Is Russia global warming denialist?

GarryB wrote:but a well designed plant should be able to shut the reactor down in case of emergency like an air attack, which would mean  it would need a direct hit on the reactor to create any sort of radiation problem...

That is not too difficult for a modern CM. And there are anti bunker bombs that go trough 60 meter rock, even if it was very well protected. In any case I think a relatively normal impact with a tactical weapon could already expose the core

and as studies have shown a good enormous burst of radiation gets the people out of there real fast and while it is not good for plants and animals either it is not as bad as human activity on nature so in a way it could be a good thing.

Well, you are right on that one, we are worse for nature than any bomb...

That is not too difficult for a modern CM. And there are anti bunker bombs that go trough 60 meter rock, even if it was very well protected. In any case I think a relatively normal impact with a tactical weapon could already expose the core

The irony is that if they did that then the radiation is fully detectable and trackable and the end result is that a lot of people who already have cancer but don't have symptoms will get checked and cancers will be found early which will probably massively offset any people killed by the radiation itself... it would be a very irresponsible party that attacks a nuclear power station as a target of war... if I was that country I would feel free to put radioactive material in conventional bombs and drop them on the enemy capital with airburst fuses so they don't do physical damage but spread contaminated material around the place... and if the enemy had places of value... churches, shrines, things, or places of cultural or religious significance they would get dirty bombed too.

It is not ideal, but hydro electric dams can also kill lots of people with flooding... and not all countries have suitable rivers for hydro electric power in the first place... which limits options...

GarryB wrote:The irony is that if they did that then the radiation is fully detectable and trackable and the end result is that a lot of people who already have cancer but don't have symptoms will get checked and cancers will be found early which will probably massively offset any people killed by the radiation itself...

Hahaha that is what I would call a positive view of the issue  

it would be a very irresponsible party that attacks a nuclear power station as a target of war... if I was that country I would feel free to put radioactive material in conventional bombs and drop them on the enemy capital

One Ukranian journo proposed this to attack Russia recently.

A damaged reactor will lose cooling, bars will melt and the fission will be not controlled, big amounts of radioactive materials can be expelled to the air and cover big areas that afterwards are not safe to live... it is not an easy situation to manage and the last thing you want to take care of while you are waging war.

It is not ideal, but hydro electric dams can also kill lots of people with flooding... and not all countries have suitable rivers for hydro electric power in the first place... which limits options...

That kind of targets are supposedly off-limits, but in a war they want you dead to start with so I would not count on everyone being a gentleman. Bombing of Serbia comes to mind...

kvs wrote:Hydroelectric is a limited capacity energy source.   Even though there is more than enough water available, there are not enough
basins of the right topography

True, and so big countries which like Brazil could get most of their electricity from hydro are exceptions. The good part is that the same reservoir surface used for PV modules generates many times the energy that hydro does. As to biofuels, the energy / surface relationship is like 50 times or more in favour of solar. Still we see thousands of hectares of fertile land being ruined with them, or hundreds of square km being flooded and take it for normal, but we are still not used to putting some PV modules on the roof...

Don't get me wrong.  I am not wishing for alternatives to never be deployed.  

Yeah I think we understand what you mean. People need to take a look at the primary energy sources in this world and they will understand that a energy transition like the one being proposed now will take like one century to be completed... and in the meantime industries and cars and homes need to be supplied, not only in rich countries but in developing ones too.

It is already contributing to the development of solar panel tech with high efficiency amorphous solar cells. It is also researching meta materials for solar cells such as including gold nano particles to act as a sort of quantum catalyst that increases the electricity generated for a given radiation flux on to the solar cell.

 

Exactly, Russia's very particular scientific school can play a huge role in advancing the physics needed for high efficiency cells, new materials etc., even if the solar resource of the country is not so good. I seem to remember Ioffe Institute has been involved in PV research for a long time.

If you do a Google search for the plasmon effect, you will see that it is now an active area or research in the west.
But it goes back years to research done at Dubna and probably elsewhere.  

http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1915  

Haha, plasmons, that trivial topic
Let's see how much I manage to understand of all that... but anyway for the little that I am reading its possibilities seem amazing, thanks for pointing it out

Hahaha that is what I would call a positive view of the issue

One of the effects of Chernobyl is that environmental radiation levels were monitored closely by lots of european countries and more people got tested and checked for cancer than ever before so deaths from cancers actually went down from normal because often by the time symptoms appear it is too late, but people with no symptoms were being tested and it was getting found much earlier.

One Ukranian journo proposed this to attack Russia recently.

I was thinking of an Iran vs Israel type scenario, but if the Ukraine wasn't to commit suicide I am sure the Russians would enjoy attacking and taking out the relative government and military components of their country likely in on such a plan and leveling the buildings they occupy... purely self defence of course.

If the west defended the actions of the Ukraine I am sure ISIS in Europe could be supplied with some very toxic substances that would be completely untraceable... or traced to western facilities...

A damaged reactor will lose cooling, bars will melt and the fission will be not controlled, big amounts of radioactive materials can be expelled to the air and cover big areas that afterwards are not safe to live... it is not an easy situation to manage and the last thing you want to take care of while you are waging war.

It would all come down to the damage sustained and the type of reactor... many have auto shut down mechanisms so that if power is lost then magnetic fields fail and the reactor is automatically shut down... so nothing melts... no civilian or military nuclear reactor on the planet could ever reach fission temperatures... the materials being used are no where near enriched enough to achieve that... the worst that normally happens is that the coolant water is super super heated which separates the hydrogen from the oxygen... which detonates like a bomb... but a hydrogen oxygen bomb... it is a chemical explosion and not a nuclear one.

During war time with a real enemy most of the time the war is vastly more dangerous than radiation leaking... those effects are more long term...

That kind of targets are supposedly off-limits, but in a war they want you dead to start with so I would not count on everyone being a gentleman. Bombing of Serbia comes to mind...

I doubt big powerful countries like the US see war the same as the little countries they crush... they take what they want and expect everyone to move on like nothing just happened... I mean there are people in the US who genuinely think the US should make up friends with Russia to fight the Asian menace of China... because we are all just european white people now...

The same people who might not even admit the WMDs in Iraq were made up, but will say it was good we invaded anyway because Saddam was bad and they wouldn't be free now... free to do as America tells them to of course...

GarryB wrote:One of the effects of Chernobyl is that environmental radiation levels were monitored closely by lots of european countries and more people got tested and checked for cancer than ever before so deaths from cancers actually went down

Wow didn't know that...

It would all come down to the damage sustained and the type of reactor... many have auto shut down mechanisms so that if power is lost then magnetic fields fail and the reactor is automatically shut down... so nothing melts

I would not be so sure. Water is gone, temperature goes up. Control bars or they mechanisms could be damaged by the warhead too, it is not so crazy to think that I would say. But I guess it depends a lot on the type of reactor and the type of attack. Even used up fuel rods left without water heat up badly too. Fukushima gave us some nasty surprises about how nuclear reactors work and what happens when supporting systems are damaged. Not every system is intrinsically safe, much less when things get blown to pieces wit explosives

... no civilian or military nuclear reactor on the planet could ever reach fission temperatures... the materials being used are no where near enriched enough to achieve that... the worst that normally happens is that the coolant water is super super heated which separates the hydrogen from the oxygen... which detonates like a bomb... but a hydrogen oxygen bomb... it is a chemical explosion and not a nuclear one.

Fission happens naturally on radioactive materials, and if you put them close to each other the process reinforces itself... not saying they are going to explode like an atom bomb. What did you understand?

The same people who might not even admit the WMDs in Iraq were made up, but will say it was good we invaded anyway because Saddam was bad and they wouldn't be free now... free to do as America tells them to of course...

Same way of thinking of nazis, only with an overdose of faked equanimity and without swastikas

That was the kind of solid info we were missing, thanks

I am rather sure that a conventional attack to the reactor building with a simple warhead against hardened targets would suffice to expose the core / cause a catastrophic malfunction, after the 9/11 the topic of crashing an airliner against those installations was brought up to the light and the results of the assessments were not good from what I remember. CMs/BMs and specially bunker-buster bombs can go through meters and in some cases tens of meters of reinforced concrete and steel before going off, so I very much doubt a reactor contention structure has any chance, unless it was like 100 m below ground...

Wow didn't know that...

It is not in the interests of the west to say nice things about Chernobyl, but the radiation didn't kill everything within a 1,000 mile radius and the mutants depicted in STALKER were not created, though actual mutants and mutations did occur they were real mutations and mutants... not movie ones. Getting bitten by a radioactive spider in a movie turns you into Spiderman. In the 1980s there were a series of cheap B movies about a nerd that is pushed and falls into toxic waste and he becomes the toxic avenger... in real life if you don't die it inflicts pain and suffering and shortens your life and makes things much harder.

Western countries were interested in blaming the Soviets so of course they monitored radiation levels and increased funding to healthcare regarding cancer and people got checked more thoroughly than they normally would... any increase in cancers could therefore be blamed on the Soviets and Chernobyl.

As I mentioned at the time and even right now the key to surviving cancer is early detection and treatment... technology being rather better today than back then, but people keep dying from cancer.

I would not be so sure. Water is gone, temperature goes up. Control bars or they mechanisms could be damaged by the warhead too, it is not so crazy to think that I would say.

Actually that is wrong... if the water goes then the temperature does go up but who cares? The temperature will never go up high enough to create fusion or even fission because the material is fuel grade enriched and not weapon grade enriched so you will never achieve critical mass.

If you leave the water there however it is under pressure so the boiling temperature is increased... running normally the water temperature is 5 or 6 hundred degrees C and it only just starts to turn into steam to drive turbines because of the immense pressure it is under... hence they are called Pressurised water reactors or PWRs. If you keep heating it up to thousands of degrees it gets very energetic and the hydrogen and oxygen separate but are still mixed together and at those temperatures you don't need a spark and you have oxygen and hydrogen mixed together in gas form hydrogen being a fuel and oxygen being an oxidiser and heat... = boom. Not a nuke boom, but still a boom which releases the now melted radioactive materials.

But modern nuclear reactors have safety measures... one of the ones introduced is that a matrix of control rods that are normally moved between the fuel rods to stop the reactions are designed to operate automatically. One common method is to use electromagnets to hold the control rods above the fuel rods when the reactor is running. If there is a power cut or some problem the magnetic field holding the control rods up either goes off in a power cut or can be turned off manually... making the control rods drop into place and effectively shut down the reactor by stopping the reaction.

Earth quake, Tsunami, fire, or any other problem and it automatically shuts down... if it is a false alarm then you can turn it back on again easily enough.

Even used up fuel rods left without water heat up badly too. Fukushima gave us some nasty surprises about how nuclear reactors work and what happens when supporting systems are damaged. Not every system is intrinsically safe, much less when things get blown to pieces wit explosives

The Soviets and Russians learned a lot regarding Chernobyl and started building safety features into their reactors. Fukushima is an old American design that had backup generators and things like that but once the whole reactor was ironically swamped with water and sea water at that... the electric generators stopped working and backups stopped too and without power they were unable to shut down the reactors properly. The earthquake did some damage but it was the water damage from the Tsunami that really created the problems... and of course poor design in terms of safety... but you wont hear that latter fact from western sources...

Fission happens naturally on radioactive materials, and if you put them close to each other the process reinforces itself... not saying they are going to explode like an atom bomb. What did you understand?

Fission is not an issue as you explain... fission is only a problem when critical mass is achieved and a runaway nuclear reaction takes place, which as I said is not possible because the material is not enriched to weapon grade levels so even a thousand tons of the stuff stacked together will just get hot enough to melt and then dribble down into the ground... it will not go boom.

CMs/BMs and specially bunker-buster bombs can go through meters and in some cases tens of meters of reinforced concrete and steel before going off, so I very much doubt a reactor contention structure has any chance, unless it was like 100 m below ground...

Yeah... all they have to do is penetrate Russian air defences with a bomber big enough to carry this huge bunker buster munitions and not get shot down by aircraft or SAMs on the way to or around the target... and of course be fully aware that they will likely respond in kind and using mach 10 hypersonic missiles would probably make replying in kind actually much easier for them...

If Israel does it to Iran I am sure they will be scooping up the radiated material and popping it in cannisters to launch at Israel... which is a much smaller country and much easier to contaminate with radioactive materials.

They have the capability to enrich various materials to dangerous levels and put them in a ceramic container lined with control rod materials and over the target eject the fissile material over the enemy territory...

GarryB wrote:even a thousand tons of the stuff stacked together will just get hot enough to melt and then dribble down into the ground... it will not go boom.

Of course it will not boom... It will still be hot enough to release lot of radioactive materials into the environment that the wind will take far away and that is a serious problem to manage...

Yeah... all they have to do is penetrate Russian air defences with a bomber big enough to carry this huge bunker buster munitions and not get shot down by aircraft or SAMs on the way to or around the target... and of course be fully aware that they will likely respond in kind and using mach 10 hypersonic missiles would probably make replying in kind actually much easier for them...

Yeah, I mentioned Russia as the kind of country that is in better conditions to protect their NPPs. Other countries, not so much.

If Israel does it to Iran I am sure they will be scooping up the radiated material and popping it in cannisters to launch at Israel... which is a much smaller country and much easier to contaminate with radioactive materials.

Israel bought GBU-28 from US with Iran's nuclear facilities in mind. US ordered recently more GBU-57 for that reason too

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30872/air-force-updates-massive-ordnance-penetrator-bombs-amid-new-iranian-nuclear-posturing

kvs wrote: But a bunker buster used against a molten vat reactor has a hard time because none of the
targets are soft. It is vastly easier to destroy the functionality of a water cooled/moderated design and cause it to undergo
a meltdown.

With the penetration capability those weapons have, "hard time" is a bit relative, but I get the point that molten vat reactors are more vulnerable than PWR ones... which are the vast majority if I am not wrong.