How should west respond to potential (likely) Russian invasion of Ukraine?

[bilby]

I wasn't suggesting that the total deaths at Chernobyl were zero; Just that the "fallout over a wide area" caused zero detectable deaths - all if the detectable deaths were highly localised, most of them amongst people who were at the power plant itself, either as staff or as part of the firefighting effort.

The fallout was detected across most of Europe, but caused no health effects outside Ukraine and Belarus.

Estimates of thousands of deaths are absurd, and tens of thousands simply impossible. If Greenpeace were anywhere close to being right, it would be starkly obvious in the medical records across Europe.

Anything can be terrifying if you accept completely fictitious casualty estimates.

But nobody has claimed that radiation sickness usually causes immediate deaths, nor are many people really taking the Greenpeace estimate of 90,000 deaths seriously. Nor should anyone take seriously your claim that it caused no health effects outside of Ukraine and Belarus. The nature of those health effects makes it nearly impossible to prove direct links to fallout from the disaster, and defenders of nuclear power have always relied on the lack of provable effects as proof of lack. However, the map of detectable cesium-137 deposits, which had a 30 year half-life, in Europe looked like this by May 10, 1986:

So, as the Time article pointed out, the true cost of the Chernobyl disaster is worse than it looked. Ultimately, close to 7 million people received some form of compensation as a result of the disaster, including the 19,000 families just in Ukraine that "were receiving government assistance owing to the loss of a breadwinner whose death was deemed to be related to the Chernobyl accident". It is fair to say that most of the detectable damage was localized to just Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, but it is far from certain that catastrophic damage from one or more of the six Zaporizhzhiya reactors will be as limited Chernobyl was. Chernobyl was never deliberately bombed. All of the deaths and illnesses were from just getting a meltdown under control.

Seriously, if you think 1,500kBq is enough to have a measurable effect on any biological system, you are just demonstrating that the authors of that hugely misleading graphic were absolutely right to assume that they could scare the crap out of people by presenting data that most don't comprehend.

Radiation is easy to detect. That doesn't make it dangerous.

These days, the Bq is mostly used only for anti-nuclear propaganda, because pretty much any measurement generates huge numbers. https://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/Activity_Doses.htm

Deliberately bombing a nuclear power plant cannot release more radioactive material than it contains, and the dispersal of this material at Chernobyl was mainly due to the burning of the graphite moderator. The VVER reactors at Zaporizhzhiya use water as a moderator, so no, it couldn't be significantly worse than Chernobyl, or even anywhere close to as bad as Chernobyl, unless the Russians have a mechanism for getting hot water to burn as well as hot graphite does.

And most of the Chernobyl deaths and injuries were due to Soviet disregard for the risks they were exposing their emergency personnel and citizens to; They were trying to pretend that it hadn't happened. That wouldn't apply to a deliberate demolition of Zaporizhzhiya.

 

[ZiprHead]

Russia’s private military contractor Wagner comes out of the shadows in Ukraine war

Mercenary group does not officially exist but is playing a more public role and openly recruiting in Russia

www.theguardian.com

Three billboards in the Ural city of Ekaterinburg shine a light on what was once one of Russia’s most shadowy organisations, the private military contractor Wagner.

“Motherland, Honour, Blood, Bravery. WAGNER”, one of the posters reads.

Another, which locals said first appeared on the outskirts of the country’s fourth largest city in early July, depicts three men in military uniform next to the words “Wagner2022.org”.

The billboards, which can be seen in several Russian cities, are part of Wagner’s efforts to recruit fighters to join its ranks in Ukraine.

Are you a sadistic, baby-raping, motherfucker? Then come join us!

 

[Copernicus]

I wasn't suggesting that the total deaths at Chernobyl were zero; Just that the "fallout over a wide area" caused zero detectable deaths - all if the detectable deaths were highly localised, most of them amongst people who were at the power plant itself, either as staff or as part of the firefighting effort.

The fallout was detected across most of Europe, but caused no health effects outside Ukraine and Belarus.

Estimates of thousands of deaths are absurd, and tens of thousands simply impossible. If Greenpeace were anywhere close to being right, it would be starkly obvious in the medical records across Europe.

Anything can be terrifying if you accept completely fictitious casualty estimates.

But nobody has claimed that radiation sickness usually causes immediate deaths, nor are many people really taking the Greenpeace estimate of 90,000 deaths seriously. Nor should anyone take seriously your claim that it caused no health effects outside of Ukraine and Belarus. The nature of those health effects makes it nearly impossible to prove direct links to fallout from the disaster, and defenders of nuclear power have always relied on the lack of provable effects as proof of lack. However, the map of detectable cesium-137 deposits, which had a 30 year half-life, in Europe looked like this by May 10, 1986:

So, as the Time article pointed out, the true cost of the Chernobyl disaster is worse than it looked. Ultimately, close to 7 million people received some form of compensation as a result of the disaster, including the 19,000 families just in Ukraine that "were receiving government assistance owing to the loss of a breadwinner whose death was deemed to be related to the Chernobyl accident". It is fair to say that most of the detectable damage was localized to just Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, but it is far from certain that catastrophic damage from one or more of the six Zaporizhzhiya reactors will be as limited Chernobyl was. Chernobyl was never deliberately bombed. All of the deaths and illnesses were from just getting a meltdown under control.

Seriously, if you think 1,500kBq is enough to have a measurable effect on any biological system, you are just demonstrating that the authors of that hugely misleading graphic were absolutely right to assume that they could scare the crap out of people by presenting data that most don't comprehend.

Radiation is easy to detect. That doesn't make it dangerous.

These days, the Bq is mostly used only for anti-nuclear propaganda, because pretty much any measurement generates huge numbers. https://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/Activity_Doses.htm

Deliberately bombing a nuclear power plant cannot release more radioactive material than it contains, and the dispersal of this material at Chernobyl was mainly due to the burning of the graphite moderator. The VVER reactors at Zaporizhzhiya use water as a moderator, so no, it couldn't be significantly worse than Chernobyl, or even anywhere close to as bad as Chernobyl, unless the Russians have a mechanism for getting hot water to burn as well as hot graphite does.

And most of the Chernobyl deaths and injuries were due to Soviet disregard for the risks they were exposing their emergency personnel and citizens to; They were trying to pretend that it hadn't happened. That wouldn't apply to a deliberate demolition of Zaporizhzhiya.

I don't have enough knowledge of the technical details of either nuclear plants or the medical risks involved to debate at length with you on those subjects, so I'll just have to weigh your opinion against that of people quoted as experts in the press. One thing that the Times article stressed was the amount of intense debate over the question of exactly how much damage past nuclear events have caused. You seem to be on the very low end of estimates, and you have been a very strong advocate for nuclear power.

It does not help your argument to point out how careless the Soviets (and modern Russians) have been in handling the Chernobyl disaster. As for Zaporizhzhia, it is impossible to predict how serious a deliberate or accidental bombing of that facility would be, but it is located in a much more populated area of the country than Chernobyl is. Hopefully, damage to the facility would not lead to significant amounts of radiation being pumped into the atmosphere through fires that could not be contained because of the ongoing hostilities. During the Chernobyl meltdown, there was no war in the area to hinder emergency efforts to contain it.

 

[bilby]

I don't have enough knowledge of the technical details of either nuclear plants or the medical risks involved to debate at length with you on those subjects, so I'll just have to weigh your opinion against that of people quoted as experts in the press.

No you don't. And the press don't either, so they quote lobbyists and credit them as experts.

Your options, like mine, boil down to gaining an education in the technical details, or remaining unable to form reasonable opinions.

I hope you at least stop sharing those unreasonable opinions, if you elect the latter course.

I will note that there's currently intense debate over whether Trump was elected President but had his victory stolen. The existence of debate doesn't imply that there's no hard factual reality, nor that this reality is somewhere in between the two polar extremes of belief.

The problem at Chernobyl wasn't the meltdown; It was the subsequent fire. Graphite burns; Water not so much. The RBMK design was inherently dangerous, in a way that the VVER simply isn't.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In terms of direct deaths attributable to the accident, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster turned out to be anything but a highly destructive force. Whereas the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki claimed close to 200,000 immediate victims — more than 100,000 killed and the rest injured — the Chernobyl explosion caused 2 immediate deaths and 29 deaths from acute radiation sickness in the course of the next three months. Altogether, 237 people were airlifted from Chernobyl to Moscow and treated in the special clinic there. Out of these, 134 showed symptoms of acute radiation syndrome. It has been claimed that a total of 50 people died of acute radiation syndrome, and that 4,000 may die in the future of radiation-related causes. But the ultimate Chernobyl mortality toll, though difficult to estimate, may yet turn out to be significantly higher. Current estimates place it between the 4,000 deaths estimated by United Nations agencies in 2005 and the 90,000 suggested by Greenpeace International.

So the detectable deaths and injuries at the time were not zero, and the actual count is not really known. There is much more in the article about the extent of the disaster, and you may well disagree with a lot of it. However, I do think it's ridiculous to claim that there were no detectable deaths and injuries from that very widespread and well-publicized disaster. There are even reports of radiation sickness in Russian soldiers that had recently occupied Chernobyl and dug trenches in contaminated soil.

Greenpeace is not a credible source. The UN's 4,000 is reasonable, although even that is questionable--there's a strange lack of expected thyroid deaths.

 

[bilby]

In terms of direct deaths attributable to the accident, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster turned out to be anything but a highly destructive force. Whereas the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki claimed close to 200,000 immediate victims — more than 100,000 killed and the rest injured — the Chernobyl explosion caused 2 immediate deaths and 29 deaths from acute radiation sickness in the course of the next three months. Altogether, 237 people were airlifted from Chernobyl to Moscow and treated in the special clinic there. Out of these, 134 showed symptoms of acute radiation syndrome. It has been claimed that a total of 50 people died of acute radiation syndrome, and that 4,000 may die in the future of radiation-related causes. But the ultimate Chernobyl mortality toll, though difficult to estimate, may yet turn out to be significantly higher. Current estimates place it between the 4,000 deaths estimated by United Nations agencies in 2005 and the 90,000 suggested by Greenpeace International.

So the detectable deaths and injuries at the time were not zero, and the actual count is not really known. There is much more in the article about the extent of the disaster, and you may well disagree with a lot of it. However, I do think it's ridiculous to claim that there were no detectable deaths and injuries from that very widespread and well-publicized disaster. There are even reports of radiation sickness in Russian soldiers that had recently occupied Chernobyl and dug trenches in contaminated soil.

Greenpeace is not a credible source. The UN's 4,000 is reasonable, although even that is questionable--there's a strange lack of expected thyroid deaths.

A lot of that is explained by the fact that thyroid cancer is now eminently treatable if found early, and populations in Ukraine and Belarus who drank contaminated milk in 1986 were closely monitored and given timely treatment.

The anticipated deaths were based on Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims, who were exposed at a time of poor understanding of the risks, and poor availability of medical care.

It turns out that radiation is much less deadly if your city, with most of its hospitals, doctors, and nurses, hasn't just been wiped off the map.

Forty years of cancer and radiation medicine research does wonders for survival rates too.

In 1945, radiation was a mysterious and terrible thing that struck down survivors in awful ways and with little apparent rhyme or reason. Greenpeace still think it is. But they're just ignorant and wrong.

The UN figure is highly inflated, because it's based on the LNT hypothesis, which is known to massively overstate the hazard of small radiation doses.

Of course, even if the UN were right, and 4,000 people did die due to the Chernobyl disaster, there would need to be several such disasters every single month, before nuclear power was as deadly as the coal power it should immediately be used to replace.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But nobody has claimed that radiation sickness usually causes immediate deaths, nor are many people really taking the Greenpeace estimate of 90,000 deaths seriously. Nor should anyone take seriously your claim that it caused no health effects outside of Ukraine and Belarus. The nature of those health effects makes it nearly impossible to prove direct links to fallout from the disaster, and defenders of nuclear power have always relied on the lack of provable effects as proof of lack. However, the map of detectable cesium-137 deposits, which had a 30 year half-life, in Europe looked like this by May 10, 1986:

And food runs something like 600Bq per dry kilogram.

 

[TV and credit cards]

US is sending its largest shipment of weapons, $1B to Ukraine. This is for an expected southern counteroffensive.
We’ll see just what Russia has left in the tank.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-government-and-politics-d0597183948fb1f1eca99a01180e3bc8

 

[Copernicus]

I don't have enough knowledge of the technical details of either nuclear plants or the medical risks involved to debate at length with you on those subjects, so I'll just have to weigh your opinion against that of people quoted as experts in the press.

No you don't. And the press don't either, so they quote lobbyists and credit them as experts.

Your options, like mine, boil down to gaining an education in the technical details, or remaining unable to form reasonable opinions.

I hope you at least stop sharing those unreasonable opinions, if you elect the latter course.

I'm sorry, bilby, but you come off more as someone, like me, who has read a lot of stuff--articles, blogs, posts, etc.--on the subject and gotten into a lot of arguments on the internet. I do respect that fact that you've invested more time than I have on these subjects, because nuclear energy is obviously one of your hobbyhorses. Nevertheless, I still prefer to trust people quoted as experts and source material written by those with more knowledge than either you or I possess. Because I don't consider myself an expert, I try to post links to support my opinions rather than unsourced factoids. However, I'm under no illusion that I can post any source on the subject that won't elicit a somewhat condescending dismissal from you. You can attack experts that you disagree with as "lobbyists" and propagandists, but that kind of rhetorical ad hominem technique is hardly a refutation. Some experts actually get paid to say things they believe to be true. So I will continue to use sources to back up my opinions, and you will continue to wave them off.

I will note that there's currently intense debate over whether Trump was elected President but had his victory stolen. The existence of debate doesn't imply that there's no hard factual reality, nor that this reality is somewhere in between the two polar extremes of belief.

Strawman. I never said that it did imply that. Nor does it imply that the truth doesn't actually lie between extremes. It depends on the controversy.

The problem at Chernobyl wasn't the meltdown; It was the subsequent fire. Graphite burns; Water not so much. The RBMK design was inherently dangerous, in a way that the VVER simply isn't.

I'm not arguing that all meltdowns will progress like the one at Chernobyl. This is another strawman. Graphite can burn all it wants, but it was just one factor in the disaster that you use here, IMHO, to attempt to minimize the severity of what happened. The meltdown itself could have caused a worse disaster, if it had burned down through the basement floor to reach groundwater. You seem be taking a rather sanguine position that the six nuclear reactors in Zaporizhzhia pose no dire threat if they are bombed, but you clearly did not even realize that the facility was still operational. So I tend to trust the more alarmist news reports based on interviews with experts on nuclear power plants and better knowledge of conditions at the facility.

 

[Copernicus]

But nobody has claimed that radiation sickness usually causes immediate deaths, nor are many people really taking the Greenpeace estimate of 90,000 deaths seriously. Nor should anyone take seriously your claim that it caused no health effects outside of Ukraine and Belarus. The nature of those health effects makes it nearly impossible to prove direct links to fallout from the disaster, and defenders of nuclear power have always relied on the lack of provable effects as proof of lack. However, the map of detectable cesium-137 deposits, which had a 30 year half-life, in Europe looked like this by May 10, 1986:

And food runs something like 600Bq per dry kilogram.

You missed the point of the map. It isn't to claim that the contamination was all and only from cesium 137. It is to show the extent of the spread of contamination from the disaster. Cesium 137 is extremely rare, so this map can be used for that purpose. There were other radioactive materials that were also spread from Chernobyl, but this was an attempt to show that health effects were likely to have taken place outside of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, even if there isn't any direct proof of a link to health effects. The point of the source article was to argue that the true cost of Chernobyl was much higher than it seemed, and this was partial support for such an argument.

 

[lpetrich]

U.S. Senate vote on admitting Sweden and Finland into NATO

Referring to
Treaty Document 117-3 - Protocols to the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 on the Accession of the Republic of Finland and the Kingdom of Sweden | Congress.gov | Library of Congress

The vote: Yes 95, No 1, Present 1, Not Voting 3.

The no vote was from Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO, and the present vote from Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY.

The non-voters were two D's and one R.

 

[barbos]

Russians had every reason to kill them. Your own politicians in the Duma called for the Azovstal defenders to be killed

Yes, they should be tried and sentenced accordingly. Some should be executed.
There is no reason whatsoever to bomb perfectly fine building to achieve that.
Ukrainian regime, on the other hand, got tired of russian propaganda videos of azov regiment soldiers where they are telling everybody how happy they are in the captivity.
These videos are not helping Elensky with his "troops are surrendering!!!" problem.

I see no discussion of Amnesty International debacle here
Nuclear Pland bombing? sure, keep speculating, even after ukrainian regime admitted it was them.

You people are still thinking that Ukraine is winning.

 

[barbos]

russian terrorists declare that they plan to detonate bombs on the nuclear reactors. This is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and among the 10 largest in the world

You ARE aware that your "news" is based on anonymous post on board like this one?
So I am posting this:
Joe Biden is an alien from outer space.

 

[zorq]

Russians had every reason to kill them. Your own politicians in the Duma called for the Azovstal defenders to be killed

Yes, they should be tried and sentenced accordingly. Some should be executed.
There is no reason whatsoever to bomb perfectly fine building to achieve that.

There are all kinds of ways a defendant can make a spectacle out of a courtroom, even in a Russian 'kangaroo court.' Putin doesn't want that. Plus, too many of the Ukrainian prisoners had already died from the torture the Russians were subjecting them to so the Russians realized that they had to cover up the war crimes by faking an enemy bombing.

Ukrainian regime, on the other hand, got tired of russian propaganda videos of azov regiment soldiers where they are telling everybody how happy they are in the captivity.
These videos are not helping Elensky with his "troops are surrendering!!!" problem.

I see no discussion of Amnesty International debacle here

LOL. In your delusional propaganda filled media bubble perhaps. We have video of Russian soldiers was filmed cutting off the testicles of a Ukranian POW.

 

[bilby]

The meltdown itself could have caused a worse disaster, if it had burned down through the basement floor to reach groundwater.

No, it really couldn't.

That's a fictional element from the HBO 'docudrama', that was added to increase tension.

I note that other, far worse, contemporary industrial accidents don't have recent HBO specials about them. Where's the docudrama about Bhopal? That was a far more serious accident on every level, but apparently dead Indians are less exciting than scared Europeans.

 

[bilby]

But nobody has claimed that radiation sickness usually causes immediate deaths, nor are many people really taking the Greenpeace estimate of 90,000 deaths seriously. Nor should anyone take seriously your claim that it caused no health effects outside of Ukraine and Belarus. The nature of those health effects makes it nearly impossible to prove direct links to fallout from the disaster, and defenders of nuclear power have always relied on the lack of provable effects as proof of lack. However, the map of detectable cesium-137 deposits, which had a 30 year half-life, in Europe looked like this by May 10, 1986:

And food runs something like 600Bq per dry kilogram.

You missed the point of the map. It isn't to claim that the contamination was all and only from cesium 137. It is to show the extent of the spread of contamination from the disaster. Cesium 137 is extremely rare, so this map can be used for that purpose. There were other radioactive materials that were also spread from Chernobyl, but this was an attempt to show that health effects were likely to have taken place outside of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, even if there isn't any direct proof of a link to health effects. The point of the source article was to argue that the true cost of Chernobyl was much higher than it seemed, and this was partial support for such an argument.

The point of the map was to scare the shit out of ignorami, because scared ignorant people buy more copies of the tabloid newspaper that originated it than comfortable ignorant people do.

 

[barbos]

too many of the Ukrainian prisoners had already died from the torture the Russians were subjecting them to so the Russians realized that they had to cover up the war crimes by faking an enemy bombing.

Complete and utter lie.

 

[barbos]

LOL. In your delusional propaganda filled media bubble perhaps. We have video of Russian soldiers was filmed cutting off the testicles of a Ukranian POW.

You saw nothing!
What we saw are the proven cases of ukrainian nazis torturing and murderuing russian POWs during early days of operation. Your video WAS NOT in any way verified.

 

[zorq]

LOL. In your delusional propaganda filled media bubble perhaps. We have video of Russian soldiers was filmed cutting off the testicles of a Ukranian POW.

You saw nothing!
What we saw are the proven cases of ukrainian nazis torturing and murderuing russian POWs during early days of operation. Your video WAS NOT in any way verified.

Had to edit your post eh? Just found out about that video eh? LOL. Your media bubble tells you the convenient lies that you refuse to examine closely. Because that might make you feel uncomfortable. Because you have been covering for Russian atrocities from day 1. And that makes you complicit in them.

 

[barbos]

Just found out about that video eh?

No, I've read about it before. It was said that it was not verified and mentioned that russian federation millitary are strictly forbidden from using cellphones and other such equipment. Basically you are a toast if you are identified on the video regardless of the content.
Having said that, DNR/LNR people have looser rules and they may have greater grudge against ukrainian nazi scam.
In any case, it was not verified, it could be ukrainian fake, like 90% of the shit coming from them. They are filthy liars.