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Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

reuters.com

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Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#531

Post by PeterisP »

armada651 wrote: post #321
boringg wrote: post #274

So, aside from the obvious nature of messing around with Nuclear generating station being an idiotic move. From a tactical move for Russia - clearly they want the generating station offline to cause further chaos in Ukraine and that it supplies 1/6 of the power I believe(?). Was the generating station fighting to say online / not surrender or did Russia just show up guns blazing? It's clearly a tactically important s…

The only public statement I've read is that the Russian Army is concerned the Ukrainians would use their Nuclear Power Plants as dirty bombs.

One thing that I've seen is "preemptive whataboutism" - essentially, when Russian state media make a wild unreasonable claim, one that's not merely false but invokes a "WTF how and why would someone even think of something like that??" feeling, then sometimes it turns out that this is something that they are planning or doing at the time, and that is why they have considered that this is a plausible thing that others might do as well and can be reasonably accused of actually doing.

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#532

Post by isomel »

revscat wrote: post #342
yabones wrote: post #314

This has been a real reckoning for me, as somebody who has historically been very pro-nuclear. Quite simply, humanity is too good at screwing things up to harness such a fundamentally powerful and dangerous source of power. It requires a commitment to long lasting peace and stability that we're just not capable of.

This touches on why I think humanity will not survive for much longer. Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat, and yet it continues to be more or less ignored. Vast swathes of the population believe that their egos can determine reality, no matter the actual physical reality they so hubristically ignore. > we’re not capable of I don’t think so, either. This sentiment tends to be met by the…

> Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat,

Global warming is a threat that will have tons of negative impact. But is it really "civilization-ending"?

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#533

Post by twaw »

Scea91 wrote: post #525
oddmiral wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything can go wrong AFTER takeover. Russians can convert power plant into nuclear landmine and blow up it on retreat. This is war between two nuclear states, so nuclear weapon will be used eventually.

> This is war between two nuclear states, so nuclear weapon will be used eventually. Ukraine is not a nuclear state as it does not have nuclear weapons.

No post body was provided.

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#534

Post by PeterisP »

necheffa wrote: post #372
redwall_hp wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually they have fail safes that will more or less immediately shut them down. On any reactor designed in the last 50 years, they pretty much default to a safe state, as they require power to keep the failsafes open. Starting back up after is the slow part.

The one snag is that even with the reactor shut down (just drop all the control rods in) you still have to deal with the decay heat. Which, in the case of a controlled manual shut down shouldn't be a problem.

It's not a problem if you can continue to run the cooling system for quite some time. If you bomb the plant or its connections to the outside, that might be a problem - just as in Fukushima, where a key cause of the disaster was that the cooling system could not be properly powered when required.

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#535

Post by sdoering »

JohnBooty wrote: post #470
yabones wrote: post #314

This has been a real reckoning for me, as somebody who has historically been very pro-nuclear. Quite simply, humanity is too good at screwing things up to harness such a fundamentally powerful and dangerous source of power. It requires a commitment to long lasting peace and stability that we're just not capable of.

It's not that nuclear is easy or perfect. But until we scale up renewable energy by orders of magnitude, or somehow scale down demand, nuclear is the least-bad choice by many measures.

It is a very costly choice. We don't know how to store waste securely. We don't know how to process the waste efficiently and somewhat without it being an ecological disaster. We don't know how to extract and process nuclear 'fuel' without it bei g an ecological disaster as well. Just because the atom doesn't produce smoke at the plant doesn't make it an alternative.

Additionally there is the whole thing about the dangers of an accident and the cost for insurance against it. The cost of building and maintaining a somewhat secure reactor and the later cost of dismantling it and storing the additional waste.

Nearly all these costs for externalities were not factored into the price of energy. Calculating in all these costs mskes renewable energy look more than interesting. And also makes the question of storing excessive energy an interesting case. But governments/lobbies argue for cheap (read subsidized) nuclear, while not factoring the same subsidiaries into energy storage for renewables.

Investing into the future with a broad renewable energy and storage infrastructure program could ensure not only less dependency on Russia (for oil or gas) but also have a positive impact on the topic of climate change.

On the other hand. The German/European dependency on Russian gas and Russias dependency on the money from the sale of said gas was done to reduce the risk of war. The idea being that both sides could loose too much in the case of war and that would act as a deterrent. Even during the height of the Cold War Russian gas flowed towards the western world (aka Europe/Germany).

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#536

Post by the_gipsy »

theshrike79 wrote: post #492
TillE wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every country has its propaganda and lies, but they're generally couched in half-truths. It's truly remarkable how the Russian flavor of misinformation sounds just like a pathological liar making up wild bullshit that nobody could possibly take seriously. That's been a tradition for decades, as far as I know.

The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth. And one of those (pravda) is a kind of a half-truth used to keep moving from the current situation. Russians know they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever.

> they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever.

Same can be said about the west. What matters is that there is free press, call it "picking your favorite lies", but it makes a big difference.

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#537

Post by isomel »

MandieD wrote: post #469
yabones wrote: post #314

This has been a real reckoning for me, as somebody who has historically been very pro-nuclear. Quite simply, humanity is too good at screwing things up to harness such a fundamentally powerful and dangerous source of power. It requires a commitment to long lasting peace and stability that we're just not capable of.

And this is part of why a lot of Germans have always been uneasy with nuclear power.

The German are uneasy because of irrational fear and exaggerated risks.

Even if the worst happen at that nuclear power plant, it will still be a small disaster compared to all the causalities that already have happened in Ukraine the last few weeks (you know: the war)

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#538

Post by twaw »

harles wrote: post #527
oddmiral wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

No post body was provided.

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#539

Post by akvadrako »

isomel wrote: post #532
revscat wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This touches on why I think humanity will not survive for much longer. Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat, and yet it continues to be more or less ignored. Vast swathes of the population believe that their egos can determine reality, no matter the actual physical reality they so hubristically ignore. > we’re not capable of I don’t think so, either. This sentiment tends to be met by the…

> Global warming continues to be a civilization-ending level threat, Global warming is a threat that will have tons of negative impact. But is it really "civilization-ending"?

No, the positive impacts will most likely outweigh the negative impacts.

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#540

Post by ericd »

Johnny555 wrote: post #518
ericd wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 sho…

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.

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