The surrounding war environment, the stressed operators, etc mean that any of these failures are now more likely. It is reaonsable that external power will not be available, it is possible the gen sets will fail, it is possible the operators will do something stupid.
To put it simply, warfare is not a design basis accident for current light water reactors like VVER-800.
It only takes a couple of seconds to shut down a reactor. https://qr.ae/pGdkkv
The chain reaction can be shut down in a matter of seconds. However, the reactor continues to generate a huge amount of heat for weeks afterwards. It's not as much heat as a fully-running chain reaction, but it's still enough to cause a catastrophe if cooling is not kept running - we're talking multiple megawatts of heating here. The cooling requires an external power supply. It was the failure of this external power supply that caused the problems at Fukushima.
There are newer reactor designs that are specifically engineered to be capable of cooling themselves on shutdown without an external power supply. However, most reactors in the world do not have that capability.
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.
The cost may be millions of Ukrainian lives, so this all comes down to how much the Ukranian people is willing to endure for their eventual independence.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20...
The idea that you are somehow immune to this is unsustainable - I'm sure avid Putin fans feel the same, after all they have access to Google too.
It's just that we are privileged to live in a relatively free societies, where bias is self imposed groupthink as opposed to mandated by the government.
For an extreme version of this in action, you can see the early reporting in the American media of the Iraq invasion.
You are right that we also have filters inside our brains. But just like with the outside filter, we can make some efforts to get around them. Even if our efforts don't always lead to perfection.
That's not at all to say we're doomed to be brainwashed; along what you're saying, with conscious awareness, effort, openness to reassess, and honesty (first and foremost to oneself) we can better ourselves and the social groups we're each part of.
Yes, I agree that it's pretty nutty. It's just that to actually verify that we have to do a bit more work, like you suggested; otherwise we might just be bullshitting ourselves.
IIRC, the correct term is disinformation, and I believe the idea (at least sometimes) is more akin to "jamming" than any kind of persuasion (e.g. encourage passivity because it's too much effort to sort out the truth from the lies).
Completely off-topic, but what a strangley formatted document. The pages of the PDF are 9x8 in.
Russians know they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever.
I looked into this, and found this blog post [1]. The comments are quite interesting, but the main post points out this isn't much different from English. In English we use synonyms for truth/true (e.g. authentic, factual, legitimate, etc) and lie (e.g. fabrication, falsehood, misrepresentation, disinformation) with different meanings too.
Maybe we shouldn't use vocabulary of a language to draw/imply further conclusions about a culture.
That does not say anything about English speaking people other then their language is rich and can express nuance.
Same can be said about the west. What matters is that there is free press, call it "picking your favorite lies", but it makes a big difference.
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.
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).
However the significant bit here is the fact that Bush was re-elected despite lying about the reasons going to war.
He could have left a great legacy, but his addiction to power has become his ruin. And quite possibly that of Ukraine and Russia.
...this time.
That's not a strategic lie, that's a pathological lie. That's someone who simply cannot tell the truth.
This is what the last report from the republican majority senate intelligence committee wrote [0]:
> It is our conclusion, based on the facts detailed in the Committee's Report, that the Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process[,] and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modern era.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_...
> "While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."
> "[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment."
> “Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” Mueller wrote. “The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”
> "the President engaged in a second phase of conduct, involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation."
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/what-the-mueller-report-sa...
In case it's not obvious, the point of obstructing justice is to prevent facts from coming out.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/obstruction-justice-mueller-repo...
The idea he colluded with Putin to hack the election was always an utter baseless fantasy. There was no evidence for it ever. Not from Mueller, not from Schiff, not from 17 intelligence agencies. It was a conspiracy theory.
And I'm not talking about "obvious ties to Russia" whatever that means (everyone seems to have weird ties and uranium sales and gas company deals with Russia, Ukraine, etc). I'm talking about the delusional baseless conspiracy theory that Trump colluded or conspired with Putin to hack or otherwise influence the election. That was the conspiracy theory that so many were repeating and so so many gullible people fell for.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...
Russia is a terrorist state full of abuses invading a peaceful democratic country.
This is incomparable.
Similarly, although Ukraine is clearly much more peaceful relative to Russia, there has been low-level conflict for years (including violence in the insurrection and fighting in the contested territories) and there are verifiable claims of them having committed atrocities.
All this can be true and Russia can still be engaged in morally (strategically may be a different story) unjustified aggression.
And if you're talking about the Orange Revolution from 2004, that was peaceful all the way through, and lead to a second round of the election, not installing a new leader.
And, since both wars are based on bombastic lies, it seems consistent, given this act of remembering, to call the aggressor in each to account.
With these memories still fresh in terms of the cognition of the collective internet, perhaps now we can begin to get serious about a future in which the streams of fantasy which are reliably produced by hegemonic states (or mutually-assured-destructive states) are muted indefinitely, and the capacity for capricious warfare stemming from them dismantled.
The invasion of Iraq was based on lies and this is terrible. The invasion of Ukraine is based on lies and it is also terrible.
Russian bot, convert yourself into a sunflower.
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.
If Russia wants to use Nuclear weapons then they only need to enter the codes. That would probably be the final straw for western powers putting boots on the ground though.
EDIT: I would also like to ask if you can recommend some source where curious layman with no knowledge of physics could learn a bit more about this.
The new designs are built with the expectation that power can be cut off. The new design shut themselves off passively without any damage (that we know of) when the power is gone.
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.
edit: Construction started on it in 1980. This is a Soviet designed and built reactor. Russia should have no problem maintaining it.
Starting back up after is the slow part.
Which, in the case of a controlled manual shut down shouldn't be a problem.
Putin doesn't have to occupy the country to "win", all he has to do is set them back to the dark ages and make everyone (who can) flee.
He can't be allowed to get away with this. Ukraine needs a "no fly zone" ASAP
We need to not normalize the idea of a no fly zone, no matter how gut wrenching watching this war gets.
Putin just moves the line wherever he wants and you will keep dancing around it. This naive thinking really needs to die already.
Putin has made it clear that he will also launch a nuclear attack in case of an "existential war", which means a war where Russia itself is being attacked with the purpose of conquering or destroying it.
A no-fly zone is not that. There is no reason for Russia to escalate to nuclear, except for Putin's vengeful ego. Because everybody knows that if Russia goes nuclear, it would be the end of Russia. Everybody in the nuclear chain of command knows this. Even if Putin is actually insane enough to order a nuclear attack (he might be, I don't know), anyone of any competence in the military will ignore those orders, because it would end their country and kill their family. (Although you could ask whether there is anyone of competence left in the Russian military; Putin seems to replace competents with loyalists, and the incompetent execution of the attack on Kiev doesn't inspire much confidence here.)
And if Putin's vengeful ego will make him order a nuclear attack, then losing this war will probably do that anyway, whether or not NATO or EU had anything to do with it. And there is no way Putin can win this war. Ukrainians have made clear that they will continue to fight, no matter what. If Kiev falls, they will continue to fight. Any city that Russia takes, will be Ukrainian again the moment they leave. For Ukrainians, there is no surrender possible to a man who wants to enslave them. If this war continues, it can only become a massacre. Putin would have to kill every single Ukrainian, and I'm starting to believe that he would. It would be another holocaust.
I think a no-fly zone is the only option.
Not directly, no - but by induction, probably.
NATO fighter jets attacking Russian aircraft & SAM sites would likely be used by Russia to justify strikes against the airfields those NATO planes operate from. So then you have Russia attacking airfields in NATO countries. Already that's terrifying because you have missiles launched by Russia flying at, say, Germany - and you don't know until they hit if they're nuclear, chemical, conventional, or what. Next step you probably have NATO counterstrikes on Russian land. That puts you right on the edge of nuclear scenarios very fast. No world leaders should even remotely be considering going there.
Neither the US nor Russia accept this premise.
Are you sure about that, to the point of risking the continuity of the species and all of our modern civilizations upon that? If one can claim that the Jewish population in Ukraine is actually Nazis and have many of their citizens believe it even as the economy is collapsing, i doubt that justifying even greater crimes against humanity or other horrible actions is out of the question.
It breaks my heart to see that bullies like Putin are allowed to largely get away with what's going on (apart from support for Ukraine by the international community, though that's essentially funding a proxy war and civilians and the culture at large will still suffer immensely), but you also have to understand the reluctance of other countries to escalate.
And to prevent anyone dismissing the above arguments due to my biases towards the western perspective, i've seen people on /r/russia attempt to justify their military's actions by recalling past actions of western regimes. Just to be clear, i condemn all actions like this, regardless by whom they're perpetuated: two wrongs don't make a right. Humanity should learn to talk, though i fear that there are irreconcilable differences as well.
And I understand that western countries are reluctant to impose a no-fly zone out of fear that Putin has gone insane and might resort to nuclear escalation, but I think the risk of him resorting to nuclear escalation already exists if he can't have his way with Ukraine. And there are a lot of Russians who strongly disagree with this war and would probably support a no-fly zone.
I fully admit that if Putin has indeed gone nuts and isn't merely playing games, then we have to trust the Russian military in control of the missiles to do the right thing, but I think that trust is also warranted; many Russian soldiers already don't want to fight, and I'm sure the more competent commanders are well aware that a nuclear attack would be suicide.
No, the fear is that Putin is basically sane and operating under something like normal great power expectations despite his crimes of aggression, and thus will not attack NATO countries for fear or nuclear retaliation, but will escalate against NATO countries if they intervene directly against him, potentially and quickly leading to nuclear war.
If they thought Putin was insane, the marginal risk between aiding Ukraine and intervening directly would be less, not more.
He is claiming that the Neo-Nazi units of the Ukrainian military operating in the south of the country, who harbor Nazi tattoos and whose flags represent the Black Sun and the rune used as the symbol of the "Das Reich" SS division, are probably Nazis. The Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant mentioned, in his manifesto, that he had visited those guys.
Last year a UN resolution was motioned to condemn Nazism and Neo-Nazism. Only two countries voted against: the United States and Ukraine.
This doesn't justify any war of aggression, of course, but you cannot pretend that there is no Nazi problem in Ukraine either.
Of course he is not claiming that the Jews in the government in Kiev are Nazis, because that would be absurd, but it's pretty clear that they are tolerating Nazis in the military for very cynical reasons (they're actually very effective fighters and are employed to fight the separatists in the Donbass region).
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.
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.
Why? Nuclear disaster is bad, but how would it ensure that a country can _never_ join NATO or the EU?
Ukraine already had the Chernobyl disaster on their soil, and I don't see that one as keeping them out of either organisation _forever_.
> Why? Nuclear disaster is bad, but how would it ensure that a country can _never_ join NATO or the EU?
> Ukraine already had the Chernobyl disaster on their soil, and I don't see that one as keeping them out of either organisation _forever_.
And didn't the EU pay a lot of money to help them build a new containment building for it?
It's a bizarre leap to say a nuclear disaster would disqualify a country from joining NATO or the EU.
Doesn't matter too much for the point I made in any case:
If a nuclear disaster were to happen in Ukraine now, NATO and EU would also not blame it on Ukraine.
2:1
Both USA and USSR nuked themselves a whole lot more when testing nuclear weapons. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests
And, of course, Russia could do much blowing up with conventional weapons, too.
However: for a nuclear power like Russia, blowing up nuclear reactors only makes sense if they can make it look like an accident.
Otherwise: just use your nukes.
He has a difficult time winning the war already, he’d never be able to win if he pulls in more countries.
Russia is desperate to deter EU/USA from involving itself more in the war, and the only way it can do that is by treating to escalate to nuclear war.
But that threat is only effective if people actually think that you will do it, so they must play this so that they seem crazy enough to start a nuclear war.
It's a bit like someone blackmailing you for money for something illegal you did together, only way to get you to pay is to show that they are really willing to expose your secrets, even if they might be exposed also. And once you believe them and start paying they will continue to demand money from you.
As always, apply the Falsifiability principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
> the Kremlin said that Mr. Putin had told his French counterparty
> that his main goal was “the demilitarization and neutral status of Ukraine.”
> Those goals, the Kremlin said, “will be achieved no matter what.”
The only English source I could find quickly was this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/world/europe/putin-macron...
Edit: by your terminology I would consider Ukrainians to be crazy. This a good thing and the reason why I’m rooting for them. They’re the underdog. The rational thing for them to do was to capitulate as soon as the invasions started. It takes a “crazy” level of conviction to the do the irrational thing here.
If you think they might not, because ethics and morals, then the deterrent's value is discounted by your percentage of doubt.
But yeah, it was a stupid theory, too bad I cannot delete it anymore. At least it triggered better theories in this thread, though.
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 rolling over and letting the Russians have their way. I suspect that they've got plenty of other nasty little surprises in store.
One of the things that the last 50 years' worth of guerrilla wars has been, is an object lesson on how to do asymmetric warfare against technologically-advanced, and overwhelming armies.
I suspect that every military in the world has been taking notes.
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.
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.
Take a place like syria, it went from a centralized government to a heap of insurgencies and many sides killing people en-masse.
For example, China Nuclear Corporation tries to buy Russian part of nuclear fuel facility almost built in Smolino[0], central Ukraine.
It's clearly a tactically important source of energy for Ukraine.
Also - wouldn't it just be easier for Russia to destroy the substations nearby? I assume there would be some problems with all that excess power being generating if the substations were blown. The whole thing is pretty nuts.
I can't imagine being the ISO trying to balance the grid or ISO equivalent of the grid over there right now (amongst other impossible jobs/positions people are in Ukraine right now).