831–840 of 894 posts
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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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He will lose in many respects, but even so, Moscow and St. Petersburg are not going to be radioactive craters. All evidence suggests he wants to be remembered as a Russian hero. I think he is intelligent enough to know that bringing nuclear destruction on Russia will not put him in that category. And it's not possible for him to act alone anyway. Worth noting that the two people in human history who have acted to sto…
It is completely mind numbingly crazy how much is at stake based on a single psychopaths whims, and possibly the courage of a few people selected by the same psychopath.
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RSFSR - Russia is officially recognized as continuation state of USSR by the UN
Turns out it's just inertia, also the last constituent member of USSR to leave (and thus logical successor) is... Kazakhstan
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That's not correct. It only takes a couple of seconds to shut down a reactor. https://qr.ae/pGdkkv
Your link supports the comment you are replying to; it says that after the reactor is shutdown, additional cooling is needed for some time, and that eg the Fukushima and Three Mile Island incidents both involved damage done by an inability to cool the reactors after they were already shut down.
Once the chain reaction is shut down - there is basically no way for the reactor to come alive (chain-reaction-wise) again on its own - not even if it's being bombed, shelled, etc. And run-away super(prompt)critical reactions are not even possible with this reactor design. These reactors are water-moderated - which means that water is used to slow down neutrons to increase their reaction probability. As the reactor heats up, the water gets less dense (even if it is still a liquid) making it a less effective moderator - this density decrease is enough to passively/automatically keep the reactor in a shut-down state. Residual decay heat from radioactivity of the fission byproducts post-shutdown is enough to damage the reactor internals for several days - hence the need for active cooling post-shutdown.
I've seen lots of crazy-exaggerated news reporting on how "bad" or "dangerous" this entire situation could be. It's not good, but neither is the war in Ukraine. It's not even remotely possible for this to be anything like Chernobyl, and I think unlikely to be nearly as bad as Fukushima (which in the grand scheme of the Tsunami - wasn't really that bad). In the war context, I don't think this nuclear plant situation is particularly notable beyond it providing a large fraction of Ukraine's power.
I am a nuclear engineer FWIW.
nice thread (this account is good to follow) disproving Ukrainiang propaganda, Western media saying Russians attacked nuclear power plant and put it on fire, while Russians entered without any shooting and then were shot at by Ukrainians causing fire in administrative building, so much for relying on Western media making money on causing panic and spreading misinformation https://twitter.com/ASBMilitary/status/149953…
Ukrainians blew up their own power plant? Fuck off nazi troll.
and it wouldn't be first time in this invasion for Ukrainians to destroy something and claim Russians did it
also we are here in HN where people discuss in civil manner, if you can't do it you should seek different venue
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No. It is many orders of magnitude less dangerous. It would potentially cause thousands of deaths, not hundreds of millions . This is true even if a melt down was caused, like Chernobyl, which others have already explained is quite improbable. Chernobyl caused between ~100 and ~16,000 deaths, depending sensitively on how one models the effects of small (sub-natural-background) radiation increases over a large populat…
Still, maybe we should be amending the list of war crimes to include certain types of sabotage of nuclear power plants. In a war situation, shutting off highways and disabling power plants or oil refineries are all strategic targets that affect both the military and civilians. But shutting down a refinery is different than dumping all of the chemical tanks into the water supply, setting oil fields on fire, or making…
The chief issue is that, unlike something like cultural artifacts, power plants have significant strategic military importance. Perhaps a rule that (a) fighting be confined outside a certain perimeter and (b) plant workers have special protected status like medics, and are required to obey shutdown orders if the invading military takes control of the perimeter (so that the invaders don't have incentive to physically destroy the plant).
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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…
It seems awful transparent, when they do this “false flag” stuff, but I think they are playing to a domestic audience.
So, aside from the obvious nature of messing around with Nuclear generating station being an idiotic move. From a tactical move for Russia - clearly they want the generating station offline to cause further chaos in Ukraine and that it supplies 1/6 of the power I believe(?). Was the generating station fighting to say online / not surrender or did Russia just show up guns blazing? It's clearly a tactically important s…
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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 sa…
> The cost of a Chernobyl-scale incident is that it renders a region uninhabitable and kills several hundred people.
There are quite a few interesting numbers regarding Chernobyl:
31 deaths, for example, is an official figure. But the credits for the TV series also state that estimates of deaths would vary between 4,000 and 93,000 victims.
A bit more about the numbers and some additional estimations:
The environmental organization Greenpeace estimates the total number of dead as a result of the Chernobyl accident at 93,000.
Kate Brown, a professor at MIT, considers up to 150,000 deaths realistic for Ukraine alone.
The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) says Chernobyl caused 50,000 to 100,000 deaths and up to 900,000 disabled.
34,499 rescue workers died, according to the Ukrainian Commission for Radiation Protection. However this figure is considered to be wrong because there is usually no such precise information on this scale. So the number just seems to be doctored to look more precise than is possible at estimations like these.
So now we can pick and choose to support our ideology. I don't pick and chose, but state that there are quite a few nuclear reactors that sit in areas way more densely populated with massively more inhabitants in the zone of imminent danger.
So any extrapolation from Chernobyl numbers (whichever one selects) would need to factor this into their argument imho.
Edit: One question ==>
> 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)
Does this number include the parts of the reactor buildings being contaminated?
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