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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

#781

Post by ed_balls »

mulmen wrote: post #775
ed_balls wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#782

Post by agumonkey »

queuebert wrote: post #430
agumonkey wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

devious ukrainians even built a whole plant in advance to ensure their genocides

Neo-Nazi Nuclear Power Plants. Sounds like Putin plays Wolfenstein.

And we're all fungible sprites.

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

#783

Post by postalrat »

trhway wrote: post #391
postalrat wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other conflicts those are known as human shields.

Human shield is when forced. In this case it were willing people, a lot of older and mid-age people to whom it was their way to resist.

Up until this conflict it was never required that human shields must be forced into that position.

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

#784

Post by wiz21c »

seanhandley wrote: post #559
gambiting wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You have never heard anyone ever describe regular citizens surrendering to the invader? I feel like you are arguing a technicality here - if you are faced with people with guns of course you'd say "I surrender" even if technically that's not what you're doing.

Welcome to HN. The home of "Well, technically".

TBH, Putin is not calling a war a war, the turkish governemnt took some time to say it's war too, etc. ('cos calling it a war would mean triggering consequences). So, government's are super technical too... (not saying it's good or bad, I don't know, just saying that they are extremely technical with their words)

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

#785

Post by JohnBooty »

sdoering wrote: post #535
JohnBooty wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 da…

    Additionally there is the whole thing about the 
    dangers of an accident
Sure, let's talk about that.

- As a species, we've been running hundreds of nuclear reactors (440 currently) for a while now.

- Their cumulative track record is (very roughly) "one Chernobyl every 25 years."

- The cost of a Chernobyl-scale incident is that it renders a region uninhabitable and kills several hundred people.

- With plants getting safer and safer, we might reasonably expect the risk to be more like "one Chernobyl every 50 or 100 years" for modern plants.

- Waste storage is obviously a challenge. The US has apparently produced enough nuclear waste "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." (64,000 metric tons)

That is steep but manageable.

Relative to fossil fuels, this is less-bad by orders of magnitude. It is regrettable (to put it laughably mildly) that the Fukushima and Chernobyl regions are no longer inhabitable, but fossil fuels have pushed us to the point where everything near the equator is going to be uninhabitable soon.

As for the waste issue, again, compare it to the alternatives. 64,000 cumulative tons of nuclear waste in America's history versus 6,500,000,000 tons of CO2 emissions last year. Obviously a ton of nuclear waste is not directly comparable to a ton of CO2 emission, but at least nuclear waste can be collected and sequestered. It is a local problem, not one that irrevocably poisons the entire planet.

Yeah, green energy sources are better than nuclear, for sure, and maybe fusion will save our butts eventually. But we need energy in the meantime. We should use the least-bad thing until we get something great, and nuclear is the least-bad option by such a ridiculous margin that it's not even funny.

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

#786

Post by throwawaylinux »

croon wrote: post #619
throwawaylinux wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, propaganda and political lies is certainly not confined to Russia or backwater dictatorships. In America you also had that president's opponents concocting lies and peddling insane and baseless conspiracy theories for years about him colluding with Putin to hack the election and other such nonsense. That was even more infantile and simple than the propaganda that comes out of Russia.

Everything in the Mueller report was true. No republican has denied that, or come to any other conclusion in their committee reports. Trump was cleared in the impeachment not because of the contents of the report, but whether what happened technically constituted collusion, or whether republicans felt that convicting him was necessary for what he and his associates did in fact do. This is what the last report from th…

The Mueller report clearly states they did not find evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded or conspired with Russia to interfere with the election. That nonsense was all a conspiracy theory. For example Adam Schiff never had the "ample evidence" for it, despite being on the house intelligence committee. That was bald faced and repeated lie peddling this conspiracy theory. Unfortunately many fall for these "stolen election" conspiracy theories. Probably as a coping mechanism more than anything.

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

#787

Post by ArnoVW »

oddmiral wrote: post #743
type0 wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSFSR - Russia is officially recognized as continuation state of USSR by the UN

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)

https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

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

#788

Post by dewey »

isomel wrote: post #780
dewey wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "it will still be a small disaster compared to all the causalities that already" Maybe I'm missing something regarding this specific reactor but how is a war that will eventually (hopefully) be over worse than a nuclear fallout that would make large areas unlivable for thousands of years and affect multiple countries and also killing a lot of people.

> make large areas unlivable for thousands of years I think you are over-estimating the cost of this. I contest the use of 'large'. The 30km radius exclusion zone is nothing compared to the surface occupied by deserts, ice floe, or whatever of the many others existing unhinabitable places. > and affect multiple countries and also killing a lot of people. Because the war has been doing that already, at a even larger s…

> occupied by deserts, ice floe

Usually nuclear power plants are located close to cities and populated areas and not in the middle of the desert or uninhabited ice fields.

> That's already worse than the consequences of a nuclear meltdown.

In the short term yes, but on a time scale that's longer than a few years I think you'll quickly realize that a meltdown is worse. Will the same war go on in 50 years? Probably not, but the radiation will be...for thousands of years.

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

#789

Post by chinathrow »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #148
Thaxll wrote: post #131

One can wonder what does it takes for the west to military intervene. Sanctions are a long term plan but it won't save Ukraine.

The risks of nuclear war from a NATO militarily intervention are far too high to even consider it. I’m sorry to say, but there is really nothing that could happen in Ukraine that would be bad enough for us to accept the risk of nuclear annihilation.

> I’m sorry to say, but there is really nothing that could happen in Ukraine that would be bad enough for us to accept the risk of nuclear annihilation.

Would that hold up if you insert "anywhere" instead of "in Ukraine"? I am not so sure that e.g. the Baltics would be protected by NATO if Putin invades.

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

#790

Post by pvaldes »

zeven7 wrote: post #462
da39a3ee wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately America has just shown us that it too can advance a wildly inappropriate and simply stupid individual to the highest levels of power.

But then he got replaced 4 years later. Unlike what happened in Russia.

Yeah, the capitol coup guys weren't well trained and failed, fortunately. Everybody has a lot of luck

...this time.

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