731–740 of 894 posts
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.
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It doesn't surprise me if they believe that considering the ridiculous stream of fantasy being spewed out of Russian leader and media.
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And, since both wars are based on bombastic lies, it seems consistent, given this act of remembering, to call the aggressor in each to account.
With these memories still fresh in terms of the cognition of the collective internet, perhaps now we can begin to get serious about a future in which the streams of fantasy which are reliably produced by hegemonic states (or mutually-assured-destructive states) are muted indefinitely, and the capacity for capricious warfare stemming from them dismantled.
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I mean… Trump was lying about how many electoral votes he got. It was easily verifiable. Also such a stupid lie because he did have enough electoral votes to win the election anyway. But still! He fabricated that number. He was also truly in pathological liar territory.
Also consider his insistence that his inauguration crowd was larger than Obama's, when the photos clearly showed that wasn't the case. It's a completely meaningless lie. He doesn't accomplish anything if people were to accept it as truth, and it was quite obviously at odd with reality, and yet he just kept going on about it. That's not a strategic lie, that's a pathological lie. That's someone who simply cannot tell…
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Given the accepted MAD doctrine, which kept the "peace" throughout the cold war, you would think nuclear escalation would be unthinkable as a means to stave off a conventional defeat on foreign soil.
For a mad man who's going to lose anyway, what does he care if he takes the whole world with him?
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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…
+ 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.
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Operators of nuclear plant are civilians. They are not part of force. Civilians can be captured, they cannot surrender, because nobody asks them to do that. I never heard that police or army asks somebody unarmed to surrender.
Given recent moves to allow Ukrainians everywhere to bear arms in response to the invasion. It's rather reasonable to see that the Civilians, once they enter into defending a stronghold (in this case, just a power plant), that they are now considered a militia, which can surrender.
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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"?
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Right, if only the world would have thousands of nuclear plants more, the danger of one blowing up in a war would decrease substantially.
What kind of sick mind one needs to have, to push this anti nuclear bullshit when the real issue is a fucking fascist invasion of Russia into Ukraine? For fucks sake..
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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.
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.