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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

#721

Post by usrusr »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #628
Muromec wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We promised to not have it in return for not being invaded, so technically we are a nuclear state without any weapons present at this moment (as far as publicly known). Since we have both technological expertise and practical means (from uranium ores to delivery systems), it’s a matter of time.

No nukes means not a nuclear state. The former nukes belonged to the USSR and only they had the codes to arm them.

So tell us, which of the letters in USSR is for "Russia"?

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

#722

Post by simonh »

hnlmorg wrote: post #691
pvaldes wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

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…

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.

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

#723

Post by HPsquared »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #709
HPsquared wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's reactor heat -> (heat exchanger) -> steam -> (steam turbine) -> electricity.

If you disconnect the load, you need to stop putting steam through the turbine and dump it somewhere else (i.e. a condenser). All steam turbine plants (including coal) have something similar.

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

#724

Post by eru »

dewey wrote: post #715
eru wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bad, but nuclear isn't uniquely dangerous here: just imagine the same kind of shelling around a large dam.

I hope you realize how bad of a comparison that is. If a dam would break and flood some area it would kill people but after a year the chaos will be cleaned up and things will be back to normal. If the same thing happens to a nuclear power plant the area can't be lived in for millions of years.

> If the same thing happens to a nuclear power plant the area can't be lived in for millions of years.

Some people have been squatting in the Chernobyl exclusion zone for decades now, and are still alive. See eg https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/17/chernob...

I wouldn't want to live there myself, and cancer levels might be slightly higher than normal.

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

#725

Post by eru »

dewey wrote: post #716
akvadrako wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 1975 the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam and other dams in Henan Province, China caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history. The disaster killed an estimated 171,000 people and 11 million people lost their homes.

Were they able to rebuild their homes in the years past that in the same spot? Yes. Are people able to move back into the Chernobyl fallout zone in the next few thousand years? No.

See https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/17/chernob...

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

#726

Post by ed_balls »

mdoms wrote: post #703
ed_balls wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

There isn't one. Maximal theoretical damage (not practical) would not end civilisation.

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

#727

Post by eru »

manholio wrote: post #627
traviswt wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the internet and Google translate, you can easily go read for yourself. And it’s still pretty nutty with no western filter applied. The accidentally published victory unification speech is particularly crazy: https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20...

I think the gp was referring to the filter in your own brain, that was set up by watching western media. The idea that you are somehow immune to this is unsustainable - I'm sure avid Putin fans feel the same, after all they have access to Google too. It's just that we are privileged to live in a relatively free societies, where bias is self imposed groupthink as opposed to mandated by the government. For an extreme v…

I was mostly referring to the filter outside the brain.

You are right that we also have filters inside our brains. But just like with the outside filter, we can make some efforts to get around them. Even if our efforts don't always lead to perfection.

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

#728

Post by dewey »

eru wrote: post #725
dewey wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were they able to rebuild their homes in the years past that in the same spot? Yes. Are people able to move back into the Chernobyl fallout zone in the next few thousand years? No.

See https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/17/chernob...

Are you saying that 180 (old) people who refuse to leave out of 50000 who were displaced are a representative sample that should show us that living in a fallout zone isn't a problem?

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

#729

Post by dewey »

eru wrote: post #724
dewey wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you realize how bad of a comparison that is. If a dam would break and flood some area it would kill people but after a year the chaos will be cleaned up and things will be back to normal. If the same thing happens to a nuclear power plant the area can't be lived in for millions of years.

> If the same thing happens to a nuclear power plant the area can't be lived in for millions of years. Some people have been squatting in the Chernobyl exclusion zone for decades now, and are still alive. See eg https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/17/chernob... I wouldn't want to live there myself, and cancer levels might be slightly higher than normal.

Living secluded in a big exclusion zone with ~180 other people, no stores or infrastructure and higher levels of cancer is definitely something we should strive for.

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

#730

Post by fulafel »

keymone wrote: post #662
locallost wrote: post #658

Remember this situation the next time you hear somebody say that nuclear plants could be built cheaper if not for too much safety regulation.

This wouldn’t have happened if the world stopped buying oil and gas from Russia and used more energy from nuclear power plants.

This would have needed to happen a long time ago to have the altnerative energy sources in production today. Which also begs another counterfactual scenario: what if we had spent even a slightly larger fraction of the taxpayer r&d subsidies on renewables rather than the extremely capital heavy nuclear research on both military and civilian sectors, with many decades long dead-ends (breeders, gas cooled, liquid cooled, fission, etc), we'd be decades further along with solar and wind.
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