Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were accidents.
The Russians are deliberately putting this power plant at risk. First by using it as military base. Now it appears they are going to screw around with the controls. Maybe send power to Russia or totally shut down the plant. Do they have expert technical support to do it safely?
The two big accidents were directly caused by workers incompetence. They had errors on their console and didn’t respond correctly.
I hope your right.
I hope I’m right too. But I mentioned Three Mile Island for a reason. Zhaporizhzia is in the same general class of reactor as TMI. By basic design characteristics, safer even than the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors, which were Boiling Water Reactors. (Safer than Chornobyl, less safe than PWRs.)
We’re in uncharted territory. There doesn’t seem to be any contingency plans for a military take over of a nuclear power plant.
I have read security at the plant prepares for possible terrorism. They are supposed to be prepared to stop a small force of men.
No one expected Vlad to show up with a thousand men and tanks.
NATO vs Russia would be laughable slaughter. F-22s would get hundreds of kills, Russia would be wiped like a dish rag, it would be like Gulf War I but 4x faster.
Right up until the nukes fly. You can’t forget them.
Anyway, what would NATO do with Russia if it got it? That would be an administrative nightmare nobody in their right mind would voluntarily sign up for.
Yeah, that would be about the size of it. In war games against the F-22 and F-35, I understand the non stealth fighter pilots describe the experience as “boring”. They don’t realize anyone is nearby, and they’re just killed in the simulation. NATO developing air superiority would most likely be a short process.
However, that does remind me of the overconfidence that led Russia into it’s current debacle. Only the Israelis have used their 5th gen fighters in war. They’ve appeared to perform well, but their opponent wasn’t Russia. On top of that:
Yes, that’s the thing that keeps us from getting directly involved. If Russia wasn’t armed with nukes, Ukraine would probably have gotten a no-fly zone in place by Feb 25th and would have had others’ troops and equipment backing them up shortly afterward.
But at this point, if Russia is going to resort to nukes to win a war with NATO, it will probably lead with them on day one.
Well, if they don’t resort to nukes on day one, I’d say NATO’s reaction wouldn’t be to take over Russia. I figure once there wasn’t any Russian hardware within NATO’s borders, they would state something like “Any of Russia’s military hardware or personnel within 300 miles of the borders of a NATO country is subject to destruction at NATO’s discretion”
Because while trying to destroy them is an obvious reason for them to nuke you, it’s harder to justify if you’re just making sure they don’t continue invading you.
Send in the ghost of George Marshall or Douglas MacArthur to rebuild Russia (or the contemporary equivalent of someone given similar authority) the way we did with Germany and Japan after WWII. We had a small scale opportunity to do that in the early 90s, but Bill Clinton screwed that up. Either way, the whole nukes flying thing means that’s never going to happen.
More information is coming out about Russian plans at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. It sounds very risky and probably not well planned.
Guardian blog
It seems a hallmark of Russian strategy these days. I’m not sure why they can’t simply disconnect the connections to the rest of the grid so as to let the plant continue to generate power for its internal use i.e. pumping coolant water.
Cynically, I think the threat of an unfortunate event is the real point of the whole shameful exercise.
“That’s a lovely nuclear plant you’ve got there. It would be such a shame if anything… unfortunate… were to happen to it.”
Maybe turning it off is the first step to disconnecting it?
Wow, that’s the most intensne 
I’ve seen yet. Russia must be havings fits finding ways to hide their ammo dumps.
I imagine no one is happy when a convoy of trucks starts unloading crates of shells near their town even in the best of times. But I can only imagine how panic-inducing it must be to know that that massive pile of explosives is a huge target for incoming fire.
The video showed some Fire Trucks (?) a mile or so from this. Ummmm… I think I would be saying no.
Yeah, even here in the good ole USA, fire departments will look at a fire and go 'Nope. We’ll work to prevent it spreading to other buildings, but that one is toast.".
Big bada BOOM!
Ordinarily yes, some first responders don’t check their hazmat book for guidance and pay the price. A semi-recent amonium nitrate fertilizer explosion in West, TX took a few lives.
Maybe we should be staging mobile generators and pumps close enough to intercede in the event of a meltdown.
The Russian public are almost certainly NOT being told what the death/wounded totals are. There is no free press and the propaganda machine is going full speed.
SOP for any conflict, really. Sure, this one might be particularly interesting for various reasons, but competent militaries are always studying.
Vast quantities of natural resources. Of course, there are also vast quantities of territory polluted by the extraction of same by regimes that didn’t care about the environmental and human cost to doing so.
Be careful what you wish for. There are, unfortunately, scenarios where this ends soon and the consequences are bad for everyone, everywhere.
You would think so, but an “accident” can provide “plausible deniability” if it’s done in a manner where it’s not clear who was actually responsible for the mess. No, we don’t launch when there’s an accident, there’s no “nuclear deterrent” for accidents. Given this power plant is in the middle of a war zone a genuine accident is a possibility.
It does seem that way.
Depending on wind direction at the time it may wind up doing more damage to Russia than to Western Europe. Not that Putin cares.
It also is NOT going to blow up like Chernobyl did, as already noted in post #7140.
Russia does have competent nuclear power plant operators who have the technical knowledge and expertise to do that safely. However, there is no guarantee they will use those actual experts to do the deed. You’d think the Russians would also know better than to screw around in the Chernobyl Red Zone but apparently they issued stupid pills to the guys sent to take that over.
My concern is someone with little to no understanding of nuclear hazards decides to sabotage the power plant, or shell it with artillery, thinking doing so isn’t much different than blowing up any other building or industrial complex. Given that the Ukrainians seem to be sensible about such things I expect if it does happen it would be the Russians being stupid again.
Because the US military pays people to think about unlikely scenarios I suspect there are some… but they have never been tested. No real-world data to work from. And then there’s the question of whether or not anything from elsewhere could be used to help the Ukrainians, who are the folks who currently are dealing with this up front.
Right - the nukes are the wild card in this scenario. If not for them the situation would be much, much different.
Every tin-pot dictator is taking notes about that. A LOT of nations will be wanting nukes after this, even more so than before.
There are emergency generators on site. My (imperfect) understanding is that fuel for those would be the crucial bottleneck.
I very much doubt Russia would let us, or anyone else, intercede. Either they’ll handle it or nobody will.