Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

701–710 of 894 posts

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

#701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Iraq was a terrorist state full of abuses Russia is a terrorist state full of abuses invading a peaceful democratic country. This is incomparable.

"Democratic" is used as a thought-terminating cliche. Just a few years ago Ukraine had an insurrection because of their election results and overturned the election to install a new leader. It's a corrupt kleptocratic state very similar to Russia, it's just more of the money comes from American interests than in Russia, and that upsets the Russian kleptocrats who don't want American influence in Ukraine.

Similarly, although Ukraine is clearly much more peaceful relative to Russia, there has been low-level conflict for years (including violence in the insurrection and fighting in the contested territories) and there are verifiable claims of them having committed atrocities.

All this can be true and Russia can still be engaged in morally (strategically may be a different story) unjustified aggression.

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

#702
post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we can make energy storage simple and cheap enough If you're thinking of big Tesla Powerwall-style batteries, that just kicks the problem ahead by a few years or decades. The materials needed to make those batteries are finite. They will become "the new oil" in N years. Energy storage is going to be a big part of any sane energy future, but it's going to have to make heavy usage of non-battery means: giant flywhee…

The materials in those batteries can be recycled into new batteries indefinitely.

And when we need to create additional batteries...?

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

#703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are these things not a civilization ending threat? Nukes can literally kill everything and global warming, if unchecked, will probably do the same long term.

Even if all nukes would go off (spread evenly) they would not kill everybody. The worst case scenario of global worming would not kill everybody. People living north of 40o will survive.

In what realistic scenario would all nukes go off "spread evenly"?

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

#704
It appears that EURDEP (European Radiological Data Exchange Platform) data isn't being shared with the public at the moment. I'm not sure if this is because of the war, this attack in particular, or if they're having problems with their infrastructure due to people like me wondering what's going on.

Their simple map (https://remap.jrc.ec.europa.eu/Simple.aspx) shows the last update as being 03/03/22 22:00 UTC, but selecting a station doesn't give any current or historic readings.

The advanced map (https://remap.jrc.ec.europa.eu/Advanced.aspx) doesn't display any data for me.

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

#705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commenter literally said “far from Ukraine”. What are you talking about?

oh, you're right. i totally missed the word far on initial read. totally changes the everything.

To be fair, I am around 500 km from the westernmost border, so not that far in American terms. We were affected by the Chernobyl disaster.

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

#706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fu…

> So tell me, how does a rbmk reactor explode? Edit: This is a joke based on TV series Chernobyl. A Chernobyl reactor did infact explode and the logic was that it exploding was impossible there for it did not explode.

They don't

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

#707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fu…

> So tell me, how does a rbmk reactor explode? Edit: This is a joke based on TV series Chernobyl. A Chernobyl reactor did infact explode and the logic was that it exploding was impossible there for it did not explode.

Stop spreading FUD. The plant has six VVER-1000/320 reactors.

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

#708
post #478
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Their whole invasion has screamed incompetence.

Could you give some examples of what you see as incompetent?

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

#709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

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

#710
post #174

At what point do we consider the risks of letting this continue higher than the potential effects of intervention?

When we have the stomach to go through with a plan so overwhelming that it would cause Putin to submit in fear. That is a very high threshold. No doubt there are people working on black flag political assassination attempts, but really the only other options are convincing non NATO members to intervene or launching bombers towards Moscow and making an ultimatum that won’t be perceived as a bluff. Ultimately though i…

Putin doesn’t have to submit in fear. Literally the only pre-condition is that it doesn’t trigger nuclear war.
Post reply on HN