to go somewhere. I don’t know what would happen to a nuclear power plant operating without a load to take the generated power.
Maybe the steam just vents? Or bypasses a turbine? Hopefully it can operate without being connected to the outside, but I’m not sure.
> I don’t know what would happen to a nuclear power plant operating without a load to take the generated power.
The same as any other power plant: the generator is automatically shut down by its safety systems (if it didn't shut down, the generator would overspeed and violently break apart). Once the generator shuts down, the safety systems for the reactor itself should either automatically shut down the reactor too, or somehow bypass the steam to the generator and reduce power to idle (I thought they would always shut down, but recently there was a failure on the generator of the nuclear power plant near where I live, and the reactor went to idle instead of shutting down, so it seems nuclear power plants have this mode too).
The issue is what happens after a shutdown; as seen at Fukushima, the cooling pumps in the reactor need external power for a couple of days until the decay heat reduces enough that passive cooling is sufficient. Without power from the outside, the emergency generators take over; if these are damaged or out of fuel, and backup generators can't be brought by truck from outside after a couple of hours, disaster happens.
Reactors can be shut down gracefully. The generated power can be shunted to ground from the turbines without risk.
If they were to spring a leak then it would be impossible to hide their activity from the population at home, so my guess is that's something they would try to avoid.
Elevated radiation levels originating from a significant distance away from measurement are not going to be the thing that breaks through the fog of Russian propaganda, for anyone who's along for that ride.
That almost seems irellevant, even if Putin cared what people think (I don't think he does for the most part), he controls almost all of the media in the country. He can just tell people "Ukraine did it" and they can believe him or not, it doesn't really matter.
The Russian government has already claimed that Ukraine is seeking nuclear weapons with US aid [0]. If it doesn't find a way to fit it's attack on, the fire at, and any resulting radiation release from the plant into that narrative with massaged details that make it both a heroic action by Russia and a dastardly one by Ukraine compounded by a Ukrainian propaganda effort to blame it on Russia...well, they aren't following the propaganda style they have been this whole invasion.
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/ukrain...
A large ecological disaster from an open air uncontrolled nuclear power plant fire would be a European wide concern. The results could be considered a WMD.
> results could be considered a WMD
What rubbish. This looks like Putin found a way to tactically deploy dirty nukes within the West’s red lines.
I expect if the invasion is protracted, Putin will at a minimum detonate a demonstration nuke. The downside consequences for Russia are modest at this point, and it'll be very terrifying to the people of Ukraine (and the world generally).
>I expect if the invasion is protracted, Putin will at a minimum detonate a demonstration nuke.
Given the widespread reports during this war of Russian equipment in poor condition, I've been thinking about this possibility for a while:
* Putin fires tactical atomic weapon at some empty plot of Ukrainian land, and announces it as a "demonstration" of Russian might.
* The weapon is a dud.
I'm not sure whether this outcome might not be worse in the long run, in terms of geopolitical stability, than if the weapon performs as expected!
There is no “demonstration nuke”. If Putin sets off a nuke it’s doomsday.
The time between Russia being the second country to use nuclear weapons and our current concept of countries becoming totally irrelevant would be measured in minutes.
Having said this he might still do it.
The rest of the world isn’t going to say “whelp, I guess it’s time to kick off the extinction of our species” and do a full set of city strikes over a tactical nuke being used. That would be absurd.
It looks like you are using salami tactics. Salami tactics works in both ways.
You say that nobody will went crazy when a tactic nuke will be used against RF army. Right?
Can you draw the line, please? When this war between two nuclear states will be nuclear, if even use of tactical nuke is not enough for you?
Ukraine isn't a nuclear state. They destroyed their nukes and joined the non-proliferation treaty in 1994.
Ukraine is a nuclear state[1] that temporarily doesn't have nukes - they gave all to Russia.
[1]Budapest Memorandum was not fulfilled, so Ukraine regain their status of nuclear state.
I’m just saying that the US isn’t going to engage in a massive species-ending strike over the Russians using a tactical nuke in a conflict with a non-NATO country.
No idea what salami tactics means.
The idea is that a tactical nuke requires at a minimum proportionate response. The history of large attacks is that the response is always disproportionate. A German plane accidentally drops their bombs on London leads to a dedicated air raid on berlin leads to the blitz.
A tactical nuke used against Kharkiv would certainly lead to either a Ukrainian dirty bomb strike against Moscow and or a NATO intervention. Why would Russia stop at one nuke when fighting NATO? For each tactical nuke against NATO you would expect at least one in return, or worse a megaton +x% for megaton exchange.
This spirals into full nuclear war very quickly once one side believes that they are going to lose without strategic weapons, or one side believes they have been or will be the victim of a strategic attack.
Speaking of, how long until the country with all of the old Soviet weapons facilities decides to re-enter the nuclear club?
Even total nuclear war (probably) wouldn't end the species. Just civilization as we know it.
That opinion is contrary to over 70 years of geopolitical and military strategic thinking.
I’m no expert, but my understanding is that thinking was based around a tactical nuke being used on US or Russian forces, leading to escalation and eventual use of strategic weapons, not against a non-nuclear power like Ukraine.
AFAICT, the person you were responding to wasn’t talking about a nuke being used against NATO forces.
If nuclear weapons are used it is doomsday. There are no qualifiers. The idea of getting away with a "tactical" nuke is fantasy. Our response would be total and immediate. There's no time to hesitate or wait for the effects.
If "tactical" nukes are a thing why hasn't anyone used them since 1945? Seems like they could have been handy in Syria or Afghanistan. There's no shortage of examples of nuclear powers going to war with non-nuclear non-NATO countries in the last 77 years. None of them involved nukes in any capacity.
demonstration nuke - it's called tactical nuke, which is different to strategic nuke. Imagine Ukrainian army winning and move towards Russia and Belarus. Putin may decide to fire a tactical nuke to "escalate to de-escalate"
If the Ukrainians push the Russians back to Russia then that is a de-escalation. The Ukrainians are not the aggressors here. I see no reason Ukraine would cross their own borders.
If Putin decides to escalate to nukes as a final act of failure then the de-escalation would be the complete annihilation of Russia as a country. In minutes.
The idea of getting away with a tactical nuke strike is insane.
> I see no reason Ukraine would cross their own borders
to strengthen their negotiation position "We give you back X, you give back Mariupol"
> complete annihilation of Russia as a country
you think US would die for some village in Ukraine? They were plenty of US politicians and generals which were against nuclear umbrella for West Germany.
None of what you are describing makes sense.
If the Ukrainians can push Russians back why wouldn’t they do the same everywhere? Crossing the border becomes an act of aggression, only Russia has acted aggressively here. Everyone else is trying to avoid conflict.
If Russia detonates a nuke in Europe the entire country will be obliterated immediately.
Ukrainians already have, there was a counter attack in the north of Dombas
That was a tactical strike on an airfield. They don’t hold Russian territory. They have not secured a bargaining chip.
6:42p Eastern Industrial ground: 0.09
According to the website above.
I think “officials” are reporting increased levels, but if the website source above is good, I’m not seeing high values. I didn’t look at Wayback, so it could be “increased”, thus my comment for reference.
Thanks. So what’s the historical norm on those numbers?
0.1 microsieverts (uSv) per hour is normal background radiation rate. Right now in my apartment (far from Ukraine) the dose rate is 0.12 uSv/h.
Is there a map service you're using to find the radiation levels at your apartment?
Nope, it's from Geiger counter on my desk.
Good lord, I love the understatedness of this comment.
?
It’s a Geiger counter. It’s cheaper than having an oscilloscope, which wouldn’t be “understated” either.
Do YOU have a geiger counter on your desk?
Well, I just ordered one, which was not a thing I expected to do when I woke up today.
We'll see if it actually ships; seems lots of people have the same idea right now.
The seem to be like £100 on amazon.
Yeah, but the fact that a Ukranian actually has one. I was going to make an "In Soviet Russia..." style joke, but a quick reading of the room suggested not good timing.
Commenter literally said “far from Ukraine”. What are you talking about?
oh, you're right. i totally missed the word far on initial read. totally changes the everything.
To be fair, I am around 500 km from the westernmost border, so not that far in American terms. We were affected by the Chernobyl disaster.
Most recent wayback machine sample I could find https://web.archive.org/web/20220226013028/https://www.npp.z... shows comparable to right now
Can't say historical, but 1,000 μsv/year is the annual limit / point at which increase cancer risk exists.
Fukushima disaster levels were 400,000 μSv/h at peak. Short term dose of 10,000 μSv causes radiation sickness but probably not death. Beyond that it gets worse.
I can say historically, background is 1,000-3,000 μsv a year depending where you live.
According to the Linear-no-threshold model [1], any level of radiation, no matter how small, causes cancer. According to this model, the 1,000 μsv/year of normal background radiation already cause cancer for 1% of people. And any additional dose increase the risk further.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
However this model is contested. And the analysis on the cancers incidence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Chernobyl seems to indicate that this model is flawed. The exact model is difficult to estimate because of the low number of extra cancer is lost in the noise.
Doesn't look like radiation levels are going up at the moment, do you know how often this page is updated?
This type of the nuclear power plant seems to be much more safe than the type of chernobyl. Maybe it is not leaking anything now.
It's past 3 AM in Ukraine. Every couple minutes, it seems.
currently says 03/04/2022 - 03:06, so putting this here for reference Edit: Then saw an update at 03:10 so it is updating
"BREAKING: Ukraine's energy ministry claims firefighters have been fired at while trying to put out fire at Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant"
https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/149954992461016678...
Well, I've been watching the video for a while before the fire started, and there was shooting going on towards the building that's on fire from the units stationed between the parking lots.
Then there was/is fire. Then presumably firefighters arrived, were not let through and departed away.
Hmm, and the live stream got truncated, now it doesn't have the whole 3h history, but just 1 minute. Damn.
Apparently the whole unit 3 it was stopped automatically.
https://twitter.com/AlexandruC4/status/1499552200867164180?t...
That must be why my attempt at archiving it froze -.-
I misunderstood "fired".
It’s amazing that in this context it could have at least three different meanings: being fired with guns, their contact being terminated, or just been thrown fire (less usual or even grammatically incorrect, I know)
yeah my brain removed the "at" for a couple of passes and I was wondering, what could they have done to get fired?
In some other universe there's a title from a complementary newspaper; "Russian soldiers fired for firing on firefighters fighting fire at nuclear plant".
I've not seen a credible sourcing to МІНІСТЕРСТВО ЕНЕРГЕТИКИ УКРАЇНИ anywhere.
edit: posts from head of the Zaporozhye Regional State Administration Alexander Starukh - looks like for 20m firefighters were not let through. Is that because they were fired upon? I don't know. He writes they are there working now though.
https://www.facebook.com/starukholexander
https://twitter.com/badc0fee/status/1499569060291481601
Imagine being in a fire fight while fighting a fire. Two enemies simultaneously.
Imagine being in a fire fight while fighting a fire. Two enemies simultaneously.
Happens in Chicago. I assume it happens in other big cities, too.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-firefighter-sh...
https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2022/03/4/7328008/ (link in Russian, that's a big newspaper in Ukraine) the units of chechen warlord Kadyrov are fighting inside the building of the power station, and are said to be laying mines, as a means of exerting pressure. What could go wrong...
This kadyrov is totally mad, they introduced Sharia law in their chechen republic, and putin doesn't want to interfer with this madness, as he fears to provoke them and also needs them for his military adventures...
https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2022/03/4/7328011/ Zelensky made an announcement, if the power station explodes, then that's the end for Europe, the thing is six times bigger than Chernobyl.
"and putin doesn't want to interfer with this madness"
Putin installed Kadyrov.
"On 2 March 2007, following Putin's nomination of Kadyrov as Chechen president, the Chechen parliament approved the nomination." Wikipedia
of course you are correct, they coopted Chechnya, after the second Chechen war [1] Now a month ago they had a big scandal with an ex-chechen judge, forces under the command of kadyrov snatched the wife of the judge from a region that is not part of Chechnya. This was a big scandal, as the authority of the central government in Moscow is kind of put into question. Putin did avoid a conflict with Kadyrov, i think that makes sense in hindsight: he needed kadyrov and his forces for the planned war... See here: [2] All that happened a month before the outbreak of the war; that may be an indication, that the war was already a decided matter, at that point in time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chechen_War
[2] https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-chechnya-judge-flees-wife-abd...
Thank you for pointing out that the plant is 6 times bigger. I watched the HBO series Chernobyl and it opened my eyes to the dangers of a nuclear meltdown. I hope the new containment tech is enough to avoid a disaster.
There is no "new containment tech" that contains a reactor breach.
Things like the (non-existent) molten salt reactor try to reduce the risk of a runaway meltdown, but do nothing to stop the danger if the reactor itself is broken open.
That show was basically fiction. https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/chernobyl/
Firefighter have access now:
https://twitter.com/bnonews/status/1499555239351005194?s=21
https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1499555095817728023?s=21
"According to Andrey Tuz, spokesman of the press service of the nuclear power plant, there is no threat of radiation spread."
And now Russian forces have entered the building and are fighting inside.
Apparently Ukrainians have surrendered now.
What a nerve wrecking situation. In the heat of the moment deciding when is the right time to surrender. Probably the smartest decision of the day.
Where do you get those news? Would you mind sharing the link?
There's a telegram channel:
https://t.me/UkraineNowEnglish
https://t.me/UkraineNow
Ukraine TV live on YouTube.
Links please !
Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR) has a banner to ICTV Ukraine live stream on its frontpage. The channel is in Ukrainian, though.
Link to ICTV stream through ERR: https://jupiter.err.ee/otse/eri6
About the ICTV channel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICTV_(Ukraine)
About ERR's decision: https://news.err.ee/1608518996/err-adds-current-time-ukraini...
For context, access to ERR's own Russian news site was blocked in Russia a few days ago.
TSN: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXoJ8kY9zpLBEz-8saaT3ew
One of the channels that broadcasts (24/7) stream which is mentioned in the message above + periodically posted short clips of the news
UATV English
https://youtube.com/c/UATVEnglish
Same happened in Chernobyl. Workers in the plant granted the free pass and were allowed to keep running the plants. The young soldiers just can't do it and is in their most interest to keep the plant operations safe. A figth inside a nuclear plant can't be win and starting it would be a moronic disaster. Even the dumbest soldier is aware of that.
But is still a risk. People does not act rationally in a war. If it continues for a lot of time any depressed 19yo soldier could say I'm sick of this, decided to suicide and destroy half of the EU with him. The objective of probable Ukrainian genocide has been upgraded to possible European genocide as a bonus.
On the other hand, Putin seems to crave for another countries joining the war so he can "show the nazis" to Russia.
Nuclear power stations don't go boom so even if a war was raged inside a power station it wouldn't take out half of Europe.
What could happen is safety systems could be compromised causing a meltdown and that would carry the risk of spreading radioactive matter to the local environment. And if the local environment gets sufficiently contaminated then weather patterns, sea tides, etc could spread the radiation much further. But it's a slow risk (when compared to a nuclear weapon) so it is still possible to contain the damage to within a few miles, which I acknowledged is still bad but a much better outcome than half of Europe being contaminated.
The Chernobyl reactor suffered a steam explosion that destroyed the containment chamber and lead to an open air reactor core fire. Fukushima suffered several hydrogen gas explosions that also caused explosive venting of radioactive material and severe structural damage.
So yes nuclear plants can explode extremely violently and that can disperse huge quantities of radioactive material. They’re not nuclear detonations as in an atomic warhead, but the consequences can still be catastrophic and as at Chernobyl the fallout can be similar to that from a nuclear weapon. In fact when scientists in Russia initially detected the radiation from Chernobyl they at first assumed there must have been a nuclear explosion if done kind.
You're literally arguing the same points I made:
+ It's not the fission material that explodes (like in a bomb)
+ The explosion is relatively small
+ Radiation is then dispersed to the wider area via atmospheric or tidal conditions (like smoke drifting) rather than as a direct result of the explosion
All points I was making too.
> but the consequences can still be catastrophic and as at Chernobyl the fallout can be similar to that from a nuclear weapon
I never said there wouldn't be radioactive fallout nor that it wouldn't be catastrophic. I said it's a slower risk (days rather than seconds), easier to contain (relatively speaking) and it wouldn't take out half of Europe.
You're not actually disagreeing with anything I've stated despite phrasing your comment as if it were a correction.
Chernobyl was caused by several days of mismanagement. It wasn't something that happened over night. Fukushima took more than 24 hours after the tsunami for the first hydrogen explosion and the others were several days later. And it was a week after the tsunami before the situation escalated into a meltdown too.
To be clear: I'm not saying waging a fight inside a nuclear power station isn't a dangerous and stupid thing to do. What I'm saying is it's not comparable to a nuke exploding.
I disagree on the conclusion that damage to a nuclear reactor is a 'slow risk'. The Chernobyl explosion and open rector core fire, which spewed vast quantities of radioactive material into the atmosphere, occurred within a few hours and minutes of the mistakes that triggered them. It's plausible to imagine a few artillery shells into a plant's cooling system could lead to a similar chain of events and a catastrophic explosive contamination event.
> The Chernobyl explosion and open rector core fire, which spewed vast quantities of radioactive material into the atmosphere, occurred within a few hours of the mistake that triggered them.
Chernobyl was a very unique situation though. They almost engineered that disaster to happen with the mistakes that they made. We've learned a lot since then too. That all said, you do make a very strong argument with your next sentence:
> It's plausible to imagine a few artillery shells into a plant's cooling system could lead to a similar chain of events.
Indeed. That is a very good point.
> So tell me, how does a rbmk reactor explode?
Edit: This is a joke based on TV series Chernobyl. A Chernobyl reactor did infact explode and the logic was that it exploding was impossible there for it did not explode.
Stop spreading FUD. The plant has six VVER-1000/320 reactors.
They don't
Chernobyl disaster was first detected in Sweden, and in this nuclear plant would be like six Chernobyl, is closer to Europe than Chernobyl was and we can add the 3 reactors still active in Chernobyl also in hands of clueless 20 Yo soldiers. Some of those people claimed that they don't really know whom are fighting, or what are doing here.
By the way, I never say that I was concerned by an explosion blowing half of the continent, but the effects on Germany for example, were measurable and still last. We shouldn't be so naive as to ignore the risk.
I think that your prevision of just a few miles, enough so Putin will have this safe perimeter, is too much optimistic
Chernobyl was a different era and mismanaged for days too. If something happened to the Ukrainian power station we'd know about it sooner (the proof of that is the fact that we know enough to have this discussion to begin with) and could react sooner. We've learned lessons from other meltdowns and nuclear and radiation accidents and incidents that have happened since Chernobyl and thus are better equipped and educated to respond. This applies as much to Russia as it does Europe, Japan and America too.
> I never say that I was concerned by an explosion blowing half of the continent, but the effects on Germany for example, were measurable and still last.
Your comment is very misleading then if that's what you meant:
"If it continues for a lot of time any depressed 19yo soldier could say I'm sick of this, decided to suicide and destroy half of the EU with him."
^ that reads to me like a pretty instant cause and effect, which a nuclear meltdown is not. If you were talking about over a prolonged period with no decontamination nor mitigation efforts put in place, then it really was not clear from your comment. And I'd argue that is a result of far more than just the actions of a depressed 19 year old soldier in isolation.
> I think that your prevision of just a few miles, enough to Putin have this safe perimeter, is too much optimistic
You're now conflating accident with intention. If Putin intentionally wants to contaminate half of the EU then that's a whole different argument to an accident happening during a capture of a power station or a depressed solder committing suicide (which was the original context you defined and the context I was responding to)
I'm not trying to dispute that the risk of contamination if one damages a nuclear power station is both significant and worrisome. I'm just saying it's not an instant effect (as your post implies) and thus measures can be taken to contain the worst of it to relatively a localized area.
Anyway, I think we both agree that nuclear power stations don't make good war zones :)
Thankfully the reactors are behind the camera streaming the administrative building. Hopefully nothing goes wrong during the takeover. The reactor containment itself is robust, but the potential for human error in a war that keeps escalating should not be discounted.
Internet speculation is that the power plant will be shut down once taken over. Which at least minimizes the ongoing risk of human error. Heck, shutting down is probably a far simpler process than continuing to run - nuclear power plants are designed to be shut down if necessary.
Well, shutting down nuclear reactor is not a simple process — it has to be actively cooled for weeks after being disconnected, which requires power, which you don’t have because you shut it down. So there should be either on-site generators (burning fuel) or external power . That’s why power stations usually have multiple reactors which are serviced on schedule, so it always has some generation happening.
None of it can be relied on during the war.
Shutting down and not having power to cooldown is how Fukushima happened. Emergency shutdown drill is how Chornobyl’ happened
> Emergency shutdown drill is how Chornobyl’ happened
And not being informed of well-known (in higher Soviet echelons) serious reactor flaws, like the grafite on the rods being inserted into the reactor core initially spiking the fission process significantly.
Shutting down is a much safer condition than operating. The decay heat decreases massively over time (huge difference between minutes / hours / days /weeks) and gets safer the longer it has been off.
Also if it's online, the electricity needs to go somewhere: any disruption to the electrical grid and it'd have to go off - probably at a bad time. Better to go through the shutdown in a planned manner while the outside situation is (relatively) stable.
What would happen if the grid connection was severed by bombing? Is there no emergency shutdown mechanism where the output is just dumped into some artificial load?
Then again, a 5700MW resistor might require a bit of cooling.
First, reactor protection systems will start reducing power down to 40% nominal if the turbogenerator load disappears (search for URB in https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...).
The power would not be dumped into a resistor: the power would be dumped in form of heat with the turbogenerator disconnected from steam. I expect that you can "just" dump it in the condenser and use the standard cooling of the condenser to dump it into the local body of water. If that's insufficient, one can dump steam from the secondary loop into atmosphere (which necessitates adding water there). You can play with a vver-1000 simulator and see how many of these things work; the simulator whose manual I'm citing above can be easily found on the internet.
It's reactor heat -> (heat exchanger) -> steam -> (steam turbine) -> electricity.
If you disconnect the load, you need to stop putting steam through the turbine and dump it somewhere else (i.e. a condenser). All steam turbine plants (including coal) have something similar.
Stoo the turbines and dump the st team/heat into the lake instead?
I was about to mention that reactors often have fuel generators but I remember that the invading force is famous for selling the gas from their tanks to pocket the money…
Given the quality of Russian supply planning and execution it seems as if the biggest danger could be emergency generator fuel supplies getting forcefully repurposed. Good luck doing a safe shutdown...
I mean, they're also designed to run, and they do that most of the time.
Given the continuous need for cooling and containment, and within the context of a war, does it really matter if a fission power plant is running or shut down in terms of environmental security?
Russian forces have been destroying substations to kill electricity and this is the largest power station in Ukraine. It is not unreasonable at all to think that shutting it down and making it hard to get back up (to destabilize or shut down the Ukrainian power grid) is part of the Russian attack strategy.
It seems trivial to cut the big power lines if you want to cut power?
Ukraine is a big country. Meanwhile, this power plant represents 40 % of Ukraine's nuclear power generating capacity, which in turn is responsible for ~50 % of power generation. So this one plant is around 20 % of the total generating capacity in Ukraine.
Since Ukraine is no longer connected to the Ex-Soviet power grid, it is now an isolated grid and has to generate all electricity domestically. That's why the Ukraine is trying to create an interconnection with the EU grid as quickly as possible.
They're much less hazardous in a "cold shutdown" state. Decay heat is highest immediately after shutdown and decreases over time.
Anything can go wrong AFTER takeover. Russians can convert power plant into nuclear landmine and blow up it on retreat. This is war between two nuclear states, so nuclear weapon will be used eventually.
> This is war between two nuclear states, so nuclear weapon will be used eventually.
Ukraine is not a nuclear state as it does not have nuclear weapons.
We promised to not have it in return for not being invaded, so technically we are a nuclear state without any weapons present at this moment (as far as publicly known).
Since we have both technological expertise and practical means (from uranium ores to delivery systems), it’s a matter of time.
No nukes means not a nuclear state.
The former nukes belonged to the USSR and only they had the codes to arm them.
So tell us, which of the letters in USSR is for "Russia"?
RSFSR - Russia is officially recognized as continuation state of USSR by the UN
Can you point to an official document, such as voting by UN members, to put RF into security council of UN? I cannot find any. RF is not a founder of UN, so it puzzling for me, how they are able to sit permanently in Security Council. Is there an exception for RF in UN statute written somewhere?
I wondered the same thing recently. Found this legal academic analysis of the succession of member states.
The conclusion part made me think that the subject was negociated between constituant parts in the devolution treaty. However the paper does highlight that the UN is under ever more pressure for rule-based functioning and transparency, so who knows.
Personally if it were me, I'd rather try and get Russia's membership or voting rights suspended, based on the fact that article 4 states that the UN is for peace loving nations. In the current climate this has a chance of passing in the general assembly, where the veto can not be used. Russia has evoked article 41 'right of self-defense' but that seems problematic.
Another question is if you want to exclude Russia. It sets a precedent, and erodes the position of the UN if not (near-) unanimous. The previous vote had 144 out of 193 voting against Russia, with only 5 against (Russia, Belarus, Venezuela, etc)
https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
> Can you point to official documents, such as voting by UN members to put RF into security council of UN?
No idea, I haven't seen any. Another thing Russia inherited from USSR war nukes as well as debt.
> from USSR war nukes
edit (I misspelled): from USSR was nukes
Turns out it's just inertia, also the last constituent member of USSR to leave (and thus logical successor) is... Kazakhstan
Not just inertia, but also military and nukes
None, but unlike Ukraine, russia had the codes and took them when they left the USSR
>so technically we are a nuclear state without any weapons present at this moment
You'd still be prevented by NPT (which Ukraine is part of) like all other non-nuclear states, even without the Budapest Memorandum.
> It looks like nobody holding their promises right now, i.e. USA, Brittain, RF, France are traitors, thus Ukraine has full right to not obey this agreement either.
No, the only traitor is Russia. Look at the actual contents of Budapest memorandum [1]. This is in summary what the parties committed to:
1) Respect Belarusian, Kazakh and Ukrainian independence and sovereignty in the existing borders.
2) Refrain from the threat or the use of force against Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
3) Refrain from using economic pressure on Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to influence their politics.
4) Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".
5) Refrain from the use of nuclear arms against Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
6) Consult with one another if questions arise regarding those commitments.
I do not see any of these items being violated by western powers.
> RF started to prepare their citizens for such scenario already.
Obviously not for propaganda purposes...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...
There actually seems to have been a promise made, back in 1991, that NATO wouldn't expand eastward beyond Germany. Somebody did some research deep and found an assurance like that in protocols, Spiegel reports
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-e...
Or if you want just the quote out of the protocol by the researcher, see here:
https://twitter.com/shifrinson/status/1160540400760832000/ph...
Not sure how binding such an assurance is or should be.
> It looks like nobody holding their promises right now, i.e. USA, Brittain, RF, France are traitors, thus Ukraine has full right to not obey this agreement either.
Nobody wants to start WW3 over Ukraine, except maybe Putin who has been left with very few options and doesn't care much about the lives of others, including his fellow Russians. The way he sees it is that he's liberating Ukraine from "nazis" and that the US has orchestrated a coup in 2014 replacing his puppet Yanukovych with their own. He has also signalled that he's ready to use the nuclear arsnal to deter anyone who interferes. What the West can do without potentially triggering WW3 is to economically cripple Russia, supply Ukraine with small arms, personnel carried anti tank and anti airplane weapons, ammo and possibly mercenaries. Any direct engagement between NATO and Russia could potentially trigger WW3 and nuclear warfare.
What you are doing is making unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine might be developing nuclear weapons. The very same false claims were in fact voiced by the Kremlin.
-Unless the Russian forces have way better connections than we give them credit for, they can not control which way the wind blows. At the moment, the winds come from the southeast, so a lot of the fallout would end up in Russia.
As far as I can tell, this power station is in the south-east. A wind from the south-east would dump fallout in central Ukraine, not Russia.
-Most definitely, but there'd be plenty to spare for Russia, too.
Blown up nuclear power plants are equal opportunity weapons.
Judging from the way this war develops, it’s nit like they care about Russia that much
I wouldn’t count having nuclear power plants as being a nuclear state. There’s a world of difference between power plants and weapons. A war between two countries with nuclear weapons would be on a whole other level.
I’ve read/heard the point is to destroy the reactor for the Russians. They’ve attempted to reach out to the Russians to no avail. It produces 1/4 the country’s power.
Interesting twitter space discussion goign on right now: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1LyxBowlNzoKN?s=20
speakers seem informed
Good discussion. Brings some clarity to this and so far it doesn’t sound quite as serious as you might be led to believe given the headlines.
It's reassuring in that meltdown is very unlikely.
But who the actual fuck shells a nuclear plant? That's not reassuring at all.
It's also against international law.
Nobody shelled a nuclear plant. Russian forces drove into the parking lot of a nuclear plant, had two RPGs fired upon them from an administrative building and fired machine guns back at the administrative building. There were fires and after some time the fighting was sorted out and firefighters put out the fire.
All headlines are about Russians shelling a nuclear plant. You can say that's fake news, but at least provide a shred of evidence (like any article?).
> KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian forces pressed their attack on a crucial energy-producing Ukrainian city by shelling Europe’s largest nuclear plant early Friday, sparking a fire and raising fears that radiation could leak from the damaged power station.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-a3092d8e476949...
I think the best stance is what we should all know by now: Ukraine is highly propagandistic because their victory scenario involves getting NATO directly involved and escalating a regional conflict into a World War.
So let's treat any information coming out from them as such and wait 1 day for more accurate accounts to come in.
To be fair, I'm certain that the Ukraine does not want to spark a world war, but they certainly would appreciate some direct support from NATO, even just air support. (which is likely to lead to a world war, but that's not Ukraine's intention, they are just trying to preserve their country).
Despite any inaccuracies due to the "fog of war" or even propaganda, the basic facts of this unprovoked invasion are more than enough to justify NATO intervention.
“Just air support” means a hot war between the US and Russia, which would be an extremely dangerous thing. It’s extremely irresponsible to advocate for that. There is a reason they weren’t allowed into NATO before, and that reason has only gotten stronger.
I'm not advocating for any direct NATO involvement, I was just saying that Ukraine would love NATO support, even if just air support (which they've already asked for), but even that would likely escalate this into a world war.
I'm not sure how you read that as me advocating for NATO involvement.
But I disagree with your assertion that the reason to not let them into NATO has gotten stronger, I think this invasion shows that the reason to let Ukraine in to NATO has gotten stronger.
Sorry, I don’t understand, how is air support not direct NATO involvement?
The reason has gotten stronger because if we let Ukraine into NATO now, that obligates NATO to defend them, which makes this into WW3. That would be extremely bad for humanity on a much, much larger scale than Ukraine represents. NATO is not a tool for humanitarian aid.
It is direct NATO involvement, I never advocated for it -- Ukraine did.
Obviously we wouldn't let Ukraine into NATO now during a conflict, but if this conflict somehow ends and Putin withdraws then I think there's a strong case for giving them NATO membership. Letting Ukraine join NATO later is a deterrent from another invastion, letting them join NATO today is just the start of WWIII
Ah ok, I agree. Sorry, I must’ve misunderstood what you meant by “the basic facts of this unprovoked invasion are more than enough to justify NATO intervention” in your original post.
Oh, I definitely think NATO has ample justification to join the battle, and if the adversary were not Russia (or China), I think they already would have.
But I also think it would be a horrible idea to get into a direct war with Russia.
I watched the same livestream the AP is screenshotting. There weren't any signs of "shelling". There were two RPG blasts, and then later on tracer rounds fired back towards the source of the RPG blasts.
Edit: Saw an explanation that media journalists are probably mistakenly identifying the lighting flares launched in the video as shelling. They're way too slow moving to be shells or explosive rockets.
So it randomly invading a country.
International law doesn’t actually mean very much, especially when the violator is powerful and has nuclear weapons.
This discussion has been very helpful for my understanding of the situation and has been reducing my anxiety, thank you.
You are welcome, also I saw you commented about rising radiation levels somewhere else earlier. I think this has been covered perhaps before you chimed in, a physicist claimed that the higher radiation levels, assuming they are actually recorded, could very likely be caused by the weapons used in the are and not reflect the true levels. I unfortunately don't have the necessary expertise to explain that further, but I assume it's simmiliar to smoking a ciggarette into a air pollution sensor.
edit: seems like you just asked for a source, I misread the comment chain
Reposting this valuable comment with a link to a live Twitter Spaces discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30549210
The experts on there are NOT concerned. At least yet.
Lots of scope for misinformation and panic here (understandably) as it’s a live developing story, but I don’t think we all need to retire to our bunkers just yet.
Would urge caution about reading too much into this until we have a bit more info. Rushing to try and interpret live radiation levels and talk of “this escalates to nuclear war” is a bit premature.
Allegedly, Ukrainian firefighters were shot at by Russian troops.
If true, then that’s another war crime to add to the growing list.
> If true, then that’s another war crime to add to the growing list.
So what?
Russia (like the USA btw) does not acknowledge the jurisdiction of the ICC. The dictator in Moscow (and his minions) will just laugh at any conviction from there.
Doesn't matter what they think or acknowledge. If they set foot in a country that supports those convictions, they can be arrested.
If who exactly sets foot in a country that recognizes the convictions? No country is going to try to start a war with Russia by detaining their President.
Once Putin is detained the war will end. At the very least a condemnation/conviction in absence will be another prestige blow, if that's possible. Germany started an independent proceeding btw: Once you violate the sovereignty of other countries and or human rights, you lose your own formal indefeasibility. It's called "Weltrecht".
The war with Ukraine is not just due to Putin. This idea that everyone is just following the orders of one man is absurd. It isn't going to be like a movie where once they take out the leader everyone puts down their weapons. Detaining him would not end the conflict and would be seen as an attack on Russia that could provoke the use of nukes.
Other than praying that China won't send arms to Russia or people getting tired of war quickly, what else can be done?
Indeed, which is fucking terrifying.
You don't do war crimes unless you expect to get away with it, which means either you're fighting a war that more powerful nations don't care about, or you expect to win it.
Putin can't win against NATO but he can make both sides lose.
I used to think he was rational and only minorly evil, but now I'm not so sure of the rationality... and clearly he's more than minorly evil.
Two thoughts come to mind:
1) The West has already weaponized the law. It is currently operating on the Latin American dictator model of "for my friends, anything; for my enemies: the law!".
2) The United States strongly opposes the ICC treaty and does not accept its jurisdiction overs its nationals and is even willing to use military force to free any of its nationals should the ICC ever try to enforce jurisdiction over an American[1]. In similar, but less violent terms, Russia withdrew from the ICC back in 2016.
So my point is, why would Russia care what some court with no jurisdiction says? It's already obvious it won't matter. The West is already going full Treaty of Versailles on them - so what difference does it make? There is little credibility left for the West, either in terms of rule of law or moral authority to be telling anyone what is right or wrong.
This is something that most of the world sees by now, but the West is comically unable to look in the mirror and see this and I'm afraid they will only notice when it's too late. It's absurdly self-destructive but the West consider it "winning", yet the history books will almost certainly mark this as the most obvious inflection point where the West lost the plot.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court#C...
Thank you very much. This is how citizens and governments in nations outside of the Western world perceive the West and its mad war propaganda. And they're correct.
Westerners, that are scrutinizing every single move of Russia today, ignored every time it was pointed out that the U.S. was waging a proxy war in Ukraine for 8 years.
The Minsk agreements, mediated by NATO members, were NEVER applied, and there have been 14000 deaths in the Donbass war since 2014. All the while, U.S. politicians have been publicly gloating that they "are fighting Russia in Ukraine". Their involvement in this is clearly documented -- except Westerners do not even care to look.
The current act of freezing the assets of the Russian state -- completely arbitrary thievery -- just sends the following message to outside governments that have seen this unfold: the West is not to be trusted.
He is likely “rational” but so out of touch after so many years with the actual world that he can only reason about the distortion bubble that gets built up around people with so much power, wealth, and political influence.
You don't do war crimes unless you expect to get away with it, which means either you're fighting a war that more powerful nations don't care about, or you expect to win it.
I think it's the later - Putin is not going to lose this war since he's racking up hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars of damage and compensation for injury/death that Russia would have a hard time paying for if he admits defeat.
Or some powerful group with slightly more sense or at least ambition in Russia will stage a coup.
Right now, I think that's the best the world could hope for. But seems decreasingly likely the longer this goes on, they already have ample incentive to do so now.
IMO you have to consider there is an information war going on so to me the only rational thing to do is take everything you think you know with a grain of salt.
There probably is a tactical advantage from the Russian side to putting out the idea that Putin has gone crazy.
Or he really has gone crazy. We can't really know but the fog of war spreading to social media does not seem like a great development.
There probably is a tactical advantage from the Russian side to putting out the idea that Putin has gone crazy.
What other explanation is there for invading a European country with close ties to the USA and NATO -- one claim for the invasion is that Putin was worried that Ukraine would join NATO, if they are that friendly to NATO, then he must have known that NATO would help fight.
There are quite a few loyal or sympathetic to Russia in Ukraine, due to propaganda and history, how many is hard to say and colored by your opinions. Hard to think not significantly fewer now than in the recent past.
Putin thought he would win quickly, get troops to lay down arms and overthrow the government. For whatever reason he was wrong, it seems clear this is what was expected but pushback has been more effective. Probably in no small way because organizing the logistics of such a large operation is hard and has not gone smoothly.
> What other explanation is there for invading a European country with close ties to the USA and NATO
This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZLhRP01jz8 seems like a possibility.
> one claim for the invasion is that Putin was worried that Ukraine would join NATO, if they are that friendly to NATO, then he must have known that NATO would help fight.
Well, look at what's happened. Look at what has happened previously in Crimea, look what happened in the Ukraine separatist regions before. Look at what is happening now. He would not necessarily have to be totally irrational to believe objectives could be achieved there.
USSR was a Protocol 1 signatory, but Putin withdrew from Protocol 1 in 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-warcrimes-conventi...
This is either a plan for malice or it's incompetency, either way it's not good.
Whether or not Russia is a Protocol I party doesn't particularly matter here as the war crime at issue is viewed now as a matter of customary international law and is explicitly within the jurisdiction of the ICC; Rome Statute Article 8, 2.(b)(iv)
The same ICC the USA has a law on the books to invade the Netherlands if it charges US troops? Russia isn’t a signatory either. It’s edifying to observe that only the losers ever get tried for war crimes. A major nuclear power may fail to win a war, but it can’t lose one except if everyone loses.
OK, but Russia withdrew from the ICC. And Ukraine has signed but not ratified. And as Russia can veto a U.N. Security Council resolution referring a crime to the ICC, I'm not sure how this happens? And it seems Russia is not a party to the Rome Statutes either.
> OK, but Russia withdrew from the ICC.
Doesn't matter for ICC jurisdiction over war crimes committed in Ukraine, because Ukraine, while not a state party, has acceded to voluntary ICC jurisdiction for war crimes and crimes against humanity on its territory from 21 November 2013 forward. (If you are relying on Wikipedia, it seems to systematically omit mention of voluntary jurisdiction.)
> And as Russia can veto a U.N. Security Council resolution referring a crime to the ICC
A UNSC resolution is not required; for cases where the ICC would have jurisdiction, it can begin investigations on the initiative of the prosecutor with permission of the ICC judiciary, or on referral of a state party (which need not be directly involved.) After the ICC prosecutor announced the intention to seek permission for an investigation, based on both a completed preliminary examination which found sufficient indication of ICC-covered war crimes and crimes against humanity before the recent escalation, as well as additional concerns arising from the recent escalation on his own initiative, but noted that a state-party referral would streamline the process, 39 state parties to the Rome Statute submitted referrals relating to the situation in Ukraine to the ICC.
The IAEA has been issuing a constant stream of very shrill warnings about Ukraine's NPP's on their press channel here:
https://www.iaea.org/news?type=3243 ("Press releases")
One can wonder what does it takes for the west to military intervene. Sanctions are a long term plan but it won't save Ukraine.
The risks of nuclear war from a NATO militarily intervention are far too high to even consider it. I’m sorry to say, but there is really nothing that could happen in Ukraine that would be bad enough for us to accept the risk of nuclear annihilation.
If NATO got involved my guess is that the chance of an all out nuclear war would increase to near 100% because Russia can not win a conventional war with NATO which means nukes would need to be deployed to level the playing field.
Once one Nuke is fired it's likely they'll all be because the only real defence against a nation using nuclear weapons against you is to try to wipe them out before they wipe you out.
In this situation hundreds of millions would be likely die directly from the attack and a similar amount would probably die from starvation shortly after as the global economy collapses and crops fail on mass.
There's just no situation that this is something we'd even want to consider. As much as I'd love NATO to be able to intervene it's just not possible. The best we can do is put pressure on Russia and show other nations that this is not acceptable and not in their national interest because of the harsh economic consequences.
> the only real defence against a nation using nuclear weapons against you is to try to wipe them out before they wipe you out
Thankfully, that has been thought of and, as much as possible, planned for.
How do you decrease the incentive for a preemptive strike? By building your nuclear arsenal so that it can survive one. There are 3 main things that help achieve this:
(1) Put your nukes somewhere where even a direct hit from an enemy nuke will not destroy them. That's why missile silos are underground.
(2) Hide your nukes. The enemy can't take out your nukes if they don't know where they are. Fixed-location nukes are bad at this. Mobility is good, but road and rail are not the best forms of mobility. Nukes in planes are better. Nukes in submarines are really good.
(3) Have lots of nukes. If the enemy can destroy 90% of your nukes with a preemptive strike but 10% of your nukes would still easily be enough to wipe them out, then a preemptive strike still doesn't achieve its goal. One way to increase nukes cheaply and effectively is with MIRVs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targeta...), which means one missile has multiple nuclear warheads that can independently hit different targets.
Basically, all this was thought out pretty thoroughly during the Cold War. The well-known acronym MAD stands for Mutually-Assured Destruction, and the importance of the assured part has not been overlooked.
Source: needed a government credit in college, took a class that was all about nuclear deterrence theory.
Given the accepted MAD doctrine, which kept the "peace" throughout the cold war, you would think nuclear escalation would be unthinkable as a means to stave off a conventional defeat on foreign soil.
For a mad man who's going to lose anyway, what does he care if he takes the whole world with him?
He will lose in many respects, but even so, Moscow and St. Petersburg are not going to be radioactive craters. All evidence suggests he wants to be remembered as a Russian hero. I think he is intelligent enough to know that bringing nuclear destruction on Russia will not put him in that category. And it's not possible for him to act alone anyway. Worth noting that the two people in human history who have acted to stop a nuclear catastrophe were both Russian soldiers: Stanislav Petrov and Vasili Arkhipov.
It is completely mind numbingly crazy how much is at stake based on a single psychopaths whims, and possibly the courage of a few people selected by the same psychopath.
Absolutely. I think democratic governance and rule of law should be table stakes for participation in the "Western" economy and its international institutions. Countries that don't respect those values in their own societies won't respect them in international relations either.
So any time a tin pot dictator wants to do whatever they want they just claim they'll use nukes and we let it ride?
Why do you think there's been so much effort to keep Iran and North Korea out of the nuclear club? Once someone has a high probability of having nuclear weapon and the capacity to deliver it, your tolerable options decline sharply. Russia is the worst-case form of that problem since they have many advanced weapons and even if their maintenance standards have been deplorable the odds are far too high that enough would reach their targets to cause death counts in the range of hundreds of millions.
Yes and this is why the US has been so aggressive about stopping North Korea.
And why the US and especially Israel is so against Iran having nuclear weapons, to the point where Israel would attack Iran militarily, to stop them.
Yes. That's why every tin pot dictator wants nukes.
Hm no that doesn’t sound good either. Alright nuclear annihilation it is! Too bad…
That's the point of sanctions and shipping weapons to Ukraine.
Yup, as long as the tin pot dictator is attacking some country we don't really care about.
Bingo. Unfortunately NATO made it very clear to everyone over the past eight years that it's not going to spill blood over Ukraine.
... But now that the opportunity to trap Putin in a quagmire has presented itself, it does seem to be ready to flood the region with weapons. Had it done so at any point in the preceding eight years, war might well have been avoided.
Which leads me to think that avoiding war was never the goal.
I think it's a bit of a catch-22: given one of Putin's stated aims is to demilitarise Ukraine and remove Western weapons, NATO arming Ukraine earlier would have caused Russia to invade earlier.
Invasions take a lot of preparation. You can't just tell your army to attack some country - they need to plan exactly how they will do it, and practice.
The turnaround time on this sort of thing does not favor the aggressor.
It makes me wonder if there is a Russian information campaign to try to get public opinion in the West for NATO to enter, knowing that the US is not going to enter and then fracture NATO or cause division within NATO.
All the sudden all these Curtis LeMay types are coming out of the woodwork trying to drum up nuclear war.
We know Russia has ran information campaigns on social media in the past so it seems pretty irrational to believe they aren't running campaigns when actually at war.
Everyone should take what they think they know about the situation with a huge grain of salt. It is totally irresponsible to read a news headline that may or may not be correct and then from that headline extrapolate that it is time to go to DEFCON 1.
What would be the difference if Putin invaded a NATO state and NATO was forced to defend? What would be the difference if he starts losing the war and needs to kick it up a notch? Is there any less chance he'd use nukes? Serious question. Threatening nukes is a rational move. Actually using them is not.
In general, the side that cares about the conflict more is more likely to engage in direct conflict, and escalate to nuclear use if their goals are being thwarted by conventional war.
To Russia, Ukraine is a core interest, and thus they're the most likely to escalate to tactical nuclear weapons if NATO intervenes and Russia starts losing.
With a NATO country, that calculus changes, and if for some crazy reason Russia actually attacked a NATO country, we would have a good chance of being able to fight back and expel Russia's attack without the war going nuclear, because Russia has far less interest in winning that war, as existing NATO countries aren't core interests to Russia.
> as existing NATO countries aren't core interests to Russia
The Baltic states (former Soviet Union states) might be
A nuclear would most likely mean the end of the world.
Russia's core interest should be preventing the end of the world. If Putin is rational, he will never initiate a nuclear war. If he is irrational, he will not stop with Ukraine.
There are paths of escalation that merely risk nuclear annihilation rather than guarantee it. In particular, in a war with NATO, where Russian forces would be heavily outmatched in conventional warfare, Russian forces would consider using "deescalatory" tactical nuclear strikes on NATO troops. The side that has the most invested (e.g. for Russia where Kyiv is seen as integral to its historical Slavic / Rus heritage) is most likely to engage in escalation and brinksmanship while the other side has to consider whether to follow it up the escalatory ladder or back down.
Putin is on record as saying "There is no world imaginable without Russia"
I keep telling people this and people seem bewildered. But how many times has this already happened in the last 80 years? We already know there’s nothing they can do to trigger a war.
I think if Russia resorted to using nuclear weapons against Ukraine we would intervene.
I’ve been wondering if that convoy outside of Kyiv is really stopped because serious thought is being given to the idea of a nuclear attack to save a long bloody insurgency.
I don’t know if NATO would respond to a nuclear attack on Kyiv. Would NATO attack knowing the destruction of London/Paris/NYC/etc would be almost guaranteed?
No offense but this is pretty far fetched.
First of all, if Putin wanted to level Kiev he could do it with conventional bombs and artillery. Nuclear weapons are not needed.
But second of all, *why* would he want to flatten Kiev? Why don’t you read his goals in his own words? https://web.archive.org/web/20220224024154/http://en.kremlin...
He says he sees Russians and Ukrainians as one people and wants to unify them. No, I’m not defending him, I oppose war in all circumstances.
But it’s important to understand that he’s not some evil maniac out of a comic book that wants to kill everybody, he has actual goals.
That was written under the assumption they'd have occupied Ukraine in 3 days or so, not the embarrassment that is happening now. At this point, Kremlin will put out any false flag and use it to justify levelling Kyiv and his population will suck it up.
Now that the Ukrainian people are resisting "unification" and he has failed to achieve goals, he's ordered revenge attacks on Ukrainian cities to level them like Grozny or like Nazis destroyed Warsaw block by block after the uprising. This follows his own words too: he does not think that Ukraine has a right to exist. It's a textbook example of genocide and it's as rational as Hitler's desire to murder all Jews.
why would you believe a single word that Putin says though? This is the guy who among many other lies said on camera in 2014 that the green men that took over Crimea and were armed to the teeth were just some random locals and not Russian military. Just a couple of days before the current invasion denied any intention to do so while detailed attack plans were signed long before etc.
And besides taking pieces from your neighboring country, waging long shadow war in Donbas, telling everyone how Ukraine is not really a country anyway and then invading doesn't really seem such a great plan for unifying nations.
As far as I understand relations before Russians and Ukrainians were pretty OK before 2014 events. With his own actions Putin has made a country that has roughly 1/3 of the population of Russia mostly against him. Healing these wounds and relationships will take decades even once the war ends.
The things I can read here..
You could say this about any military aggression from Russia though.
"Putin taking Estonia isn't as bad as nuclear annihilation."
"Putin taking Berlin isn't as bad as nuclear annihilation."
"Putin taking DC isn't as bad as nuclear annihilation."
What if he just goes, "I'm invading western Europe now too, and if you fight back I launch the nukes"? Do we just roll over and say that it's better to surrender than fight?
All of those countries are NATO members.
So? What if Putin threatens nuclear annihilation anyway?
It's the clear line in the sand. Putin's not going to cross that line, he doesn't gain anything from it.
> Putin's not going to cross that line, he doesn't gain anything from it.
He doesn't really gain anything by nuking everyone if they help Ukraine either, but that's the threat regardless.
Nukes are all about the threat, and he does gain from the threat.
In this case pressure to keep the west from becoming directly involved.
Assuming NATO would be willing to use nuclear weapons if he did attack a NATO country.
I have far more confidence that Putin would use them than the US would. That asymmetry works to his advantage.
The only country which used them and on actual civilian cities leveling them to the ground is the US. Also, launching nukes is not one person job. His generals need to be mad too for that to happen.
I’m not sure what Hiroshima and Nagasaki have to do with the discussion. The context is so completely different as to be irrelevant.
I’m sure Putin doesn’t have a big red launch button on his desk, but between the US and Russia, who do you honestly think will have an easier time getting those missiles launched? The guy who mixed up Ukrainians and Iranians during a speech last week or the guy who ordered an invasion of a neighboring country? My money is on Putin.
Hopefully we never find out.
He knows he'll get an actual response that he can't defend against, nukes or conventional weapons.
Bluff? Putin wants to live out his golden years in unabated luxury after anointing a loyal successor. If he nukes the entire world, he will live in squalor and misery while being hunted by the entire human race. He won't do it. Me hopes. Me also hopes someone in his inner circle gets a nice clean view of the back of his head and does the world a favor.
I mean you're right, but... he already lives in unimaginable luxury, wanting for nothing. Has for decades. Could continue to do so for 100 lifetimes. And yet here we are.
> I’m sorry to say, but there is really nothing that could happen in Ukraine that would be bad enough for us to accept the risk of nuclear annihilation.
Would that hold up if you insert "anywhere" instead of "in Ukraine"? I am not so sure that e.g. the Baltics would be protected by NATO if Putin invades.
How can anyone intervene when Russia has 6,400 nuclear weapons? It will provide no comfort in our final moments to know Russia is facing the same fate.
Speak for yourself.
You seem eager to die just to hurt someone you hate, do you think you're being rational?
is Putin?
Sorry dude, not going to happen, not in a million years.
We're going to keep telling ourselves that it would risk nuclear retaliation right up until the point where there's nothing in Ukraine worth defending because Russia nuked every place in Ukraine still standing.
The only exit that isn't a destructive spiral out of control is the one where Putin is no longer in power.
Nah, Ukraine isn't worth it. Never was.
In my view three things:
1. NATO Article 5 invocation, i.e. an armed attack on a NATO nation
2. or a disaster so terrible that the security of Europe requires that NATO enter the war i.e. a nuclear reactor meltdown<
3. a NATO ally such as Poland deciding to enter the war on Ukraine's side.
An NATO Article 5 invocation is the most likely. Russia is taking heavily loses due to NATO arms shipments to Ukraine. To reduce these arms shipments Russia must either bomb the shipments near the border or control the border. Both of these could result in an accidental attack on Poland. Russian bombers often have difficulty navigating and use unguided bombs. If they stray into Polish airspace they make be shot down. If Poland decides that war with Russia will happen sooner or later, they make choose to enter the war on Ukraine's side sooner when Russia is least prepared.
Ukraine was always a lost cause. Biden went on national TV a week before the war and said Russia would win, but it would be made costly.
It is not the job of the west to be world police
“Should emphasize there's a LOT of safeguards in place that make a radiation leak unlikely. Still, doesn't seem very wise.”
https://twitter.com/inteldoge/status/1499542139155398659?s=2...
These are 80's era Soviet VVER PWRs. They are better designs than Chernobyl style RBMKs, but they're not at par with Western PWRs. In particular they lack much of the automation expected in Western designs.
The danger here is if these were still operating at power when the Russians rolled in and residual heat is not removed because operators have fled or the power gets cut then the core(s) will melt. Melting cores generate hydrogen gas which then explodes. Also, there is probably a large quantity of spent fuel on site, some of which needs active cooling as well.
The account seems credible enough, but there's something weird about citing a military intel account named and themed on a meme.
It's just one of many OSINT accounts on Twitter that report / summarize what's coming through via both Telegram users and official sources.
I highly recommend this lecture by Finnish army intelligence expert to those looking to understand the deeper roots behind Russia's actions. Lecture in Finnish, but it has English subtitles. Truly wakening stuff, it really helps you to understand the situation much better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF9KretXqJw
What do you recon are the key points for people who don't have 1h to watch with subtitles. Specifically related to the nuclear power plant news from today.
The key points of this terrible demagoguery, from what I could tell:
1) Russians have been conquered a lot and are very insecure
2) They're part Mongols and inherited fear and lies as state of being
3) Russians only respect strong Tsar and let the Tsar do whatever he wants as he appears strong and manufactures the fear through the lies
4) Russians are stupid and not capable of creating anything, only destruction. They stole anything technologically worthwhile.
5) Russia is a terrible autocratic imperialist country that is completely geopolitically irrational.
Any person taking this video at face value should conclude that Russia should be suppressed and destroyed, that would be a great service to the human kind. Yes, everything makes sense now.
I do not understand, why are they fighting near the reactor? It only makes sense to keep troops of both sides away from something as dangerous.
From the Russian perspective, taking out Ukraine's power is strategic and demoralizing.
Though I think we're seeing the Ukrainians are fierce when cornered, so probably isn't the morale breaker they think it is.
"From the Russian perspective, taking out Ukraine's power is strategic and demoralizing." It would seem to me as though the Russians are living in a glass house when it comes to energy sabotage. The map of Russian petroleum pipelines going through Ukraine is substantial.
At this point it seems as though Putin won't back down for fear of being perceived as weak. He'd rather be seen as a madman. Which may be why some of these choices seem, well...mad.
One side goes “hey they won’t shoot us if we’re near the plant”. The other side goes “hey no fair”. Things escalate. It’s war, and it sucks.
One side was unarmed civilians blocking the road to the plant for couple days until Russians started to shoot and wounded several civilians.
In other conflicts those are known as human shields.
Human shield is when forced. In this case it were willing people, a lot of older and mid-age people to whom it was their way to resist.
Up until this conflict it was never required that human shields must be forced into that position.
If you don't move aside when ordered to by a man with a gun, you might get shot.
War is the ground-truthed rule of kill or be killed. This is artillery being used to cause a nuclear incident. Maybe it’s to draw international troops in for emergency remediation. Maybe it’s to spread radiation to demonstrate the consequences of resisting.
Russia is trying to move northwards to Zaporizhzhia city. Leaving Ukrainian troops roaming freely in the Energodar town would have left their supply lines / flanks exposed, so they needed to drive in and clear troops out of the town (which mostly consists of a nuclear power plant).
I'm guessing the Ukrainian troops fell back to the nuclear power plant hoping they wouldn't get attacked there.
I wonder if Russia thinks it gives them a strategic advantage to be able to turn the power on and off at will? (Hypothetically, if they have full control of some city, they can turn the power back on and the people are less likely to revolt.)
This whole situation reminds me of the Mosul dam in Iraq, which was controlled by ISIS for awhile. The dam is kept stable by continuous grouting operations, which I believe were on hold for awhile.
I'm thinking maybe their long-range plan is to turn the reactor off and then damage it in some way that it can never be used again without rebuilding from scratch. Russia's main export is fossil fuels, and it's in Russia's economic and strategic best interest for Ukraine to be dependent on them for energy. Nuclear enables Ukraine's energy independence, and thus can't be tolerated.
Without knowing the particular reactor designs, I'll just say it's extremely unlikely they can turn it on and off like a tap (or even up and down significantly) due to the resulting poison transients.
If enemy troops are hiding there and shooting at you, what are your choices?
Sense? What about any of this makes sense?
That is indeed the fundamental issue still. The invasion of Ukraine is simply insane and will absolutely hurt Russia far more than it can ever benefit. That's the really scary part which makes this all terribly unpredictable.
I do not think Putin gives a flying fuck whether it benefits Russia. He acts like a rabid dog.
Russia may be just trying to take it off line.
they could blow up the substation connecting it to the grid in that case.
That's not the point. People don't really seem to get that Russia is basically a terrorist state right now. The goal is not only to cut power but to terrorize - striking a nuclear plant and preventing firefighters from intervening is, as you currently see, scary as fuck. They're sending a message.
If you want an actual explanation for the extension of NATO into the former communist countries, look no further. East Europeans have a collective memory about how the Russian military operates.
If in future you want to force your new vassal state to buy your gas, you disable their nuclear plants.
Stock futures plunged because of fears of a meltdown, I presume. For that to happen requires a specific chain of events, not just a fire at some non critical part of the plant. Nuclear power plants are designed to withstand a lot. Likely the plant was shutdown anyway. Now stock futures have recovered almost all losses, would have been a good buying opportunity based on this fear. Shows how having an knowledge advantage helps greatly when trading based on headlines.
The reactor was under renovation, but fueled.
Oh then it doesn’t really matter. If the reactor is off the concern is very low.
Ukraine is an electricity exporter according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici... .
Is targeting electricity production a de-facto attack on EU infrastructure?
Would taking out Ukraine's electricity generation increase its dependence on Russia (who could sell it), and significantly increase the EU's dependence on Russian gas?
No, Ukraine disconnected from Russia on 24 Feb (almost accidentally, interestingly) and has been running in island mode since.
Physical connections to the EU have been constructed, but they are not in sync so the actual connection has not been made yet.
Ukraine is not connected to EU grid, I believe. There was some agreement to connect it next year, recently.
At what point do we consider the risks of letting this continue higher than the potential effects of intervention?
Given that the potential effects of intervention run up to nuclear war -- never.
Isn’t intentionally causing a nuclear meltdown during war already nuclear war?
Not in the same sense people usually mean "nuclear war".
Swapping many ICBMs is a lot more deadly than letting one NPP go critical.
> than letting one NPP go critical.
Just nitpicking, but AFAIK nuclear power plants already "go critical" whenever they're operating (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_(status) "Criticality is the normal operating condition of a nuclear reactor, in which nuclear fuel sustains a fission chain reaction.")
Thanks, I didn't realize I was using the wrong term!
I'm not sure why the parent post was downvoted. It was on-topic and taught me something relevant.
So if someone detonated a dirty bomb in Russia, that wouldn’t be nuclear war?
It would, but still better than glassing cities with ICBMs
Clearly not
Why? It’s basically a giant dirty bomb.
No, it's not. We are arguing semantics.
Why isn’t it?
Because a reactor explosion is a small chemical reaction, with the yield of a single medium-sized conventional bomb, that also happens to scatter some amount of radioactive crap into the surrounding environment.
Whereas a nuclear explosion is a self-sustaining nuclear reaction, which produces a fireball that can engulf an entire city.
Given the option, I'd far rather stand a mile downwind of an exploding reactor[1], than a mile from ground zero of any modern nuclear weapon[2]. The solution to the first problem is walking away, and trying not to breathe too much of the crap in. There is no solution to the second problem, because you, and everything in miles around you would be instantly incinerated.
[1] https://youtu.be/xulAgMNK5Jk?t=193
[2] https://youtu.be/r3l0G3XOUv4 - the fireball is a mile across. Anyone for miles outside the fireball zone will be turned into charcoal. Each modern ICBM carries 6-12 of these. That is what nuclear war will look like. Both sides in a nuclear conflict will fire hundreds of them, against opposing cities.
> Why isn’t it?
Because the effects of a nuclear meltdown are closer to that of a chemical attack and far away from that of a thermonuclear detonation. Blurry red lines cease to be lines.
If the plant melts down and explodes sending nuclear material for 100s of miles that wouldn’t be nuclear war?
> If the plant melts down and explodes sending nuclear material for 100s of miles that wouldn’t be nuclear war?
No. Because, again, if you detonated a thermonuclear weapon above that same space, the difference would be night and day.
And if this is how Putin wanted his Presidency to end, care to game out his deadhand switch?
Trump attacked Syria when russians were there. How is Ukraine any different?
When we have the stomach to go through with a plan so overwhelming that it would cause Putin to submit in fear.
That is a very high threshold.
No doubt there are people working on black flag political assassination attempts, but really the only other options are convincing non NATO members to intervene or launching bombers towards Moscow and making an ultimatum that won’t be perceived as a bluff.
Ultimately though i think Ukraine has to mostly handle this on its own and if it doesn’t win the only thing to be done is let it happen and completely isolate Russia from the global economy until they are broken. It is not a pretty picture when your only options are backing a nuclear power into a corner.
Putin doesn’t have to submit in fear. Literally the only pre-condition is that it doesn’t trigger nuclear war.
It appears that EURDEP (European Radiological Data Exchange Platform) data isn't being shared with the public at the moment. I'm not sure if this is because of the war, this attack in particular, or if they're having problems with their infrastructure due to people like me wondering what's going on.
Their simple map (https://remap.jrc.ec.europa.eu/Simple.aspx) shows the last update as being 03/03/22 22:00 UTC, but selecting a station doesn't give any current or historic readings.
The advanced map (https://remap.jrc.ec.europa.eu/Advanced.aspx) doesn't display any data for me.
Greenpeace wrote a report about nuclear power plants in Ukraine two days ago.[0] The short summary is, that a npp needs to be managed after shotdown, and the most likely scenario is a loss of offsite power like happened in Fukushima. Additionally, there is quite a bit of spent fuel on the site outside of the containment.
[0] https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-international-stat...
The head of the Zaporizhia local administration said the plant director assured him, “Nuclear safety of the plan has been guaranteed/ensured” - (1)
1: https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=358548829609705&id...
The plant on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
And Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5124275,34.5850663,1549m/dat...
Nope. We are not surrendered and have no plan to do that. Tell that to your Russian friends.
I'm pretty sure he means the Ukrainians inside the nuclear plant, not Ukrainians in general.
Operators of nuclear plant are civilians. They are not part of force. Civilians can be captured, they cannot surrender, because nobody asks them to do that. I never heard that police or army asks somebody unarmed to surrender.
"I never heard that police or army asks somebody unarmed to surrender."
I don't understand the statement. Either it is completely oblivious to daily reality, or it is hinging on some pedantic / language dependent semantic detail that should really be explicitly addressed.
Really? You have never heard anyone ever describe regular citizens surrendering to the invader? I feel like you are arguing a technicality here - if you are faced with people with guns of course you'd say "I surrender" even if technically that's not what you're doing.
Welcome to HN. The home of "Well, technically".
Yeah, it’s why I feels so at home here and the primary source of my relationship issues.
Well, technically that's Reddit and not HN.
Do you have a source for that?
TBH, Putin is not calling a war a war, the turkish governemnt took some time to say it's war too, etc. ('cos calling it a war would mean triggering consequences). So, government's are super technical too... (not saying it's good or bad, I don't know, just saying that they are extremely technical with their words)
Keep in mind, not everyone here speaks English proficiently or primarily. Nuances in definitions can lead to widely different interpretations.
Given recent moves to allow Ukrainians everywhere to bear arms in response to the invasion. It's rather reasonable to see that the Civilians, once they enter into defending a stronghold (in this case, just a power plant), that they are now considered a militia, which can surrender.
But not all civilians bear arms so not all are considered militia thus they can't "surrender"
I looked up surrender in a few dictionaries, and none of them even mention this constraint as a secondary definition, much less the primary meaning. It just means: to give oneself up, submit, yield; relinquish possession or control over
So yes, those in charge of the plant surrendered it to the attackers.
That's the spirit.
Who's we? You're telling us that you're surfing HN in the trenches?
He's quite obviously Ukranian. He could just be a regular civilian, like you and I.
Title needs to change. Russian army caused the fire. It did not started by itself.
It's the title of the article, and I don't think a responsible news agency, like Reuters, would put that title.
> Reuters could not immediately verify the information, including the potential seriousness of any fire.
If Russia explodes a dirty bomb that plumes into nato countries, what happens?
Condemn Russia so that Russia doesn't repeat it in the future.
The future is now.
Sanctions.
Fortunately that kind of not a thing. Pulling fuel out of a reactor without special tools and training would 100% kill you, and trying to build a bomb with a fuel rod assuming you got it out would also kill you. Transporting that bomb without thick concrete or lead shielding would also kill you. Blowing it up would put a bunch of heavy dust in the air that would fall out quickly and could easily be washed off of anyone it got on without significantly endangering them as long as they don't consume it. And after all of that, NATO might get involved.
TL;DR it would take a concerted effort to build such a bomb without killing yourself only to build a worse bomb that would draw in NATO.
I think he is referring to (accidentaly) blowing up the plant in a Chernobyl’esqye kind of way.
If they destroy the containment buildings, which might take more than mortar fire then the reactor would probably SCRAM since it's a PWR. There might be a steam explosion, and maybe some localized radiation leak. Really heavy arial bombardment could, if it broke containment, spread fissile material around the immediate area, cause a huge fire, and throw some radioactive debris into the air. That would all be quite bad, but not Chernobyl bad.
Chernobyl was a graphite pile reactor with no containment building, and none of those exist anymore fortunately.
I should aadd that VVER's like the reactor in question have missile shields for precisely this reason, and a bunch of other passive features. It shouldn't explode.
2nd Edit: what I’m concerned about is artillery hitting spent fuel containment. I don’t know if they used hardened casks, or if they’re using pools that might be in a less hardened building. Whoever is shelling this thing is insane, or very stupid.
Going through the livestream I may have found the missile that hit [1]. Timestamp is in the top left corner. Seems there were other weapons fired though.
Edit: More footage [2]
[1]: https://imgur.com/a/W9WbI4m [2]: https://twitter.com/aletweetsnews/status/1499547760986509315
Washington Post: “The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog soon said the blaze had not affected ‘essential’ equipment and that Ukraine’s regulator reported no change in surrounding radiation levels.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/03/nuclear-powe...
Why not sign a pact saying "Nuclear Power Plants are Off Limits. Anyone caught messing around will be court martialled."
It's quite naive I know but if you make the consequences very clear and extremely bad for the troops, it might really deter them.
Or Russia is implementing a something similar to a scorch= the-earth policy.
Russia signed a pact guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for their portion of the Soviet nuclear stockpile [my misremembering, this was incorrect: and a large amount of money]. You can see how much signatures are worth with Putin.
> sovereignty in exchange for their portion of the Soviet nuclear stockpile and a large amount of money
The money went the other way - "guarantee" of sovereignty plus financial compensation, in exchange for the nuclear weapons.
You’re right, thanks for correcting that.
This wasn't "messing around". For sure, that Russian unit was sent to capture the reactor. Wanting to control infrastructure like generators is an obvious and (fairly) rational strategic goal. Presumably the commander that ordered it felt it was worth the risk. That may not be a correct analysis (we'll see, I guess), but it surely wasn't done on a whim.
The 1949 Geneva Convention bans attacks on nuclear power plants, dams, etc (with some conditions).
Who gives a shit about a court martial? Like Russia would extradite soldiers to international courts or try them internally…
Or just submit some token soldiers and have them claim to have defied orders and acted on their own, not hard for an autocrat.
please don't use links that block views!
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukrai...
Safer than the plant at Chernobyl, thankfully, with a real containment building. I'm still worried though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Safety_barriers
news spreading about "elevated radiation levels near the power plant" and the plant being on fire are also fake https://twitter.com/iaeaorg/status/1499562515340177416
#Ukraine regulator tells IAEA there has been no change reported in #radiation levels at the #Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant site.
anyways, the news cycle nowadays and the misinformation is insane
CNN literally reporting "Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is on fire, according to the mayor of a nearby town."
Which again, sensationalist title the plant itself is not on fire. CNN and FoxNews literally saying it's another Cherynobyl - "Fears of disaster greater than Chernobyl as Putin's forces attack largest atomic plant in Europe"
Idk man, I get it's a war and shit is serious, but the information overload of propaganda from all sides is insane and is really fucking with people's anxiety and mental state.
I get what you are saying, and you are right stuff is sensationalized, but there is video of the facility getting shelled. The fire didn't start itself. People need to be anxious about this shit. The sad part is that we don't need any sensationalism to be anxious right now.
The Russians shelled an adjoining building from where they were being fired upon. This was captured on video and heavily sensationalized to an eye-rolling extent.
Frankly, I am not sure why Ukraine/West feel the need to broadcast propaganda - its not even necessary.
The hackernews crowd wants to pretend they are smarter than the facebookers who fall for fake news. But this is exactly what they do. Even though the original article is now updated to show the fire was not in the plant but outside its perimeter, you are downvoted and I was flagged for saying so. Even with ghost of kyiv nonsense making it extremely clear, western media/online nerds cannot accept that Ukraine is spewing out fake news. Out of desperation? understandably? Sure maybe. Still fake and you're still stupid for swallowing it
Snake Island - ukranian soldiers were actually captured not killed
Ghost of Kyiv ..
Good thing the nuclear reactor isn't allowed to run Java...
Or SQL Server...
https://web.archive.org/web/20110705230730/http://news.cnet....
Risking to be heavily downvoted… but does nobody question the story line at all?
It makes no sense for Russia to start shooting at a useless office building. If they wanted, they’d drop a few bombs on the critical infrastructure and that’s it.
Maybe the rumors Ukrainian forces evolved them into an attack and planted the fire has some substance? This news is the perfect headline to further lure in the west to help, without any actually critical damage to your own land.
https://archive.ph/NTefh
http://web.archive.org/web/20220304012532/https://www.reuter...
That's one of the biggest concern of this war. Ukraine is outnumbered and outgunned, and that's with Russia avoiding critical infrastructure and not leveling cities to the ground. For all practical purposes they're on their own.
A nuclear incident is pretty much their only (unlikely) hope to get some kind of foreign or NATO involvement.
Putin is an evil genius.
He attacks a nuclear plant and creates the risk of a meltdown. The result will be to remind the EU about how scary nuclear power is and ensures public opinion stays firmly against the one power source that can wean them off Russian oil.
Also, it has strategic value as limiting power to the rest of Ukraine makes it harder to wage war. No power, less internet and communication, slowing the stream of awful (for Putin) pictures and videos of his brutal war.
And capturing it would be a propaganda coup at home. Putin stopped the evil Ukrainians from blowing up a massive dirty bomb.
Pure evil genius.
I am quite sure he's just evil. A nuclear disaster as a result of russian shelling will for sure result in a direct NATO involvement. And despite all of it's propaganda, Russia cannot win a conventional war against NATO and nobody wins in nuclear confrontation. So I'll call him an idiot, because there's no wining this one. It's just stupid bully tactics.
What makes you so certain a meltdown would result in NATO involvement?
The USSR survived Chernobyl. It’s a very risky move, but not necessarily a stupid one.
There is no way to predict where exactly the toxic cloud will go[1] and it can affect Russians as much as the rest of Europe. Just settings part of an outside structure on fire is too risky and is not "Pure evil genius" but total insanity or military incompetence.
I would be happier if they blew up Chernobyl again as at least there is no more pressure cooker that can blow this shit high into the sky a seconds time.
[1] https://gdb.rferl.org/94D46F09-409D-415F-B87D-836E88607ECF_w...
"Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a 'special operation' that is not designed to occupy territory but to destroy its neighbour's military capabilities and capture what it regards as dangerous nationalists. It denies targeting civilians."
How very Reuters of them. I should have expected nothing less.
Is that a problem?
The problem is treating war criminals like they deserve an equal opportunity to explain their position.
It's indisputably a war of baseless aggression. Giving their narrative of it being a special operation to de-nazify is no different than giving nazis equal opportunity to explain their position on the Holocaust: an operation of de-bolshevization (which is what they actually said at the time).
Given that most of the reporting I see is already strongly opinionated I appreciate that I can also find more neutral coverage.
Breaking: Firefighters gain access to nuclear power plant in Ukraine, where an administrative building is on fire.
If this holds true, that would not be a good development at all. I hope no one gets too emotional now.
For those interested to see how the situation is portrayed in Russian most watched TV channel Rossiya 1 -> http://www.freeintertv.com/view/id-3163
I am absolutely livid and terrified for the state of the world right now.
Consider that there have been terrible things happening to people throughout the world, every day, for years. This is bad, of course, but I'd caution you that you're letting the media dictate your emotions. Did you feel this mad during the (still ongoing) Syrian conflict? How about when Russia invaded Georgia? Or the first Ukraine invasion in Crimea? In all three cases the threat of nuclear war was probably as high as today. And the atrocities during this war so far pale in comparison to those other three. And that's just conflicts involving Russia. Over the last few years there have been unspeakable atrocities committed across the continent of Africa - that make this look mild.
It's not that this is good or acceptable, but if you're just now getting mad, or just now seeing humans for what they're truly like, then perhaps this is a good lesson and an important milestone in the maturation process. Human nature has not changed so much over the last 80 years. It's good to be reminded of that, though the reminders are difficult.
The more I think about this kind of take, the less it makes sense. People on this site talk about American president and American race relations more then about China too. Because there are many Americans here. There are many Europeans here too and thus they talk about about war right next to EU. Indians here run to every discussion involving india. Asia biased forums do talk about events in Asia a lot too.
People in countries around Syria talked about war in Syria a lot. And in that conflict, America seems to be blamed for both intervening and not intervening enough. It is guilty of Russia bombing cities and Assad actions ... and also for helping rebels in actual fight. Because, in relation with Ukraine war, it is important to make America guilty of literally every bad thing everyone does in every conflict.
For me the difference between now and Syria is when Syria started, I'd see one or two stories a day in the AP when I checked the news. I didn't frequent HN so can't speak to if it was constantly on the news. I realize a lot of the reason were getting the info is because this is a war in Europe instead of Asia or Africa. I've had to use pihole to block several sites on a schedule to keep me from doomscrolling, maybe I need to increase my blocked time? I'd love info on how people experienced World War II without TV as well as Vietnam and the first Gulf war when we had tv but before 24/7 news coverage on the internet and social media.
How do the atrocities in this war pale in comparison to those of the war in Georgia or Crimea? A Reuters article from two days ago says there have already been 2,000 deaths of Ukrainian civilians from the invasion alone.
I was only 4 during the Cuban Missile crisis, but I've talked to people who remember it and this sounds a lot like it.
Others have pointed out that, unfortunately, the threat of nuclear war never really went away, we just got better at ignoring it except at times like this.
At all times there are submarines just floating around out there in various oceans waiting to nuke someone with a ballistic missile. They can operate underwater for 3 months without surfacing. Someone can get a call and press some buttons and just vaporize a town filled with people they have never met. I lie awake at night thinking about this a lot.
Unironically, it is exactly that crisis that is key to understanding Russias actions right now, as there are many similar parallels. That, plus the 2.5T barrels worth of shale that Chevron and Exxon prospected underneath the Crimean peninsula.
If Russia really did go to war over securing some natural resources and a geopolitical strategic location, over a false pretense of something like liberation, it would sound so much like...well, us.
So let us take a quick moment of pause and realize that this demon lives well within our own borders, too.
Hoping and praying for peace.
Russia may or may not care for it's own wealth in the shale prospects, but it can't allow for Ukraine to have them. They've shown interest in being a western aligned democracy, and having such resource exports would make Ukraine much more wealthy. A wealthy, friendly Ukraine as an energy provider is much more attractive to Europe than Russia. They would have a much easier time being admitted to the EU and NATO, and it would be a severe blow to Russian pride and potentially economy, and the strategic position provided by being an energy exporter.
Yes, this is spot on. Russia has spent the last 10 years or so rebuilding pipeline infrastructure to avoid Ukrainian tariffs. Ukraine in response has begun to align itself with the West as it seeks to ramp up its own energy production, threatening the overwhelming majority of Russia's GDP. Sometimes these things really are simple. This isn't to excuse what Putin is doing, and he is performing some serious brainwashing on the Russian people. Let us hope that the Russian people wake up to the lies they've been fed and finally rid themselves of this man. The fact of the matter is, the majority of the Ukrainian and Russian people have much more in common than what separates them. My hope is His Holiness Kirill can also wake up from his slumber, set aside his notions that God cares about the restoration of the former glory of the Kievan Rus, and see what is going on around him, because he can act as a major unifying force if he chooses to do so.
If we equate Saddam Hussein with Zelensky, then sure. I'm not so sure the parallels are actually there, though. Intelligence tells us Putin's actual reasons for invading ukraine have a lot more to do with restoring the glory of the Russian Empire. Putin's "denazification" and "liberation" rhetoric seems more like a bone thrown towards those who are fair-minded and want to believe in an equivalence between Putin and W. I get that impulse, but I also think the just world fallacy can take us to some strange places and drag us all down to hell. Sometimes people are just evil.
Trying to rescue you from downvotes, but ppl refuse to see the big picture, to think reflexively. MSM sure isn't helping.
The Cuban missile crisis seemed far less stupid. Like, shelling the nuclear power plant?
Stupid or really nihilistic.
Maybe projecting nihilism is a strategy of its own. If I act as if there is nothing I care about except my goal you will never convince me to give up. So you have to give up to spare casualties.
i think you're right
most people forget that Cuban missiles followed missiles in Turkey, who can say who really started the madness?
For some more clarity:
https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1499552483655528454
Remember this situation the next time you hear somebody say that nuclear plants could be built cheaper if not for too much safety regulation.
I don't think I've ever heard this argument.
I have, however, heard the opposite argument: nuclear power plants are now extremely safe because of safety regulations, so we should build more of them.
It's actually quite common, I've experienced it personally many times because I am interested in the topic. Their price is basically uneconomical, and the argument in the end always boils down that the danger aspect is overblown, thus making them safe to an unnecessary degree. Example, first sentence in the article:
> Should any discussion of nuclear power go on for long enough, it becomes inevitable that someone will rant that the only reason it has become unaffordable is a proliferation of safety regulations.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...
This wouldn’t have happened if the world stopped buying oil and gas from Russia and used more energy from nuclear power plants.
This would have needed to happen a long time ago to have the altnerative energy sources in production today. Which also begs another counterfactual scenario: what if we had spent even a slightly larger fraction of the taxpayer r&d subsidies on renewables rather than the extremely capital heavy nuclear research on both military and civilian sectors, with many decades long dead-ends (breeders, gas cooled, liquid cooled, fission, etc), we'd be decades further along with solar and wind.
r&d in nuclear pretty much died down over past couple decades, it all went into wind and solar. and i think it's a mistake. safe compact nuclear reactors have been developed even with reduced capital, imagine where we could've been if we continued developing.
To have more nuclear power now the plant constructions would have needed to take place starting 30ish years ago, to account for the 15 year lead time per unit and to space apart the large number of construction starts to get an appreciable number of them operational. To have better renewables in the counterfactual r&d scenario, the earlier we diverted the resources the better acceleration payoff it would have had, ideally in the 50s to 70s.
Right, if only the world would have thousands of nuclear plants more, the danger of one blowing up in a war would decrease substantially.
What kind of sick mind one needs to have, to push this anti nuclear bullshit when the real issue is a fucking fascist invasion of Russia into Ukraine? For fucks sake..
Ran out of arguments pretty quickly so taking cover behind your high horse. One of the most pathetic things one can do.
Talk to me about reducing energy from nuclear after you've done something to reduce energy from russian oil and gas. until then - go fuck yourself.
You need to have some kind of an authority to argue like this. E.g. did you do anything about it? But even then it takes a special kind of stupid to behave like this.
yes, i've donated to ukrainian army that is fighting to stop the fascist russian scourge and i'm helping to coordinate delivery of humanitarian aid so that people aren't dying because of fascist russian scourge. all of that hopefully helps ukraine last enough for russia to collapse and become a dead wasteland with no oil or gas exports.
what are you doing again?
I asked what are you doing to stop the world's dependance on russian gas because you brought it up in. Considering you are avoiding the answer in an emotionally charged way I bet the answer is nothing and that you own at least two motor vehicles and heat your home on natural gas (from Russia).
i've answered. you're dodging. what are you doing to stop putin?
The argument you made is about the importance of nuclear because of russian gas. So the question is - see above. If you already forgot what you wrote I would be extremely happy to quote you.
And I answered. Have troubles with reading comprehension?
Talk to me about reducing energy from nuclear after you've done something to reduce energy from russian oil and gas
what did you do?
I donated money to the Ukrainian army.
----
Like I said, a special kind of stupid. Keep driving that SUV in your fight against Russian oil.
Another reason to stop saying that nuclear power plants are save...
*Safe.
Various sites are reporting that it's under control now.
Ah that plant must have been operated by neo-Nazis.
Gentle reminder that the fog of war is in full effect and both sides of this conflict are guilty of spreading propaganda and misinformation. It goes with the territory but a dose of healthy skepticism is the best course of action for observers.
In times of war, the first casualty is the truth.
P.S. According to Reuters/MSNBC/US Official - There is no evidence Russia attacked nuclear reactors in Ukraine.
https://www.reuters.com/article/ukraine-crisis-usa-nuclear-e...
8:07 PM EST 3/3/22
“#Ukraine energy officials telling the media and U.S. officials that elevated radiation levels are being detected at #Zaporizhzhia”
- Marco Rubio, Senate Select Intel Committee
Put on your glasses boys
More recent IAEA tweet citing Ukrainian regulators contradicts this.
They have no intention of bombing the plant of course, or doing so in a way that would cause any serious destruction, especially when Putin's clear intentions are to take the entire Ukrainian territory; to me this is just psychological warfare to fuel the fear among other nations about nuclear dangers, so that both leaders and the public opinion will be against going at war with them. In theory, we (as EU) could intervene with traditional weapons so that the burden of escalating it further would still be on them; not an easy decision though.
Yes but nuclear power is the solution to all of the world's problems if we just ignore war, earthquakes, tsunamis, corporate greed and waste disposal!
God damn, is the Russian army really this stupid?
Is this an act of desperation, ignorance or spite?
None of those. Destroying critical infrastructure like power plants and radio towers is a common step on the invading a country checklist. Of course considering this was a nuclear plant, one should hope that they were careful enough to limit the damage to prevent nuclear fallout.
Causing a nuclear incident in a place you want to occupy is profoundly stupid.
You're making a pretty serious assumption that they're doing something haphazard rather than something calculated and planned. What's your reason for first assuming incompetence?
IMO we want to believe that the second best military on the planet is not competent because it is more comforting than the idea that the second best military actually planned out this assault on a sovereign country.
The last time I checked, being Russian doesn't make you immune to radiation. Controlling land is pretty pointless if you've poisoned it into uninhabitability for the next few generations or so.
What makes you think that what they're doing has significant risk of making the land uninhabitable? All we know is that there's a fire at the perimeter. That's it. It could be that what they're doing has little risk. From reading the twitter threads, seen elsewhere in this comment section, that seems to be the case. Not surprisingly, nuclear power plants are made pretty well.
I don't think there's any evidence that they're acting irrationally, from within their context. Making the land uninhabitable would be irrational, for everything we know of their context.
Their whole invasion has screamed incompetence.
Could you give some examples of what you see as incompetent?
All the videos of abandoned tanks and vehicles, some with fuel.
I'm not sure I understand. Were they captured? Were the drivers killed? Did the drivers perhaps have relatives/friends in Ukraine? Were they told to leave them there?
Does Hanlon’s Razor apply in times of war?
This powers 1/4 of Ukraine. Holding the plant will give them a lot of leverage.
They can already easily cut (or threaten to cut) main power lines anywhere nearby. It’s not like ukrainian army controls all the area except for the the plant itself.
So we’re back to the question: how can they be so stupid to attack the facility itself?
It could be for psychological reasons. Threatening nuclear war has been part of Putin's strategy and this reinforces that message. It is also a very visual way to drive the message home that they have leverage over Ukraine's power.
They could have just thrown breakers at junctions or cut the power lines. No need to set the reactor on fire.
Spite
A lot of what people believe about what's happening at the plant is based on the statements of Ukrainian officials, who by some accounts are using it to call for NATO to impose a no-fly zone. A disaster at this plant would cause huge problems for DNR/LNR/Crimea, which Russia does not want. Amid the fog of war it's often a good idea to take a step back and wait for more evidence to present itself.
My best mental model for the leadership of Russia's Ukraine invasion is an abusive parent who can't get his kid to bend to his will. Repeated failed attempts cause the parent to become more emotional, destructive, and out of control of himself, so we've gone from just an unprovoked invasion with airport attacks, attacks on radar sites, and occupation of the exclusion zone; to trying to assassinate Zelenskyy and starting to target refugees, residential areas, and shooting at nuclear plants.
As Ukranians continue to fight back and the West plays economic games instead of taking decisive military action, the escalation will continue until, by the end, everyone will agree that we should have just risked the initial nuclear threats of Russia rather than having Putin start launching nuclear weapons after having also leveled most of Ukraine and done whatever other increments of catastrophic forms of abuse come to his team's minds unyil then.
Alternatively, Putin wins before he feels backed that far into a corner, or maybe he's deposed before we reach nuclear weapons. But I really can't picture him backing down from confrontation, given that he was of a mindset to invade Ukraine.
Right now, the trick would be to drop a line of bombs on that stalled convoy heading for Kiev, and to establish a no-fly zone. That would turn the tide of war. I don't think that's more likely to risk nuclear retaliation than actions we'll be forced into in two weeks. It is more likely to risk nuclear retaliation than simply moving NATO troops into Ukraine two weeks ago.
As with COVID, we seem to always do too little too late.
I agree completely (except I think your timeline for troop movements would be a little late). Putin even told us 'your move' when he called the troop movements an exercise. If we had responded forcefully, they would've gone away with nothing to show for it except some new propaganda.
I think a more accurate modal is an incel. Russia is a corrupt country nobody wants to be with. Ukraine wants to be more western and rejected Russia's advances, so Russia lashes out at Ukraine instead of improving itself.
This is exactly the logic of 1st strike lunacy that we avoided in the 60s by not listening to some military brass that wanted nuclear war.
You summed it up perfectly. If we had listened to these idiots in the 60s none of us would be here.
Most likely ignorance, seems like they have soldiers who still think they are on a training mission.
Initiation of an actual radioactive disaster near your own border on purpose…
The 'training mission' trope is as old as the Red Army and it's bullshit.
They pulled the same shit in 1956 when they got captured by the Hungarians and in 1968 when they invaded Czechoslovakia: 'We were told it was a training mission'. This is straight-up a survival tactic for the prisoners. They're playing dumb and acting innocent. It's impossible not to know by now where, what and why you are doing in a foreign country, in a fucking military convoy.
"peacekeeping" "mission"
how could any of them possibly still think this is a training mission? they're in a different country shooting actual people and buildings, and actual people are shooting back at them.
Wow! These scenario role players are incredible. I'm getting so much training value! They fall down, cry, bleed out, and die just like somebody would in real life!
Does that matter?
nice thread (this account is good to follow) disproving Ukrainiang propaganda, Western media saying Russians attacked nuclear power plant and put it on fire, while Russians entered without any shooting and then were shot at by Ukrainians causing fire in administrative building, so much for relying on Western media making money on causing panic and spreading misinformation
https://twitter.com/ASBMilitary/status/1499531572055318529
Ukrainians blew up their own power plant? Fuck off nazi troll.
no power plant was blown up, there was fire in administrative building
and it wouldn't be first time in this invasion for Ukrainians to destroy something and claim Russians did it
also we are here in HN where people discuss in civil manner, if you can't do it you should seek different venue
I gradually stop seeing this as a war just for the freedom of the Ukrainian people. This is a war for the progress of humanity. A war between the new and old worlds.
With more breakthroughs in nuclear fusion energy and policies [1], the gradual adoption of nuclear (as well as EV tech) will soon mark the end of old world. The implication of this is beyond anything anyone can conceive as we do not truly know what becoming a Tier 1 civilisation means. This could also mean new military tech that would render all existing fossil-fuel-based weapon systems inefficent things of the past. In this new world social mobility would mean different things too (as energy gets cheaper (which is the cost of pretty much every basic thing a modern industrial society depends on), things get more decentralized), old status quos will crumble as the cost-to-transform skyrockets.
Systems that come with top-down execution structure always optimize for cost-to-execute and not cost-to-transform [2]. This would give you advantages eg in a Nash equilibrium, etc, but it also means losing touch with the every-changing reality that is the world now.
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28331939
It's less a war than a temper tantrum by the world's only mafia-country trillionaire, facing his own guaranteed death soon turning 70
And he doesn't have to "win" via occupation, all he has to do is destroy the place setting it back decades.
If any country undoes all the sanctions and seized property while he's still alive, he's "won".
He doesn't care about the lives on either side and there will never be justice for that even if he ends up hung by his own people (impossible fantasy outcome).
Imagine how even more destructive he'd be if he had unlimited "free" power via fusion, I am really certain fusion will initially cause more war than stop them because the money saved will go into military spending and once you have that buildup, someone always wants to put it to use.
Even if ITER finished today and worked - aren't we still AT LEAST 15 years away from Fusion energy being cheaper than solar?
It seems like the current renewable trend will phase out most fossil fuels BEFORE the most optimistic timeline for Fusion energy being a viable alternative.
Well.. Do not underestimate the incompetence blighting this world and the potentials and ingenuity in people that want to change. That's what I like to remind myself in uncertain times.
This is just the latest battlefield in the Culture War we are fighting free-for-all.
Submission title makes it seem like it spontaneously caught fire. Could we change it to the article title please?
> Ukrainian nuclear plant, Europe's largest, ablaze after Russian attack - minister
I've changed the title to the current title of the article now. It sounds like Reuters might have updated it?
Submitted title was "Europe's largest nuclear power plant on fire".
Please change the title: the linked article is entitled "Fire at Ukrainian nuclear plant outside perimeter".
Yes. Changed.
At what point do you as the nuclear plant operator consider chernobyl 2.0?
You know Russia would ultimately take the blame.
I would argue that this is a near equivalence of nuclear war with Ukraine. A well-/mis-placed Russian artillery shell could cause a loss of reactor integrity and meltdown, no?
EDIT: according to child comments, a meltdown is unlikely/impossible, but spread of radioactive particles due to a direct strike is possible.
Potentially. I'd worry more about coolant and power (to run the coolant pumps if the plant has to shut down) than about direct hits on a containment structure, but it's not like that won't eventually also cause problems if they keep doing it.
This is, so far as I know, the first time anyone has carried out a military attack on an operating nuclear plant. Nobody knows yet how that really plays out. But it looks like we all get to find out.
>This is, so far as I know, the first time anyone has carried out a military attack on a nuclear plant
The Israelis bombed an Iraqi plant in the 80s I think.
You're talking about Operation Opera, which was an attack on the unfinished Osirak reactor in Iraq.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera
Still a fair callout. Edited my original comment to clarify.
The bombed an unfinished plant that they believed would have been critical in paving the way for a belligerent dictator to obtain nuclear weapons courtesy of short sighted idiots in Europe.
Both the Iranians and the Israelis actually bombed the site one different operations in different years. Thereafter Saddam is now known to have said.
"Once Iraq walks out victorious [over Iran], there will not be any Israel"
It was both justified and didn't represent the risk that attacking this reactor represents.
We know what happened in Japan when an earthquake attacked a nuclear plant.
It’s not comparable because the type of damage is totally different.
The type of damage at Fukushima was anticipated to be survivable as well, was it not? And yet here we are.
Fukushima was explicitly a beyond-design-basis accident. (The design basis was insufficient, granted.)
On the other hand, I don't know whether the VVER design contemplates shelling, either.
Technically, it was tsunami that caused trouble.
I'd classify stuxnet as a military attack.
So would I. But that was targeted at fuel production, not power generation, and also to my admittedly imperfect knowledge involved no artillery fire.
No. It is many orders of magnitude less dangerous. It would potentially cause thousands of deaths, not hundreds of millions. This is true even if a melt down was caused, like Chernobyl, which others have already explained is quite improbable.
Chernobyl caused between ~100 and ~16,000 deaths, depending sensitively on how one models the effects of small (sub-natural-background) radiation increases over a large population.
Still, maybe we should be amending the list of war crimes to include certain types of sabotage of nuclear power plants.
In a war situation, shutting off highways and disabling power plants or oil refineries are all strategic targets that affect both the military and civilians. But shutting down a refinery is different than dumping all of the chemical tanks into the water supply, setting oil fields on fire, or making the nuclear plant blow up.
Yes, I agree. Its plausible to me nuclear power plants should have special protection during time of war.
The chief issue is that, unlike something like cultural artifacts, power plants have significant strategic military importance. Perhaps a rule that (a) fighting be confined outside a certain perimeter and (b) plant workers have special protected status like medics, and are required to obey shutdown orders if the invading military takes control of the perimeter (so that the invaders don't have incentive to physically destroy the plant).
I am using nuclear war in a literal sense, but I do see how my wording seems sensationalist given historical context.
It's not equivalent to nuclear war with Ukraine in either the sense of relative risk (for the reasons I gave) nor in the sense in which the term "nuclear weapons" is actually used. Russia intelligence agents poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium, but this was not called a nuclear attack because that's not what the term means.
One could argue, at most, that this would be equivalent to a radiological weapon ("dirty bomb"). But even then it wouldn't be correct because of the important difference between purposeful radiological dispersal and radiological dispersal as a side-effect of a legitimate military action.
It is war, and it involves nuclear things. That’s what he meant by “literal sense,” I think.
Ah, behold, my fist is an atomic weapon because ultimately the damage it inflicts is because of the Coulomb repulsion force of the fist atoms with other atoms.
No. Your fist is a biological weapon.
A kinetic weapon, really.
D) All of the above
I am Mars made flesh, a glorious warrior brimming with weapons of mass destruction.
There is a distinction between nuclear warfare and radiological warfare, which is what this would (arguably) be.
A single nuke would be more like 100k deaths, still several orders of magnitude safer. But yes, the actual danger posed by radiation is far less than what it is imagined to be
Sure, but this is neither a nuclear weapon (it would be, at most, a radiological weapon) nor risk-similar to one.
OP argued this is risk-equivalent to nuclear war. it's not even close
Nuclear war can be many things. There are small nukes not designed to level cities.
Some people are really talking insanity.
These insane people I think need to watch the Tsar bomba go off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwlNPhn64TA
We aren't talking about fatman and little boy. Talking about thousands of H bombs and literally the apocalypse for the human race.
Person you are replying to is writing about a meltdown at a nuclear power plant
A few artillery shells probably won't breach the containment. Missile shielding is part of the plant design (I don't know what level of shielding; US plants are designed to withstand a strike by an airliner).
Not saying that the attack is thus acceptable, just saying that it will take a concerted effort to breach the containment.
How old's the plant? To what design is it built? I feel like the CFIT design basis is already a little optimistic, but we also don't know that that was the design basis in this case.
completed in 1989, with a 6th reactor added in 1995.
For what it's worth, the russian convoy is firing on the administrative building, not the power units themselves, but I don't know specifically what is in said admin bldg or what the ramifications for operation/shutdown of the power units/cooling systems works if the admin building burns down and/or gets shot up.
Soviet era plants don’t have containment shells. I don’t know about this one though.
I'm certainly no expert, but I read a little bit about it before I commented. The reactors here do have a building intended to serve as containment. I didn't really see much assessment of how robust it is.
This is from last week and discusses the practical impacts of war around the plant being a major issue even if the plant isn't involved:
https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/02/24/most-immediate-nucl...
That article briefly mentions this page, where the CEO of Ukraine's nuclear operator states that they are protected:
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/A-guide-Nuclear-...
"In addition, Ukrainian power units are ready even for an aircraft crash, because the containment and the reactor vessel designed to withstand corresponding risks."
Russia doesn't need to control the immediate areas around nuclear plants in the initial phases of their invasion, it's lunacy that they aren't carefully avoiding them.
> Russia doesn't need to control the immediate areas around nuclear plants in the initial phases of their invasion, it's lunacy that they aren't carefully avoiding them.
We are over a week in, I think this is beyond the initial invasion timeframe. Russia has faced fierce resistance so I can understand a desire to weaken that defense.
It’s a lot harder to stage a defense when you have no electricity. Strategically it makes a lot of sense for Russia to overtake or shut down the power grid. If they do that with physical damage then there’s no need to control the immediate vicinity.
Why not just cut the transmission lines?
Because they would have to occupy the area where the lines were cut to prevent repairs? I don't know. I'm not justifying what Russia is doing, but it isn't surprising.
This one has a smaller core than a RBMK so it was cheap enough to have a containment shell that the Soviets were willing to pay for one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Safety_barriers
You'd think that nuclear energy would be pretty compelling economically if other power generation methods had to be designed to withstand a strike from an airliner
If an unprotected solar farm gets hit by a plane, some property damage happens. If an unprotected nuclear reactor were to get hit, we all know what would happen.
the danger of radiation has been greatly exaggerated and pales in comparison the existential risk of climate change. even accounting for black swan events like getting hit by an airliner, coal plants emit drastically more radiation than nuclear.
it's not a rational risk assessment.
making nuclear energy economically unfeasible by mandating that things be drastically overbuilt has doomed us all to climate catastrophe
I don't disagree that nuclear energy is good; I'm pointing out that you're strawmanning. A solar farm doesn't have to be protected from missiles, because if it gets hit with missiles, only it is destroyed. It harms nothing around it, if it gets destroyed or fails in some fashion.
If you want to represent nuclear, do it honestly; there are a million reasons why it's a good thing, a weak strawman doesn't help your case.
it's not a strawman. designing to requirements driven by fear and not rational risk assessment can make feasible technology infeasible.
if we designed airliners with a safety factor in line with people's fear of flying and not the actual risk of failure, they would never be able to get off the ground.
yet we require that nuclear power plants tolerate any conceivable failure mode, no matter how unlikely, or dangerous.
that's not rational.
It's far less rational to keep building expensive and unsafe generation when cheaper and safer generation is already available - and can be built more quickly.
And that's before equivalent spending on research, plus tax breaks and subsidies.
That may be true for the number of actual plants we have, but public sentiment against nuclear is why we don't have 10, even 100 times as many plants as we do now. If you start shifting decimal points two positions to the right, and diminishing the distance between plants, between plants and critical habitat, by an order of magnitude (separation is square root of density per area), those numbers aren't quite as rosy.
100 might sound like hyperbole, but if, somehow, nuclear was guilt-free power, we'd be using at least twice as much power as we currently do. Eventually that much waste heat becomes its own problem (requiring more cooling to 'deal with')
Earth is _very_ big, safety numbers are given per kWh, waste heat is insignificant compared to total insolation and all other generation methods generate the same amount of waste heat (that’s the law). Solar wind and hydro kind of cheat with the accounting though.
These are the same sort of average calculations that are the reason the general public don't understand why 1.5ºC is going to be a shitshow. Peaks and troughs and local maxima are what humans will notice, and the averages lie a great deal.
I was more talking about the distance between plants as a function of the odds of encountering the Precautionary Principle with regards to radiation events, but heat pollution is something that I've already seen happen in a town near where I grew up, where an artificial lake intended as a cooling pond ended up being unfit for recreation due to encephalitis-inducing microbes that enjoyed the heat of the cooling system.
Heat pollution at the plant can be problematic depending on where the plant is and what cooling system you use. On the consumption end it exponentially contributes to the heat island effect. Not a huge exponent, but an exponent nonetheless. Doubling power consumption more than doubles heat pump power budgets, and pushes nearby systems that previously relied on passive cooling into requiring active cooling, which pushes more systems into active cooling, on and on.
I think the only time I ever really disagreed with George Carlin was his bit about how arrogant humans are to think that we can possibly ever do enough to alter the climate. Turns out we can. There are just so many of us doing our own little game of externalities. I wonder if he were alive today what he'd have to say about it.
Well, recall that the Fukushima meltdowns were due to loss of emergency power, resulting in the inability to circulate coolant through the reactor core. Any kind of damage to the power plant that results in such power loss or damage to the coolant system could plausibly result in a meltdown / hydrogen explosion in the reactor core.
Loss of coolant can have effects on the reactor and/or the spent fuel pool or container if there is such in the facilities. Any of these could go critical very quickly and ignite/explode.
But based on what happened in Fukushima, critical electrical/cooling systems and backups would have to be damaged in order to pose catastrophic risk.
While this is unlikely I'll probably lose some hours of sleep on this.
I very much doubt the Russians would do this on purpose (fallout would risk the whole operation and possibly Russian territory too) although the fighting around there is incredibly stupid.
Apparently current prevailing winds would spread fallout through Russian-held areas in Donbas and Crimea.
Not exactly a brilliant strategy - unless you're deranged and really don't care about your people.
Probably not. Reactors generally can't melt down the way Chernobyl did anymore. The most significant risk is a breach of the reactor chamber fragmenting the fuel rofs and spreading radioactive particles around, or a hit to the spent fuel stores doing the same.
Neither are good, but they wouldn't be nearly as bad as Chernobyl or a nuclear weapon strike.
Nobody builds RBMK-style uncontained graphite piles any longer, but that's a long way from saying meltdowns are no longer possible.
There are 8 RBMK reactors still operating, though all are in Russia.
> Reactors generally can't melt down the way Chernobyl did anymore.
a) "the way Chernobyl did" is technically correct (the VVER reactor that Zaporizhzhia is uses a difference containment strategy), but a distinction without meaning - a meltdown is a meltdown.
b) "anymore" - Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant was built between 1980 and 1996.
It's true that it is a safer design than Chernobyl, but yes it absolutely can still meltdown.
> The most significant risk is a breach of the reactor chamber fragmenting the fuel rods and spreading radioactive particles around
Note that this "spreading radioactive particles around" is probably more dangerous to health than a meltdown.
> Note that this "spreading radioactive particles around" is probably more dangerous to health than a meltdown.
Put in different terms: We're basically talking about the equivalent of a dirty bomb.
A dirty bomb with as much as 30,000 kg of radioactive fuel and waste.
> a meltdown is a meltdown
I'd say that how much radioactive waste gets expelled or leaked and how much energy goes into it makes all the difference in the world and each meltdown is probably unique.
nuclear scientist @CherylRofer is worried about the ongoing fighting around the administrative building. some highly trained people keep that place from melting down and now they've got bullets whizzing by their head and fires breaking out in their offices.
Ok this is good to know, thanks for clarifying. While not nearly as bad as the two scenarios listed, spreading radioactive particles near a population center of civilians could be grounds to consider this a nuclear war, intentional or not. Not on the same scale as a deliberate nuclear attack of course.
if it can be bad as fukushima then it's bad
> near equivalence of nuclear war
If radiation escapes it would be a "dirty bomb" equivalent event, it will speed up sanctions and nations will urge Russia to allow experts to inspect the damage.
A meltdown/explosion is possible if they damage safety systems/shielding. Still won't be seen serious as a "nuke detonation" event, but countries that receive fallout will be pissed off.
If Russia continues causing more nuclear pollution that affects it neighbors, yes, it could mean war scalation.
> Ukrainians who started firing at a Russian convoy with RPGs.
The way this is phrased makes it sound like the Russian convoy was minding its own business and suddenly Ukrainians started picking a fight -- which is clearly not the case.
Combat and fires could kill power supply that is actively cooling cores. Unless you have a detailed, up to date design diagram of the entire facility that proves the on-site and/or off-site power supply is not in jeopardy then you don't know what you're talking about.
Russian puppet accounts even here at HN.
Honestly, I see more here than, say, Reddit. HN needs to be more proactive about this.
These numbers do not agree with that assessment: https://www.npp.zp.ua/en/safety/arms
Link is from a comment by Gustomaximus.
Thank you for the link. I will keep an eye on this page. I wouldn't imagine that some damage to the exterior would cause an immediate spike in radiation. However, if damage has been done to critical components, these levels may slowly increase.
Could you please provide a source for this claim?
I searched Bloomberg (as you claimed that you saw it mentioned there), and this [1] appears to be the only coverage of it at the momement. There is no mention of radiation levels increasing in the area.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-03/russia-at...
A Ukrainian official told the AP this about 15 minutes ago. Not fully confirmed yet.
Thank you. Their article mentions a government employee saying elevated radiation levels were detected. They also say that this is unofficial until a public announcement.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-a3092d8e476949...
Source?
Bloomberg. Futures are down as well
Live feed of the shelling https://youtu.be/fYUT36YGOh8
“A government official told The Associated Press that elevated levels of radiation were detected near the site of the plant”
Closest I could find on Bloomberg, from this page: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-03/refugee-c...
But also in the same article: “..shells were falling directly on the Zaporizhzhia plant and had set fire to one of the facility's six reactors. That reactor is under renovation and not operating, but there is nuclear fuel inside, he said.”
So at worst a small-scale leak.
I'm not sure how you get "at worst a small scale leak" from "fueled nuclear reactor actively on fire".
it's irresponsible sensationalist propaganda by MSM
the IAEA has already confirmed the plant is fine
https://twitter.com/iaeaorg/status/1499562515340177416
"#Ukraine tells IAEA that fire at site of #Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has not affected “essential” equipment, plant personnel taking mitigatory actions."
I get it's a war, but I can't take the news cycle anymore. Full of unconfirmed BS. Ghost of Kyiv, Snake Island, etc.
A better article is here: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-a3092d8e476949...
Aside from the obvious "knocking the power plant out to cripple the city" argument there are probably better ways to do this than blowing it up. For example, controlling the area and literally turning it off. It seems wild, even by Russian doctrine, to do such a thing.
On the other hand, the Ukranian military has every reason to "salt the earth" with a potentially critical reactor in order to do as much damage to a Russian occupation as possible. Are the Ukranians this crazy? Well, to do this they wouldn't have to be much more crazy than Russians shelling it.
Something doesn't smell right here. In the article there is this quote:
> In an emotional speech in the middle of the night, Zelenskyy said he feared an explosion that would be “the end for everyone. The end for Europe. The evacuation of Europe.” “Only urgent action by Europe can stop the Russian troops,” he said. “Do not allow the death of Europe from a catastrophe at a nuclear power station.”
The undertone of this seems more threatening than fearful. Especially given Zelensky's overall response to NATOs lack of response. Additionally, Zelensky isn't much less corrupt than putin (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...).
I do not intend to sound like a Russian apologist here but rather be the devil's advocate. This doesn't make sense inside either country's war doctrine. It seems more like it's being used as propaganda by one side or the other. Very suspicious indeed. I don't think Russian conscripts are stupid enough to blow a reactor to turn it off. I also don't think Ukraine is stupid enough to use this to salt the earth. Yet, I find the official story fairly hard to believe.
> Radiation is spiking as well
Please don't make claims like this without a source
- "A government official told The Associated Press that elevated levels of radiation were detected near the site of the plant, which provides about 25% of Ukraine’s power generation."
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-united-nations-gen...
Why not just ask for the source?
It'd be nice to have a source for that claim other from a Florida Senator. I don't think he got that information from his Intelligence Committee seat.
He’s the vice chairman of the intelligence committee. He is one of 4 members of congress who have much more access to intelligence.
I don’t see anything in the link suggesting radiation is spiking?
I agree that war is hell, but Ukrainians are smarter than that. They’re fighting to preserve their homeland, not shower it with radiation.
Eh, no, bombing nuclear power plant is a warcrime.
I mean, I agree that it'd be an incredibly inhumane thing to do, and a very bad idea that shouldn't occur
...but war crimes seem like they should only really be applicable to an aggressor. How can we tell another nation how it's allowed to defend itself? If you don't want to suffer inhumanity from an aggrieved nation, perhaps stop invading it.
War crimes do and should apply to a defender.
The main idea behind a war crime is that it is an act which has limited military utility or in many cases is counter productive from a military standpoint but causes human suffering. That is, it is a clear and unnecessary act of violence. For instance killing prisoners of war since it is often more beneficial for a military to accept a surrender than to offer no quarter.
Most ethical systems argue that human beings have a right to protect their own life with deadly force, but if during a self defense encounter you intentionally go out of your way to execute bystanders you can not use self-defense as a justification. This is because in that case you are just using self-defense as a cover to murder people.
But a warcrime means nothing to a country with nukes.
I don't understand why? Are you saying that they needed to melt it down now because they can't do it later, even though you then say that it'll be a prime target for future bombing which will most likely lead to a meltdown?
Or do you mean that "meltdown" is a safe state that would secure the reactor against future bombing?
Put yourself in the chief operator's perspective: An armed force has indiscriminately killed the plant's security that have guns far more powerful than anything allowed near the control room. If the reactor is in a state that would require the control rods to be reinserted to prevent melt down along with activating any authorization requirement to allow reinsertion, then when the orders come with guns pointed at your head and if you are allowed to talk you demand the occupiers leave and be permitted to re-insert the control rods to bring the reactor under control otherwise if they immediately kill you, then its their problem. Why demand they leave on first contact? A person pointing a gun or in this case shelling you with artillery is untrustable. If they initially obey, then it not only has bought you time, but an understanding that the attacker cares about the plant is established, which the operator has been entrusted with having as a value. It becomes the highest priority as it is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and has been the largest Ukrainian power plant. Strategically, it makes sense to seize an asset while keeping it in tact, but bombs are not known for precision.