Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest • Hacker News Board

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

#841

Post by lenkite » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC

bstar77 wrote: post #262

gt565k wrote: post #255

news spreading about "elevated radiation levels near the power plant" and the plant being on fire are also fake https://twitter.com/iaeaorg/status/1499562515340177416 #Ukraine regulator tells IAEA there has been no change reported in #radiation levels at the #Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant site. anyways, the news cycle nowadays and the misinformation is insane CNN literally reporting "Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear…

I get what you are saying, and you are right stuff is sensationalized, but there is video of the facility getting shelled. The fire didn't start itself. People need to be anxious about this shit. The sad part is that we don't need any sensationalism to be anxious right now.

The Russians shelled an adjoining building from where they were being fired upon. This was captured on video and heavily sensationalized to an eye-rolling extent.

Frankly, I am not sure why Ukraine/West feel the need to broadcast propaganda - its not even necessary.

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

#842

Post by vernie » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

xdennis wrote: post #826

vernie wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a problem?

The problem is treating war criminals like they deserve an equal opportunity to explain their position. It's indisputably a war of baseless aggression. Giving their narrative of it being a special operation to de-nazify is no different than giving nazis equal opportunity to explain their position on the Holocaust: an operation of de-bolshevization (which is what they actually said at the time).

Given that most of the reporting I see is already strongly opinionated I appreciate that I can also find more neutral coverage.

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

#843

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

rwcarlsen wrote: post #835

mlinsey wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No they are technically correct. In the reactor world "shut down" explicitly and specifically refers to chain-reaction-running mode. The reactors do still require active cooling for several days+ to avoid plant damage scenarios. Several comments on this page seem to not have a clear understanding of this difference. Once the chain reaction is shut down - there is basically no way for the reactor to come alive (chain-…

[deleted]

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

#844

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #838

dragonwriter wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That’s a good point. It seems awful transparent, when they do this “false flag” stuff, but I think they are playing to a domestic audience.

> It seems awful transparent, when they do this “false flag” stuff, but I think they are playing to a domestic audience.

I think the US managed to get and share enough intelligence to forestall most effect of the false flag stuff they wanted to use for international justification, leaving them with basically “But NATO...” on that front.

At the same time, the solid international opposition and the sanctions impact make the domestic propaganda front more critical, and there's a lot more that they can do on that front given the degree of control they have over domestic information channels.

The real-time visibility of the domestic propaganda probably further aggravates the international situation, but I think they probably have written that off except direct intervention, which they think, probably correctly, is deterred by their nuclear arsenal.

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

#845

Post by sdoering » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

sdoering wrote: post #840

JohnBooty wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have to say you lost me at: > 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…

I dug a little deeper for those interested. In Germany there are currently reactor being demolished. None is done, so the numbers are still estimates.

For a 1.3MW reactor block the amount of highly contaminated material will probably be in the range of 3000 to 5000 metric tons.

For the US with around 96 active reactors (2020) this would imply something (back of a napkin calculation) 280,000 to 470,000 metric tons of additional waste on top of burned nuclear fuel. Depending on the peculiarities of the reactors and so on. I know there are error margins.

Highly contaminated material that needs to be secured for thousands of years.

This is a multi generational cost factor for our generations convenience. For the ability to burn electricity like there is no tomorrow.

Today the lower half (poorer half) of US population is living a live that would enable the US to reach Paris Climate goals. The same applies roughly to most western/northern countries.

People like me in the upper income half are the culprits so to speak (statistically speaking).

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

#846

Post by agentdrtran » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #350

yabones wrote: post #314

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.

Humanity is fine, just some parts are quite far ahead of others. We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism. There will be some slides backwards as people in difficult situations value their opinions and risk aversion more than others’ freedoms, and there are plenty of places where people are just fine with their autocrats continuing to rule. Progress, for the most part, can’t be given. It is hopeful t…

"We just have to get rid of autocrats and authoritarianism"

Is that all? We can get that done with a new app I think.

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

#847

Post by jnxx » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 5:25 PM UTC

throwaway9278 wrote: post #622

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…

Are you so sure you're not yourself trapped in an irrational thinking loop? Global warming is not a civilization-ending threat. Even nuclear war is not a civilization-ending threat, outside a few places in the Northern hemisphere. I could be wrong about both of these claims. But you could be as well, and you're taking an extremely pessimistic view based on what you know, which is not the whole picture.

We have quite some understanding that a mayor nuclear war will cause nuclear winter, by generating huge amounts of smoke at high altitudes which will block the sunlight.

We also know that it causes an extinction event, since it was one of the effects of the K-t extinction event 60 million years ago. It is the one that killed the dinosaurs, and many more: A huge number of species, including almost any large land animals, dies. It is unlikely that homo sapiens would survive this time.

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

#848

Post by hollerith » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

Zoadian wrote: post #806

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.

it's not the nukes itself that would kill. it's the nuklear winter. with highly reduced sunlight this planet will become a freezing hell. no plants -> no food

The nuclear winter calculations by Sagan et al noticed that some fuels create more problematic smoke than other fuels. A lot of trees and wood structures would be ignited in a nuclear war, but the smoke from those fires falls out of the atmosphere relatively quickly compared to smoke from burning oil tanks, which Sagan et al said would contribute most of the cooling effect.

Then Saddam lit thousands of oil wells on fire as a big fuck-you to the miltary coalition arrayed against him, more oil than would be set on fire by any nuclear war. The cooling effect was detectable, but hardly serious.

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

#849

Post by pvaldes » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #661

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can relate. I've been pro nuclear my entire adult life, but in more recent years have added a lot more hesitations and conditions to that. Fukushima put me onto a similar thread of thinking. If there were any society and government you'd expect to have sober thinking and solid engineering around nuclear, it'd be Japan, let the way TEPCO and the Abe administration behaved in the opening stages of the emergency was q…

Just when I was ready to abandon my anti-nuclear stance and ready to accept nuclear power as transitional technology before we can transition to fully sustainable energy.

And now we can retake this conversation from just 3 months ago with a fresh view.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29251780

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

#850

Post by drran » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

vegai_ wrote: post #756

boringg wrote: post #274

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…

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.

Ukraine has 4 working nuclear power plants plus Chornobyl. Also, Ukraine has some nuclear facilities left from USSR times or freshly built. Ukraine has more than enough nuclear material to build dirty bombs or nuclear warheads.

For example, China Nuclear Corporation tries to buy Russian part of nuclear fuel facility almost built in Smolino[0], central Ukraine.