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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

#861

Post by labster »

ethbr0 wrote: post #761
labster wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does slightly more access to the Mediterranean get you when no European country will buy your goods? All of those things you mentioned are worthless without buyers. Except the farm land. But it’s not 1444 — trade is vastly more profitable than agriculture nowadays.

IMHO, Putin is looking at this from a century perspective. I.e. in a hundred years, the sanctions will be gone, Europe will be trading with Russia again, and Russia will still have the land.

Cool story ethbro

It’s for the gas pipelines, but 100 year perspective. Sure.

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

#862

Post by ericd »

dragonwriter wrote: post #818
ericd wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Haha interesting! I thought that we usually stopped at providing weapons, training, etc. I wonder if there’s something similar possible here.

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

#863

Post by ethbr0 »

labster wrote: post #861
ethbr0 wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, Putin is looking at this from a century perspective. I.e. in a hundred years, the sanctions will be gone, Europe will be trading with Russia again, and Russia will still have the land.

Cool story ethbro It’s for the gas pipelines, but 100 year perspective. Sure.

And your counterargument is?

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

#864

Post by spopejoy »

suyjuris wrote: post #712
ornornor wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chernobyl killed millions of people over time. Tons of thyroid cancers that would have never existed if Chernobyl didn’t explode.

Do you have any kind of source for this? As far as I am aware, estimates for deaths based on thyroid cancers are ~160 [1]. Not 'thousand, just 160 – you claim is off by five orders of magnitude. Estimates for the total death toll are up to 60000 if you assume the linear no-threshold model [2], so might be much lower in reality. [1] See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... . [2] The mod…

How about the 2009 epidemiology study that estimates > 900,000 dead by 2009 with no end in sight? Quoting from a summary (easy to find the original):

> In 2009, the New York Academy of Sciences published a book Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. A team of European scientists led by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, assembled over 5,000 research studies, most written in Russian and not previously published.

> The results were staggering. Yablokov’s team estimated that just in the first 20 years after the Chernobyl meltdown, some 986,000 deaths attributable to it occurred, many in parts of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The percent of children living in these areas considered in good health plunged from 80% to 20%. Rates of certain cancers soared, including childhood thyroid cancer in Ukraine (20 times higher) and Belarus (200 times higher). Rates of disease in covering many organs in the body all increased in areas closest to Chernobyl.

> Yablokov’s team indicated that the number of casualties would continue to grow, well after publication of the book.

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

#865

Post by spopejoy »

JohnBooty wrote: post #480
worldsayshi wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> They will become "the new oil" in N years.

The existential problem with oil is climate change, not finite resources.

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

#866

Post by MisterMower »

jskrablin wrote: post #509
MisterMower wrote: post #501

Putin is an evil genius. He attacks a nuclear plant and creates the risk of a meltdown. The result will be to remind the EU about how scary nuclear power is and ensures public opinion stays firmly against the one power source that can wean them off Russian oil. Also, it has strategic value as limiting power to the rest of Ukraine makes it harder to wage war. No power, less internet and communication, slowing the stre…

I am quite sure he's just evil. A nuclear disaster as a result of russian shelling will for sure result in a direct NATO involvement. And despite all of it's propaganda, Russia cannot win a conventional war against NATO and nobody wins in nuclear confrontation. So I'll call him an idiot, because there's no wining this one. It's just stupid bully tactics.

What makes you so certain a meltdown would result in NATO involvement?

The USSR survived Chernobyl. It’s a very risky move, but not necessarily a stupid one.

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

#867

Post by zeven7 »

runarberg wrote: post #621
zeven7 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

So it took 7 more years with Bush. Again, not comparable to Putin - not even close.

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

#869

Post by lowkey »

Gentle reminder that the fog of war is in full effect and both sides of this conflict are guilty of spreading propaganda and misinformation. It goes with the territory but a dose of healthy skepticism is the best course of action for observers.

In times of war, the first casualty is the truth.

P.S. According to Reuters/MSNBC/US Official - There is no evidence Russia attacked nuclear reactors in Ukraine.

https://www.reuters.com/article/ukraine-crisis-usa-nuclear-e...

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

#870

Post by thevagrant »

PeterisP wrote: post #531
armada651 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only public statement I've read is that the Russian Army is concerned the Ukrainians would use their Nuclear Power Plants as dirty bombs.

One thing that I've seen is "preemptive whataboutism" - essentially, when Russian state media make a wild unreasonable claim, one that's not merely false but invokes a "WTF how and why would someone even think of something like that??" feeling, then sometimes it turns out that this is something that they are planning or doing at the time, and that is why they have considered that this is a plausible thing that others…

I also noticed for a long time, bad actors tend to project their behavior on to others to try influence negative public opinion toward their opponents.

Seems a popular strategy as it acts as a seed for those who don't question, it provides plenty of false arguments to raise when debating an issue.

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