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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

#811

Post by adventured »

mcv wrote: post #631
runarberg wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That didn’t happen with Bush, who conjured up a premise with multiple lies in order to justify going to war. And then 3 years later, he got re-elected.

That was by far the most disappointing US election. Electing a bad president is clearly a risk of democracy, but re-electing a bad president, that's incomprehensible. And yet that was the only presidential election in decades where the Republican candidate got the majority of the votes.

> And yet that was the only presidential election in decades where the Republican candidate got the majority of the votes.

That election was 2004 of course. Reagan got 58.8% in 1984, so two decades prior (decades as you noted).

Obama got 52.9% in 2008. And prior to that for a Democrat? More than two decades prior, wherein Jimmy Carter barely scratched out a majority popular vote at 50.08% in 1976.

Lyndon Johnson of course got 61% in 1964. The monster that put us deep into Vietnam and wrecked the country got the highest popular vote percentage for the Democrats in the past century.

The two highest in modern US history, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon. What does it say about the people of the 1960s and 1970s? It says a lot of terrible things about their ability to judge character and make rational decisions.

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

#812

Post by sdfgdfghj »

asdswe wrote: post #801

I highly recommend this lecture by Finnish army intelligence expert to those looking to understand the deeper roots behind Russia's actions. Lecture in Finnish, but it has English subtitles. Truly wakening stuff, it really helps you to understand the situation much better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF9KretXqJw

What do you recon are the key points for people who don't have 1h to watch with subtitles. Specifically related to the nuclear power plant news from today.

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

#813

Post by ericd »

xfitm3 wrote: post #769
ericd wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that instituting a no fly zone means the US shooting down Russian aircraft, right? Which means a hot war between US/NATO and Russia. That is something that the US should absolutely not engage in, because the stakes at that point are the survival of the species, rather than just Ukraine. We need to not normalize the idea of a no fly zone, no matter how gut wrenching watching this war gets.

This is bananas. They need our help. We absolutely need to keep pushing for a no-fly zone and enforce it. This is now the world's war, and has reached far beyond the politics internal to Russia and Ukraine.

Yeah no, it would be bananas to engage Russia directly. We engaged in plenty of proxy wars during the Cold War, we never went direct.

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

#814

Post by dragonwriter »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #804
vegai_ wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know I'm steelmanning like a crazy person right now, but a valid reason for Russia to seize those power plants might be to prevent Ukrainians from using them as huge dirty bombs in a desperate last strike.

Nah. They just want control of the power. It's a lot of leverage, and they want to take over the country, so they will need it. The Ukrainians are fighting for their own land. I don't think that there's a single one of them that would deliberately cause another Chernobyl (remember that they have some experience with what happens when reactors go kablooey). But they seem to be quite persistent, in not just just rollin…

> They just want control of the power. It's a lot of leverage, and they want to take over the country, so they will need it.

If they are going to “find” evidence to support Putin’s claim of an offensive Ukrainian nuclear weapons program supported by the US, presumably it will be at one of Ukraine’s actual nuclear reactors.

While it's not a hard limit on propaganda, actually having physical control makes a story about such a find more plausible.

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

#815

Post by JohnBooty »

jliptzin wrote: post #802
JohnBooty wrote: post #480

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…

What element in a battery is destroyed during its lifetime that cannot be recycled?

What percentage of batteries are actually recycled? How much energy does recycling them take? What toxic byproducts are produced as part of the recycling process? What will future demand for batteries be, and how long will our supplies of lithium etc. last? Who controls the lithium supplies?

This is not an argument against recycling batteries, by the way. Chemical batteries are a big part of the future, and we should recycle them. But let's not be glib about any of these choices.

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

#816

Post by lukeschlather »

mrcheesebreeze wrote: post #807
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pure propaganda. Ukrainian forces would never do that, which I cannot say about those who oppose them.

its not out of the question, especially since resistance in its very nature becomes more decentralized and dirty the second the government is weakened or falls. Take a place like syria, it went from a centralized government to a heap of insurgencies and many sides killing people en-masse.

If anything though, that's Russia's goal. You invade a country you create insurgencies and those insurgencies will be much more evil in character than the government Russia is intentionally destroying.

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

#817

Post by yks »

worldsayshi wrote: post #373
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…

If we can make energy storage simple and cheap enough I do not see why nuclear power would have any upside left except maybe for when traveling outside the solar system. Regarding survivability of humanity I have similar fear but my current hope is that while weapons will continue to be more attainable their relevance might diminish. Why fight your neighbor if you have everything you need? But warlords create a probl…

> Why fight your neighbor if you have everything you need?

Clearly this line of logic is not working, seen in Ukraine. At some point there is a person with enough power who wants to fight just because they can. Essentially humanity is at mercy of random power-hungry sociopaths to not bomb the nuclear power plants.

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

#818

Post by dragonwriter »

ericd wrote: post #813
xfitm3 wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bananas. They need our help. We absolutely need to keep pushing for a no-fly zone and enforce it. This is now the world's war, and has reached far beyond the politics internal to Russia and Ukraine.

Yeah no, it would be bananas to engage Russia directly. We engaged in plenty of proxy wars during the Cold War, we never went direct.

> We engaged in plenty of proxy wars during the Cold War, we never went direct.

In fact, we went direct fairly regularly, but only in circumstances where we (or they, or, in a few cases both) maintained superficial (not always really plausible, as both sides would often protect the fiction to avoid escalation) deniability.

That is why, for instance, radio intercepts of North Korean pilots in the Korean War showed they tended to switch from Korean to Russian a lot under stress.

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