Unquestionably the Chernobyl accident has had a major impact on how Europeans view nuclear power. It’s hard to reconcile “this is a comparatively safe means of generating power without generating green house gas” with “if you go into this forest and dig around you might kill yourself by being exposed to the dust in the area”.
I sometimes think that building a new, more modern nuclear power plant near the defunct one in the exclusion zone would be a good move. Except, of course, for the hazards inherent in building in the zone, but I think they could be managed. The idea being that the area is already contaminated and no one wants to move next door to it anyway, so why not build a nuclear plant there? If there is a release of radioactivity who will notice, right? (Yes I know it’s not that simple).
And this is the ultimate answer to all these questions. Since the end of the Cold War, we, as a society, have spent 30 years letting corporations run everything, with the underlying philosophy of minimizing costs while maximizing profits, with little regard to secondary issues like reliability, and nation security interests. So, yeah, we saved a lot of money, but now when the system breaks down, we have very little to fall back on.
And infrastructure like this takes years to build, even if we were to bite the bullet and pull out all the stops to get it done. There are only so many people with the skills needed to build oil gas and electric infrastructure, and only so many suppliers of the equipment needed. That places hard limits on how much we can build, and there’s still ongoing demand for these people and this equipment in other parts of the world. Finding extra to replace existing pipelines to Russia will place a strain on everything else.
This is the correct answer. It’s Europe’s decision, not mine or the US, but it is clear by this point that Russia will always be an unreliable, lawless, predatory actor. Rewarding its bad actions will only result in more bad actions. Ukraine has more than demonstrated its worth as a military partner, and it has very large gas reserves of its own to be developed. The only path toward energy security and military security for Europe lies in severing its energy independence on Russia, and re-orienting its security around an active defense of countries bordering Russia, primarily Ukraine, which should become a NATO and EU member once they’re prepared to settle borders with Russia (hopefully at pre-2014 lines).
This would raise the chance of nuclear war, which is an unappealing aspect of the choice, but we need to understand that Russia is determined to live on the brink of nuclear war anyway because it has few other cards left to play. So if we don’t want to accept them running roughshod over European countries, a perpetual Cold War is the price we must be willing to pay.
Do you know who has and is offering cheap electricity to Europe at reduced rates and already has nuclear power plants?
They also know how to build more. The Ukraine is basically offering up its countryside as a atomic waste area so that they can be free. Damn this guy has a pair.
Ummm. No. First of all, he wasn’t socialist. He was the leader of a far-right racist populist party (huh, that sounds familiar some how). Second, it was a “joke”. Hmmm a far-right racist populist politician that makes extreme policy statements as “jokes”. Again that sounds familiar. He was also a criminal. Huh. A far-right racist populist politician that was a criminal. That sounds SO familiar.
Sure do. They are in a war with Russia for their freedom and asking Europe to join them in the risk in exchange for cheap electricity. He is telling Putin we will stop selling you this electricity when this is over and we win.
Whose side would we rather be on?
That and its a flying fuck you in Putins face. Gotta like that.
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in southeastern Ukraine is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and among the 10 largest in the world. As of 12 March 2022 the plant is reportedly controlled by the Russian company Rosatom. The plant continues to be operated by Ukrainian staff, under Russian control. It has been bombed by Russian and Ucrainian forces and is currectly being observed by UN inspectors.
You may remember that Chernobyl is in Ukraine.
My point precisely. And the USA does the same with Gulf oil and gas (and make no mistake: those are not your friends! Nor ours), and soon after the Ucraine invasion started the USA eased the sanctions and the embargo against Venezuela / Maduro. For humanitarian reasons only, of course: Chevron had asked politely for it. </sarc>
Well, the last time Chernobyl blew up the first to notice were the Swedes: >
In the morning of 28 April, radiation levels set off alarms at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden over 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) from the Chernobyl Plant.
And in Germany we are still urged not to eat wild mushrooms we used to pick in the forests because of the high levels of radioactivity. Damn, I like mushrooms!
Your suggestion reminds me of tanTrump’s idea of extinguishing the fire at Notre Dame in Paris with planes, which would have collapsed the structure. Quite frankly: that is not useful. You can write that kind of stuff in Farcebook or Twittest, but here?
That wasn’t what I meant. What I meant is that for things like electrical generation they can go for renewable sources in larger proportions and gain a much larger measure of energy independence than they currently have.
I know they can’t achieve total energy independence, but they could go a lot further than they currently have, and every bit of that would lessen their reliance on foreign bad actors such as Russia, OPEC, etc…
A more modern/better design will not blow up in the manner Chernobyl did. I am not claiming that a nuclear plant accident is safe or trivial, just that something the magnitude of Chernobyl is less likely now than in the past.
That is the problem with bombing a nuclear plant, or disconnecting safety systems - nuclear problems seldom stay local.
Incorrect. The Soviets, particularly in the immediate vicinity, certainly noticed that there was a big problem at the power plant before anyone else. The difference is that the Swedes were the first to publicly announce what was going on. For awhile after that the Soviets continued to try to deny anything was wrong, which was ridiculous because you can’t keep something like that secret these days.
Yes, and we currently have some problems as half of our reactors are off grid due to maintenance. During the Covid lock down they have been postponed, and the severe drought this summer aggravated some cooling problems.
But yes 80% of electricity is nuclear in origin, and a new type of reactor (EPR) is in construction ( plus one in China, one in Finland and another in UK)
Going back to the OP and into the other Big Issue — that of the Western Economies having somehow to bear any burden to Avoid A Depression. Or even just a Bad Recession. Or even just one or two countries (but the Right kind of country) defaulting. Or a Too Big To Fail economic sector crashing.
This was behind not holding people accountable for the mortgage securities shenanigans in the lead-in to the 2008 crash, and instead bailing out the banking sector because OMG we can’t let it go down. It was behind the asinine response to Covid in many places, e.g. USA where you-know-who did not want bad news and preventive measures to disrupt his economic good times.
Some times, you have to bear some pain to do the right thing. You can’t avoid it forever.
