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.
- "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."
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
-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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 379 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/inteldoge/status/1499542139155398659?s=2...
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.
Please don't make claims like this without a source
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-united-nations-gen...
Live feed of the shelling https://youtu.be/fYUT36YGOh8
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.
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.
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...
[1] https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-a3092d8e476949...
Link is from a comment by Gustomaximus.
Flares ~1:36 ago.
These timestamps relative to ~1715 PST.
But, there is no shortage of work for that investigation.
EDIT: according to child comments, a meltdown is unlikely/impossible, but spread of radioactive particles due to a direct strike is possible.
Neither are good, but they wouldn't be nearly as bad as Chernobyl or a nuclear weapon strike.
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.
Put in different terms: We're basically talking about the equivalent of a dirty bomb.
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.
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.
On the other hand, I don't know whether the VVER design contemplates shelling, either.
The Israelis bombed an Iraqi plant in the 80s I think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera
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.
Not saying that the attack is thus acceptable, just saying that it will take a concerted effort to breach the containment.
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.
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
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.
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.
And that's before equivalent spending on research, plus tax breaks and subsidies.
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')
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Safety_barriers
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Not exactly a brilliant strategy - unless you're deranged and really don't care about your people.
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.
Though I think we're seeing the Ukrainians are fierce when cornered, so probably isn't the morale breaker they think it is.
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 guessing the Ukrainian troops fell back to the nuclear power plant hoping they wouldn't get attacked there.
Automated Radiation Monitoring system: https://www.npp.zp.ua/en/safety/arms
It’s a Geiger counter. It’s cheaper than having an oscilloscope, which wouldn’t be “understated” either.
We'll see if it actually ships; seems lots of people have the same idea right now.
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.
[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.
What rubbish. This looks like Putin found a way to tactically deploy dirty nukes within the West’s red lines.
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.
AFAICT, the person you were responding to wasn’t talking about a nuke being used against NATO forces.
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.
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?
No idea what salami tactics means.
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?
[1]Budapest Memorandum was not fulfilled, so Ukraine regain their status of nuclear state.
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.
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.
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!
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/ukrain...
Maybe the steam just vents? Or bypasses a turbine? Hopefully it can operate without being connected to the outside, but I’m not sure.
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.
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.
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.
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/
Here is the statement from the Nuclear Agency in Ukraine:
https://www.facebook.com/people/Державна-інспекція-ядерного-...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 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.
https://imgur.com/a/GsBb1Oy
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-...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.
Putin is a ham-fisted dictator, and the world will be better off without him, but his motivations here aren’t mysterious.
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.
Except the farm land. But it’s not 1444 — trade is vastly more profitable than agriculture nowadays.
It’s for the gas pipelines, but 100 year perspective. Sure.
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...
I think you could say in the wider scale it can be interpreted as an existential threat to Putin's Russia?
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.
(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.
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.
https://www.iaea.org/news?type=3243 ("Press releases")
https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/149954992461016678...
Then there was/is fire. Then presumably firefighters arrived, were not let through and departed away.
https://twitter.com/AlexandruC4/status/1499552200867164180?t...
In some other universe there's a title from a complementary newspaper; "Russian soldiers fired for firing on firefighters fighting fire at nuclear plant".
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
Happens in Chicago. I assume it happens in other big cities, too.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-firefighter-sh...
speakers seem informed
edit: seems like you just asked for a source, I misread the comment chain
But who the actual fuck shells a nuclear plant? That's not reassuring at all.
It's also against international law.
International law doesn’t actually mean very much, especially when the violator is powerful and has nuclear weapons.
> 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...
So let's treat any information coming out from them as such and wait 1 day for more accurate accounts to come in.
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.
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.
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.
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
But I also think it would be a horrible idea to get into a direct war with Russia.
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.
Is this an act of desperation, ignorance or spite?
Initiation of an actual radioactive disaster near your own border on purpose…
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.
So we’re back to the question: how can they be so stupid to attack the facility itself?
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.
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.
As with COVID, we seem to always do too little too late.
You summed it up perfectly. If we had listened to these idiots in the 60s none of us would be here.
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.
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.
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.
“#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
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukrai...
Edit: More footage [2]
[1]: https://imgur.com/a/W9WbI4m [2]: https://twitter.com/aletweetsnews/status/1499547760986509315
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."
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.
One of the channels that broadcasts (24/7) stream which is mentioned in the message above + periodically posted short clips of the news
https://youtube.com/c/UATVEnglish
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.
https://t.me/UkraineNowEnglish
https://t.me/UkraineNow
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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 :)
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
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.
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.
Then again, a 5700MW resistor might require a bit of cooling.
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.
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.
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.
Blown up nuclear power plants are equal opportunity weapons.
Ukraine is not a nuclear state as it does not have nuclear weapons.
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...
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.
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.
Since we have both technological expertise and practical means (from uranium ores to delivery systems), it’s a matter of time.
The former nukes belonged to the USSR and only they had the codes to arm them.
No idea, I haven't seen any. Another thing Russia inherited from USSR war nukes as well as debt.
edit (I misspelled): from USSR was nukes
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...
You'd still be prevented by NPT (which Ukraine is part of) like all other non-nuclear states, even without the Budapest Memorandum.
https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1499552483655528454
And Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5124275,34.5850663,1549m/dat...