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

> I did not know about that aspect of nuclear plants and in my non-expert view it would be a major point against nuclear plants in the discussion how to solve climate change

It's a reasonable criticism to make, but I think it tends to be a bit overblown. Modern reactors have redundant layers of systems to prevent such a disaster from occurring. In the ~60 year history of nuclear reactors Fukashima is the only time this type of failure has happened (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were very different), and even then it was due to a cascading series of problems:

* In hindsight it was a really poor idea to locate a nuclear plant by the ocean in a region known for strong earthquakes and tsunamis.

* The backup generators flooded because they were located in the basements, another poor decision for an area at risk of tsunamis.

* TEPCO had additional generators and batteries on site within 6 hours of the earthquake, which was in time to prevent a meltdown, but they were unable to connect them to the plant's electrical system (I don't recall the details of why).

It's also worth mentioning that this is only a problem with large reactors. Smaller designs like those used in ships and submarines still have decay heat, but the reactor core is physically smaller so that it doesn't contain enough isotopes to cause a meltdown. Many nuclear advocates believe that we should be building more nuclear plants with smaller reactors for this reason as well as smaller reactors being easier to operate without getting into a dangerous state.

As far as reading, I highly recommend Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey [0]. It's very well written, aimed at a total layman, and covers basically everything that has gone wrong since we as a species started seriously messing with nuclear materials in the 19th century.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1605986801

Risking to be heavily downvoted… but does nobody question the story line at all?

It makes no sense for Russia to start shooting at a useless office building. If they wanted, they’d drop a few bombs on the critical infrastructure and that’s it.

Maybe the rumors Ukrainian forces evolved them into an attack and planted the fire has some substance? This news is the perfect headline to further lure in the west to help, without any actually critical damage to your own land.

I think parent actually meant plurality, at least that’s how I read it.

However these numbers are quite interesting. Some people attribute Nixon’s second election to his promise of withdrawing from Vietnam and one can easily blame the war for the problematic 1968 election for the democrats. LBJ was probably even gonna be the first sitting president to loose in a primary before he announced his non-bid.

I’m guessing the 1964 for election he was pretty much just riding the popularity of the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy. (Plus the war hadn’t escalated at this point).

None of what you are describing makes sense.

If the Ukrainians can push Russians back why wouldn’t they do the same everywhere? Crossing the border becomes an act of aggression, only Russia has acted aggressively here. Everyone else is trying to avoid conflict.

If Russia detonates a nuke in Europe the entire country will be obliterated immediately.

These are the same sort of average calculations that are the reason the general public don't understand why 1.5ºC is going to be a shitshow. Peaks and troughs and local maxima are what humans will notice, and the averages lie a great deal.

I was more talking about the distance between plants as a function of the odds of encountering the Precautionary Principle with regards to radiation events, but heat pollution is something that I've already seen happen in a town near where I grew up, where an artificial lake intended as a cooling pond ended up being unfit for recreation due to encephalitis-inducing microbes that enjoyed the heat of the cooling system.

Heat pollution at the plant can be problematic depending on where the plant is and what cooling system you use. On the consumption end it exponentially contributes to the heat island effect. Not a huge exponent, but an exponent nonetheless. Doubling power consumption more than doubles heat pump power budgets, and pushes nearby systems that previously relied on passive cooling into requiring active cooling, which pushes more systems into active cooling, on and on.

I think the only time I ever really disagreed with George Carlin was his bit about how arrogant humans are to think that we can possibly ever do enough to alter the climate. Turns out we can. There are just so many of us doing our own little game of externalities. I wonder if he were alive today what he'd have to say about it.