Note that, despite the headlines, the final units at the Chernobyl nuclear plant stopped generating power in 2000. These aren't like the Zaporizhzhia units which are still providing power to the area. Once a nuclear chain reaction stops, the afterglow heat reduces exponentially. By now it is exceedingly low, and can be fully cooled passively.
Best info on this whole situation comes from the UN's "nuclear watchdog" (the IAEA), who now has 27 individual updates from this overall event.
What is actually funny was after watching the show was .. huh, this was interesting .. but if the worst nuclear disaster we have has about a few hundred direct deaths, and a few thousand indirect .. with other health complications to some tens of thousands. Then compared to the respiratory illness related deaths caused by burning fossil fuels NOW and all the future wars and deaths and ecosystem collapses caused by climate change is absolutely nothing.
Now I have read quite a few books on nuclear disasters before and was aware of the fact that the megaton explosion was not true. So I may not be a representative example of how people reacted to the show.
What was scary to me was the relatively accurate representation of the behavior of the soviet brass. I even found their representation quite mild. And as we see in Ukraine these days, nothing has changed, russians have zero regard for civilians, nuclear power plants are being endangered with shelling, maternity wards are being bombed, bread lines are bombed. Post-soviet mafia does not care about anything but their own kleptocracy and looting.
Every time I think about this I get reminded the Fork Yeah! talk by bcantrill.
I however want to acknowledge that there are some brave people in russia who stand up and protest and risk their lives. It may seem futile but I still respect them. There is a great book [0] by Masha Gessen called The future is history that talks about them too.
>But don't let the word Chernobyl freak you out too much
After the TV show with its absolutely cartoonish depiction of the risks of nuclear energy I have no hope that's happening any time soon. It was genuinely baffling to me how a show, that was about as accurate on the threats of nuclear energy as Jaws was for sharks, got so much praise heaped on it.
The US continues to fail to effectively clean up the 56 million gallons of high level waste at the Hanford nuclear site and others throughout the US. Nuclear waste is slowly seeping into the water table and the Columbia river. The site is threatened by the risk of earthquakes, volcanoes, and flooding. We are no where closer to making it safe now than we were in 1985.
While I appreciate the devotion to facts, I feel the portrayal still rings true. These risks are catastrophic and are to this day being handled with scandalous incompetence.
Funniest part is that the tagline and theme of the show was “what is the cost of lies?” despite itself taking ridiculous liberties with the truth. Just off the top of my head there was:
* the “bridge of death” scene that never happened
* irradiated firefighters portrayed as themselves being radioactive
* military dude threatening to throw a member of the academy of the sciences out of a helicopter for trivial/arbitrary reasons
I remember there being other notable ones when briefly looking into it after watching it a couple years back.
> Funniest part is that the tagline and theme of the show was “what is the cost of lies?” despite itself taking ridiculous liberties with the truth. Just off the top of my head there was:
It's worth noting that show was not a work of nonfiction. In fiction, when the needs of drama and factual accuracy collide, drama usually wins, and there's nothing wrong with that.
by inventing complete nonsensical dangers. From claiming that the meltdown would result in a "4 megaton explosion" (that's off by about a million as this is the yield of a thermonuclear weapon, a plant isn't a bomb), claiming that the plant would render Europe uninhabitable (no such thing is possible), to portrayals of radiation sickness in Pripyat (the residents received about 3 x-rays worth of radiation), portrayal of radiation sickness as weirdly contagious (which it is not), and so on.
The impending explosion was going to be from the molten reactor and sand they dropped on it melting through the concrete and hitting a large underground lake, instantly vaporizing it and causing a massive explosion, and ejecting radioactive debris in a very wide area. I have read several articles criticising some aspects of the accuracy of the show (though none even venture close to saying "nonsensical"), and none of them say anything about the inaccuracy of that plot point. Do you have a source?
Much of the point of the manhattan project was devising mechanisms to bring fissile materials together fast enough and precisely enough that they could reach criticality for long enough to produce an effective weapon. To propose that you could get comparable effects via nuclear materials burning through their containment vessel melted in a pool is absurd and just extraordinarily unlikely.
That quote is about “testimony” of a Soviet physicist… who knows what political or other motivations were at work to justify that statement. I can’t imagine any modern physicist saying that was reasonable and it seems the writer couldn’t make that happen… it just seems like a fishing expedition for the most impressive quote that found someone saying something ridiculous and used that as a source of truth ignoring everything else which wasn’t as “fun”.
You sure are interpolating a lot of your own angle into this discussion. Do you think most laypeople would understand (or even remember) the implications of the difference between a 100kT explosion and a 4MT one? Probably not, right? Why do you think the writer would? Is it actually an important difference as far as the narrative is concerned? You'll find that no, it isn't. Even if it were, it's pretty ridiculous to think that expert testimony from the event wouldn't be an appropriate figure to use for a dramatization of the event.
The contemporary quote was either misattributed, missing context, or a straight up lie.
It’s not hard for an ordinary person to imagine what 4 million tons of explosive equivalent might be, or a hundred thousand, both are ridiculous. The actual risk was an explosion on the scale of a few buildings or a minor criticality incident which splattered melted nuclear material in a very small local area.
You’re not going to find a nuclear physicist who could back anything else up with calculations, the author tried and couldn’t.
The problem with your “viewers are ignorant so it doesn’t matter point” is that viewers aren’t totally ignorant and are then fed with very false information which makes any understanding that they did have considerably worse.
Ratatouille is about a rodent who can cook but doesn’t leave the viewer with major misconceptions about soup or what life working in a kitchen can be like. It doesn’t leave people with misconceptions about reality.
Wired also had an old article about the long-term situation with radioactive contamination, which the surrounding environment has to absorb including wildlife that continues to mutate rapidly last I checked. So, I would say secure containment is paramount.
Nuclear energy can be safe, but we keep failing to recognize how short of foolproof the many fail-safes involved really are even in a high-tech society. Things going bad when you lose power or a single (water) pump are the prime examples.
Chernobyl is much more dangerous in hands of russian soldiers than Zaporozhskaya Power Plant.
See, a complete destruction of ZNPP Unit by an external force (bomb) is going to contaminate the immediate area but not much further. It won't be nowhere near at the scale of Chernobyl accident.
On the other hand, The Shelter in Chernobyl NPP contains 50,000+ tons of highly radioactive and highly volatile (light) dust particles of graphite and concrete. If they destroy Novarka and The Shelter in the worst case scenario half of Europe becomes the exclusion zone. Source: I am closely working with Chernobyl guys.
Based on what we see so far in this invasion, we have no reason to rule out intentional destruction of The Shelter.
Unfortunately it seems to me that conventional logic isn't really helpful to bring a better understanding of the circumstances of this war.
For instance, you wouldn't expect sane combatant to repeatedly fire ordnance directly into the nuclear power plant units.
In Chernobyl they have already disrupted the top soil level and dug back radioactive particles back in the air and thus in the lungs and GI tracts of their soldiers and civilians unlucky enough to live where the wind blows.
Given the Putin's rhetoric of "why do we need the world without Russia" and similar we cannot rule out destruction of The Shelter.
Yes we can because it makes no strategic or tactical sense.
The so called strikes against nuclear power plants were made far too big of a deal. Ukraine is trying to blow everything out of proportion - and I say this being a total supporter of Ukraine - so that US/EU will help them.
There has been no real danger of incidents around nuclear power plants that I’ve seen, just Ukrainian propaganda efforts to try and frame the Russians for attempting one.
> no real danger of incidents around nuclear power plants
Top soil level disrupted in the Chernobyl zone. This is a big deal. Not chernobyl-accident-big, not fire-on-the-unit big, but still not a nuisance.
I can kind of agree with you and I agree that our propaganda over exaggerates.
So if Putin/military make decisions based on rational thought process then yes we don't have to worry. I'm just not sure they really do. I have seen things in this war which I do not understand from the strategic and tactical standpoint. It's not that they aren't reasons, it's just that I have not been able to figure them out so far.
Putin is 100% acting according to his rational interests, it's just that his interests appear incomprehensible to us, who believe that progress is peace. Putin and his circle believe that progress is power, and they also believe that the reconstruction of Russian power is both needed and essential.
It turns out that a lot of stuff that Putin was saying was TRUE, not just Trump-style bluster. He does believe that Russia should own a sphere of influence, and that a sort of USSR 2.0 project is both viable and desirable. This is shocking to us (I myself was shocked when he decided to go for a full invasion instead of just expanding the Donetsk and Luhansk republics), but not so much to Ukrainians.
Basically we projected our values onto Putin and believed that he wanted to make his nation rich like the West. Turns out money for him is less important, relatively speaking, than direct power for Russia.
Yes, we are all listening to Arestovich daily and sometimes even more often. He's the comforting voice for ukrainians and officially an advisor for the president Zelensky.
Meanwhile as we speak we have reports of russian soldiers with radiation poisoning arriving in hospitals in Belarus. While the reports are not yet confirmed, we fully expect that to happen: some of the russian troops are stationed right in the middle of the the Red Forest. Radiation levels in these woods were quite high by themselves even after all these years, but digging that specific soil with tanks and boots - that's a whole lot different story.
Please note that, despite your apparently reasonable handwaving, in fact fission reactions are still occurring in uranium fuel masses buried deep inside what's left of at least one of Chernobyl's reactors. Not saying there is any need to panic. But try not to let a false sense of security lull you into a coma.
Most of the arguments in favor of the renewed development of nuclear power rely on faith in engineering culture to prevent catastrophic failures and avoid large-scale loss of habitability of areas around these plants. This faith does not account for conflict and significant social disruption. We are fortunate that so far the nuclear assets in Ukraine have not been critically disrupted. I hope this is not where and when we learn this lesson.
It isn't like you have to blow up the reactor itself to disable a foreign nuclear plant. I see no reason why anybody would ever target a reactor core. There is a HUGE amount of electrical substation infrastructure outside of these plants which would take like 1/1000 the effort to damage or blow up as the reactor core itself and would shut the whole thing down. The only reason you would target a reactor core itself is to spread nuclear debri on purpose, which is still probably more effort than it would take to just make a dirty bomb and far less effective than a dirty bomb. Also you destroy all value in taking that territory, piss off every other country in the world likely prompting them to join the war against you, and likely spread the poison back into your own territory.
Would destroying the support infrastructure for these plants be any safer? My understanding is that almost all (if not all) nuclear power stations presently in operation need active cooling even after the reactor is shutdown. If that cooling infrastructure is disrupted then that could be just as disastrous as if the reactor core itself was targeted.
I don't see much of any "reason" behind what this invading army has been doing for the past 3.5 weeks, actually. Or if it's even right to call them an army.
Anyway I don't think the concern is that they would target or otherwise intentionally sabotage the reactors -- but that nonetheless they would allow something bad (potentially seriously bad) to happen by pure neglect. Kind of like the way they managed to blow up Reactor 4 in the first place back in 1986.
> It isn't like you have to blow up the reactor itself to disable a foreign nuclear plant. I see no reason why anybody would ever target a reactor core. There is a HUGE amount of electrical substation infrastructure outside of these plants which would take like 1/1000 the effort to damage or blow up as the reactor core itself and would shut the whole thing down.
If you attack that infrastructure, the core will melt down without suffering a direct attack.
IIRC, that's what happened at Fukushima: a tsunami took out the backup generators, which shut down the core cooling system, which then led to the core overheating and melting down.
With the fossil and biofuel status quo powering more than 80% of the world causing climate change and air pollution on the scale of 8 million deaths per year [1], I don't find this argument particularly compelling. Sure there are hazards with nuclear, but even in wild hypothesized scenarios the damage from not doing nuclear is worse. For perspective, fossil + biofuel kill a full Chernobyl's worth of people (short term plus long term deaths) every 7 hours, and counting.
And as for loss of habitability, the dose rates around Chernobyl are elevated but not incompatible with life. Around Fukushima, I'd join Elon Musk in eating any locally grown food. Better to avoid airplanes if you're concerned about those levels of radiation, below the threshold known to cause the smallest measurable increase in cancer (100 mSv acute, 300 mSv annual). Good read here: [2]
Briefly setting aside the term 'renewable' and focusing on wind and solar, the primary disadvantage of wind and solar of course is their intermittency. Due to low capacity factors, you have to build a lot more capacity (in GW) than your peak demand.
For example, CA uses about 25 GW-day of electricity per day. To make that much on a perfectly calm CA winter day, you need to have about 100 GW of solar capacity standing by. Then, you need to also build energy storage/shifting systems that can shift the energy from the noontime peak to the night, where baseload demand never falls below 20 GWe.
Now consider that there are often 15-day wind lulls in huge regional areas, and sometimes these coincide with big cloudy areas.
The oft quoted "low" costs of wind and solar in levelized $/kWh completely ignore and hide the fact that you have to overbuild at this magnitude and include the storage. The overbuild also implies a massive over-taxing of earth's land and mineral resources to build and rebuild the collectors and storage system.
Saying solar is the cheapest form of energy is like saying kids tents in the yard are the cheapest form of housing, and just pretending the indoor plumbing and heating and pantry of the parent's house cost nothing.
Systems costs are what matter. LCOE must stop driving policy.
Building 30 GW of load-following nuclear would be cheaper and have far lower impact on the environment.
The alternate less cooperative answer is no. 'Renewables' as a concept are not the answer. Biofuel is renewable but causes climate change and air pollution while nuclear is low carbon and low pollution but not considered renewable.
Furthermore, nuclear fuel on earth can power 100% of our primary energy for 4 billion years using the known and demonstrated technology of breeder reactors. This is just as long as the nuclear fusion fuel that powers solar, wind, hydro, bio will last, and so nuclear is just as renewable as those.
Spreading out production units (mainly wind turbines) and mixing sources (wind, solar...) considerably lowers the burden of intermittency.
LCOE is pertinent because the very low total cost of electricity generated by renewables spares money, enabling investments needed to compensate intermittency (over-provisionning, storage...).
Not a single industrial breeder reactor works satisfactorily (after many decades of R&D backed by huge investments in nations).
The thing is we don't live in a fairy tale, we're limited in resources and time. We can't ditch both nuclear + fossil right now so we have to prioritize one over the other for the next xx years until we figure out a way of making renewables good enough, right now they're a good addition at best and a gimmick at worst. And it's not like renewables are a silver bullet either. If you ditch nuclear to import panels or wind mills from countries like China I'd like to see a full life cycle pollution/emission report
I'm not as worried about global warming as I used to be after taking a look at world demographics and learning a bunch of stuff about global supply chains and agricultural practices as a result of this conflict breaking out.
World population is likely to steeply decline, and globalization plus high living standards will most probably go away. We just won't consume as much energy or make and trade as much stuff in the future.
So basically you are hoping it all sorts itself out? Maybe it will, but that seems like an incredibility risky position for humanity to make without hedging our bets.
We're long past the point of hedging our bets. Put it this way... when the world runs out of NPK fertilizers (or can't access them) and billions of people start to starve to death, climate change will no longer be seen as the big risk. After going down the rabbit hole that is modern agricultural practices, and more importantly the supply chains that underpin them, the writing is absolutely on the wall for humanity.
> World population is likely to steeply decline, and globalization plus high living standards will most probably go away. We just won't consume as much energy or make and trade as much stuff in the future.
So, rewording that: a bunch of people will die, enough to reduce the global population, the ones who are left are going to be miserable.
Well, I said it makes me less worried _about climate change_. It makes me significantly more worried about the political violence that historically breaks out under such circumstances and the wars that get started by nations to secure scarce and precious resources. The Guano Wars will look tame in comparison to whoever decides to go after the phosphate rock reserves in Morocco.
Western democracies, Japan and South Korea are politically stable so power plant disruptions due to armed conflict on their territories are likely a relatively low risk.
The US and UK nuclear programs - commercial and military - are littered with incidents, many of them fatal or releasing significant quantities of radioactive waste. In one case, someone was likely murdered as part of a coverup (google Karen Silkwood.) The attitude during much of the US nuclear program was "you're either with us or you're for those commie bastards."
And as a reminder, Chernobyl happened because a bunch of engineers were basically engaged in a dick-measuring contest, likely to satisfy some apparatchik.
I'd say the world's nuclear power programs have demonstrated extensively that humans as a whole can't handle the responsibilities, and now we have numerous, much safer alternatives.
It's an absolute miracle we haven't had an accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon near a population center given bombs have even been released from planes, in some cases with multiple safety systems satisfied - and that the permissive action link system was almost completely bypassed by petulant air force commanders who had weapons set to (I wish I were making this up) codes of all zeros.
If prosperous (as that's usually a match for a low chance of armed conflicht) nations mostly expand to non-fossil energy sources that aren't available/viable for developing/poorer nations, this is an issue since their power system won't profit from a large amount of research & investments on how to run a non-fossil fuel based system.
With the energy usage of non-western countries exploding quickly this could be a major hinderance to stopping climate change if all prosperous nations go all-in on nuclear and discourage other countries from doing so because of the risk.
A non realistic scenario tbh, it's very unlikely that e.g. germany will construct new nuclear power plants and a lot of not-very-stable countries already use nuclear power as we're seeing right now.
Russia has had several significant nuclear material release incidents in the last twenty years, only detected because the waste/fallout plume reached monitoring sites outside the country. The most recent was the 2018 disaster involving a nuclear torpedo.
Russia has used its reactors to produce materials to conduct political assassinations on foreign soil, which have ended up injuring and contaminating many innocent people.
The problem is that many of those workers won't be willing to return. Chernobyl is facing a disaster unless Russia drafts its own people in to operate it.
I can think of no good strategic reason to take over Chernobyl. I think Putin did it just to create terror. Knowing that the actual risk of a catastrophe is small, it’s a low risk way to make everyone else terrified of what Russia might do. Low cost, high yield - if you are a despot.
>I can think of no good strategic reason to take over Chernobyl.
that speaks good of you :) For Russia that allowed for one of the pillars of the current Russian propaganda - (the link below in Russian) "It has been discovered that Ukraine was making nuclear weapons in Chernobyl"
"Existing high radiations levels allowed to hide that work"
Granted that stupidity doesn't work outside of Russia. Unfortunately inside Russia it is a hit (together with "Ukraine making biological and chemical weapons to attack Russia")
I’ve been saying that this will be Russian story for Chernobyl.
Mariupol is going to be another one. They’re destroying it so they can show on their propaganda tv “look Russians, this is what we found in Ukraine, this is why we had to liberate it”.
"Granted that stupidity doesn't work outside of Russia. Unfortunately inside Russia it is a hit (together with "Ukraine making biological and chemical weapons to attack Russia")"
I know a few right wingers in the US who believe this too. They think Putin is a good guy who is cleaning up Ukraine.
Chernobyl is along one of the very few roads into Kyiv from the north west of the Dnieper. If you're trying to surround Kyiv, you'd be very hardpressed to avoid going by Chernobyl.
The Russians have access to the main rail line that goes into Kyiv from Chernobyl.
And, they can't be attacked in that area with anything other than small-arms fire - anything explosive will be too great a risk to send radioactive dust into the air.
That's not going to work at all. Russia would look weak asking, the West wouldn't be that stupid, and Russia has easier ways to do damage if they really want to start playing with nukes.
> I can think of no good strategic reason to take over Chernobyl.
If you're going to try to annex Ukraine, you're going to take Chernobyl. Of course there are very good strategic reasons (including the location issue, as mentioned by another comment) to take over all nuclear facilities and electricity production in the nation you're trying to annex.
What kind of annexation is it if you don't take the electricity production facilities and all the nuclear plants? If you do, what, leave all the nuclear power plants under the control of the Ukrainian Government and its proxies? It would be wildly irrational in terms of strategy.
One of the first things you'd want to accomplish, if you can, is to seize utilities and be able to control their function (for all manner of reasons), as well as controlling anything nuclear related.
Best info on this whole situation comes from the UN's "nuclear watchdog" (the IAEA), who now has 27 individual updates from this overall event.
https://www.iaea.org/nuclear-safety-and-security-in-ukraine
Not to say people shouldn't be allowed to rotate shifts, of course. But don't let the word Chernobyl freak you out too much is all.