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So, aside from the obvious nature of messing around with Nuclear generating station being an idiotic move. From a tactical move for Russia - clearly they want

So, aside from the obvious nature of messing around with Nuclear generating station being an idiotic move. From a tactical move for Russia - clearly they want the generating station offline to cause further chaos in Ukraine and that it supplies 1/6 of the power I believe(?). Was the generating station fighting to say online / not surrender or did Russia just show up guns blazing? It's clearly a tactically important source of energy for Ukraine. Also - wouldn't it just be easier for Russia to destroy the substations nearby? I assume there would be some problems with all that excess power being generating if the substations were blown. The whole thing is pretty nuts. I can't imagine being the ISO trying to balance the grid or ISO equivalent of the grid over there right now (amongst other impossible jobs/positions people are in Ukraine right now).

jliptzin 5y ago
Isn’t one major problem with nuclear is that it’s hard to shut down when you don’t need it? Hopefully they understand that
- cmeacham98 5y ago
  My understanding is that it's relatively easy to shut down, but costly/time consuming to start back up.
- redwall_hp 5y ago
  Usually they have fail safes that will more or less immediately shut them down. On any reactor designed in the last 50 years, they pretty much default to a safe state, as they require power to keep the failsafes open. Starting back up after is the slow part.
  - necheffa 5y ago
    The one snag is that even with the reactor shut down (just drop all the control rods in) you still have to deal with the decay heat. Which, in the case of a controlled manual shut down shouldn't be a problem.
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      It's not a problem if you can continue to run the cooling system for quite some time. If you bomb the plant or its connections to the outside, that might be a problem - just as in Fukushima, where a key cause of the disaster was that the cooling system could not be properly powered when required.
  - eru 5y ago
    No clue how old the Ukrainian reactor (and its design) is. Perhaps more than 50 years?
- Merad 5y ago
  They're easy to shut down, but when the reactor is first turned off the core is full of unstable isotopes that are byproducts of the fission reaction. Those isotopes continue decaying even with the reactor "off" until the become stable, and they put out enough heat to cause a meltdown on their own. This means the reactor needs active cooling for a couple of weeks until it reaches a safe state. That's what happened at Fukashima; the reactors were shut down when the earthquake hit, but then the tsunami disabled the backup generators that were powering the cooling pumps, and they weren't able to restore cooling before the core melted.
  - newby 5y ago
    I did not know about that aspect of nuclear plants and in my non-expert view it would be a major point against nuclear plants in the discussion how to solve climate change (at least until we learn how to secure them in case of a war). Am I wrong? EDIT: I would also like to ask if you can recommend some source where curious layman with no knowledge of physics could learn a bit more about this.
    - yazaddaruvala 5y ago
      You’re right about old nuclear design. The new designs are built with the expectation that power can be cut off. The new design shut themselves off passively without any damage (that we know of) when the power is gone.
      - jliptzin 5y ago
        Seems to me like it should have been this way from this start. Catastrophic meltdown caused by power loss, no matter how many power backup systems there are should have been a non-starter. Basically requiring a 100% SLA, 6 nines not enough, with catastrophic consequences for failing to adhere to 100% uptime. That is scary as hell.
    - tarsinge 5y ago
      You are not wrong that it's a major point in the discussion, but even with that it can still be better than the alternatives for baseline production (the part that intermittent sources like solar and wind can't cover). Remember that coal power add insult to injury by continuously releasing radioactive pollution.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Russia most likely designed and built that reactor and the others in the country, back when it was part of the Soviet Union. I think it's safe to say they fully understand and are capable of operating nuclear reactors like it. edit: Construction started on it in 1980. This is a Soviet designed and built reactor. Russia should have no problem maintaining it.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Per Wikipedia, all 6 units are VVER-1000 [0]. So, unlike RBMK, water-moderated / negative void coefficient. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Design
  - altacc 5y ago
    It is highly unlikely there are be nuclear scientists with that knowledge amongst the armed forces currently invading Ukraine. The type of reactor may be known but each reactor and its instruments, controls and protocols will be unique in some way. The only people who are qualified to run this reactor safely are the staff who work there every day.
    - mcv 5y ago
      It's not impossible, though. Russia seems to have pressed a lot of civilians into service. Ukraine recently captured an entire squad of school teachers.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
ratg13 5y ago
The plant has been offline for some time due to renovation.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I read it was just the one reactor (the one whose building was damaged in the attack).
armada651 5y ago
The only public statement I've read is that the Russian Army is concerned the Ukrainians would use their Nuclear Power Plants as dirty bombs.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  devious ukrainians even built a whole plant in advance to ensure their genocides
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - queuebert 5y ago
    Neo-Nazi Nuclear Power Plants. Sounds like Putin plays Wolfenstein.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      And we're all fungible sprites.
- sidibe 5y ago
  It doesn't surprise me if they believe that considering the ridiculous stream of fantasy being spewed out of Russian leader and media.
  - pasquinelli 5y ago
    - short_sells_poo 5y ago
      This whataboutism has to stop. One bad thing doesn't excuse another. Would you suggest that it's OK to use nuclear weapons because the US used two of them in WW2? I hope not. The invasion of Iraq was based on lies and this is terrible. The invasion of Ukraine is based on lies and it is also terrible.
ck2 5y ago
Purposely causing nuclear disasters is one way to ensure a country can never join NATO or the EU Putin doesn't have to occupy the country to "win", all he has to do is set them back to the dark ages and make everyone (who can) flee. He can't be allowed to get away with this. Ukraine needs a "no fly zone" ASAP
- eru 5y ago
  > Purposely causing nuclear disasters is one way to ensure a country can never join NATO or the EU Why? Nuclear disaster is bad, but how would it ensure that a country can _never_ join NATO or the EU? Ukraine already had the Chernobyl disaster on their soil, and I don't see that one as keeping them out of either organisation _forever_.
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    gp was saying that if you blow up the country enough, there's no country left to join NATO.
    - eru 5y ago
      That's a fair point in general. Exploding all nuclear reactors in Ukraine isn't going to do that though. And, of course, Russia could do much blowing up with conventional weapons, too.
      - oddmiral 5y ago
        Just one nuclear reactor can be used to create continent wide Red forest. Chornobyl disaster was just an incident without evil intent. Small fraction of nuclear fuel was released into atmosphere. With evil intent, much larger percent of nuclear fuel can be turned into thin dust and released into atmosphere. Larger reactors contain much more nuclear fuel. With evil intent, much more radioactive elements, such as radioactive iodine or radioactive noble gases, can be breed in reactor before blow up. With evil intent, safety systems can be disabled to produce maximal amount of dangerous elements. Depending on time given for preparation and technique used, it can be from 1 Fukushima to 10k Chornobyls. If NATO will give initiative to Russians, they can blow up reactor in good weather, so RF will not be affected, but EU will gone.
gloriana 5y ago
If the reactors are on, destroying any of the infrasture around it can be devastating. The reactors need external power to operate. If external power disappears, the reactors now need emergency power from diesel gen sets. If those fail due to any reason, the reactors will probably melt down - unless they have already been off for quite a while (~weeks would be necessary). If the reactors melt down, the VVER has both a core catcher and a containment. That's not bad and much better situation than Chernobyl. But other things may go wrong such as a pressure failure and potentially related control rod ejections that could cause the temperatures to rise and pressures to become higher than what the containment can handle. The surrounding war environment, the stressed operators, etc mean that any of these failures are now more likely. It is reaonsable that external power will not be available, it is possible the gen sets will fail, it is possible the operators will do something stupid. To put it simply, warfare is not a design basis accident for current light water reactors like VVER-800.
- threatripper 5y ago
  Yes, the power plants now need a stable supply of electric power or diesel for cooling in coming days, weeks and months as they have been shut off last night. A failure of cooling is what lead to the newclear disasters in Fukushima.
- telomero22 5y ago
  That's not correct. It only takes a couple of seconds to shut down a reactor. https://qr.ae/pGdkkv https://qr.ae/pGdkkv
  - mlinsey 5y ago
    Your link supports the comment you are replying to; it says that after the reactor is shutdown, additional cooling is needed for some time, and that eg the Fukushima and Three Mile Island incidents both involved damage done by an inability to cool the reactors after they were already shut down.
    - rwcarlsen 5y ago
vegai_ 5y ago
I know I'm steelmanning like a crazy person right now, but a valid reason for Russia to seize those power plants might be to prevent Ukrainians from using them as huge dirty bombs in a desperate last strike.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Nah. They just want control of the power. It's a lot of leverage, and they want to take over the country, so they will need it. The Ukrainians are fighting for their own land. I don't think that there's a single one of them that would deliberately cause another Chernobyl (remember that they have some experience with what happens when reactors go kablooey). But they seem to be quite persistent, in not just just rolling over and letting the Russians have their way. I suspect that they've got plenty of other nasty little surprises in store. One of the things that the last 50 years' worth of guerrilla wars has been, is an object lesson on how to do asymmetric warfare against technologically-advanced, and overwhelming armies. I suspect that every military in the world has been taking notes.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > They just want control of the power. It's a lot of leverage, and they want to take over the country, so they will need it. If they are going to “find” evidence to support Putin’s claim of an offensive Ukrainian nuclear weapons program supported by the US, presumably it will be at one of Ukraine’s actual nuclear reactors. While it's not a hard limit on propaganda, actually having physical control makes a story about such a find more plausible.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      That’s a good point. It seems awful transparent, when they do this “false flag” stuff, but I think they are playing to a domestic audience.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jliptzin 5y ago

Isn’t one major problem with nuclear is that it’s hard to shut down when you don’t need it? Hopefully they understand that

cmeacham98 5y ago
My understanding is that it's relatively easy to shut down, but costly/time consuming to start back up.
redwall_hp 5y ago
Usually they have fail safes that will more or less immediately shut them down. On any reactor designed in the last 50 years, they pretty much default to a safe state, as they require power to keep the failsafes open. Starting back up after is the slow part.
- necheffa 5y ago
  The one snag is that even with the reactor shut down (just drop all the control rods in) you still have to deal with the decay heat. Which, in the case of a controlled manual shut down shouldn't be a problem.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    It's not a problem if you can continue to run the cooling system for quite some time. If you bomb the plant or its connections to the outside, that might be a problem - just as in Fukushima, where a key cause of the disaster was that the cooling system could not be properly powered when required.
- eru 5y ago
  No clue how old the Ukrainian reactor (and its design) is. Perhaps more than 50 years?
Merad 5y ago
They're easy to shut down, but when the reactor is first turned off the core is full of unstable isotopes that are byproducts of the fission reaction. Those isotopes continue decaying even with the reactor "off" until the become stable, and they put out enough heat to cause a meltdown on their own. This means the reactor needs active cooling for a couple of weeks until it reaches a safe state. That's what happened at Fukashima; the reactors were shut down when the earthquake hit, but then the tsunami disabled the backup generators that were powering the cooling pumps, and they weren't able to restore cooling before the core melted.
- newby 5y ago
  I did not know about that aspect of nuclear plants and in my non-expert view it would be a major point against nuclear plants in the discussion how to solve climate change (at least until we learn how to secure them in case of a war). Am I wrong? EDIT: I would also like to ask if you can recommend some source where curious layman with no knowledge of physics could learn a bit more about this.
  - yazaddaruvala 5y ago
    You’re right about old nuclear design. The new designs are built with the expectation that power can be cut off. The new design shut themselves off passively without any damage (that we know of) when the power is gone.
    - jliptzin 5y ago
      Seems to me like it should have been this way from this start. Catastrophic meltdown caused by power loss, no matter how many power backup systems there are should have been a non-starter. Basically requiring a 100% SLA, 6 nines not enough, with catastrophic consequences for failing to adhere to 100% uptime. That is scary as hell.
  - tarsinge 5y ago
    You are not wrong that it's a major point in the discussion, but even with that it can still be better than the alternatives for baseline production (the part that intermittent sources like solar and wind can't cover). Remember that coal power add insult to injury by continuously releasing radioactive pollution.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
Russia most likely designed and built that reactor and the others in the country, back when it was part of the Soviet Union. I think it's safe to say they fully understand and are capable of operating nuclear reactors like it. edit: Construction started on it in 1980. This is a Soviet designed and built reactor. Russia should have no problem maintaining it.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Per Wikipedia, all 6 units are VVER-1000 [0]. So, unlike RBMK, water-moderated / negative void coefficient. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Design
- altacc 5y ago
  It is highly unlikely there are be nuclear scientists with that knowledge amongst the armed forces currently invading Ukraine. The type of reactor may be known but each reactor and its instruments, controls and protocols will be unique in some way. The only people who are qualified to run this reactor safely are the staff who work there every day.
  - mcv 5y ago
    It's not impossible, though. Russia seems to have pressed a lot of civilians into service. Ukraine recently captured an entire squad of school teachers.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

ratg13 5y ago

The plant has been offline for some time due to renovation.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I read it was just the one reactor (the one whose building was damaged in the attack).

armada651 5y ago

The only public statement I've read is that the Russian Army is concerned the Ukrainians would use their Nuclear Power Plants as dirty bombs.

agumonkey 5y ago
devious ukrainians even built a whole plant in advance to ensure their genocides
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- queuebert 5y ago
  Neo-Nazi Nuclear Power Plants. Sounds like Putin plays Wolfenstein.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    And we're all fungible sprites.
sidibe 5y ago
It doesn't surprise me if they believe that considering the ridiculous stream of fantasy being spewed out of Russian leader and media.
- pasquinelli 5y ago
  - short_sells_poo 5y ago
    This whataboutism has to stop. One bad thing doesn't excuse another. Would you suggest that it's OK to use nuclear weapons because the US used two of them in WW2? I hope not. The invasion of Iraq was based on lies and this is terrible. The invasion of Ukraine is based on lies and it is also terrible.

ck2 5y ago

Purposely causing nuclear disasters is one way to ensure a country can never join NATO or the EU Putin doesn't have to occupy the country to "win", all he has to do is set them back to the dark ages and make everyone (who can) flee. He can't be allowed to get away with this. Ukraine needs a "no fly zone" ASAP

eru 5y ago
> Purposely causing nuclear disasters is one way to ensure a country can never join NATO or the EU Why? Nuclear disaster is bad, but how would it ensure that a country can _never_ join NATO or the EU? Ukraine already had the Chernobyl disaster on their soil, and I don't see that one as keeping them out of either organisation _forever_.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
  gp was saying that if you blow up the country enough, there's no country left to join NATO.
  - eru 5y ago
    That's a fair point in general. Exploding all nuclear reactors in Ukraine isn't going to do that though. And, of course, Russia could do much blowing up with conventional weapons, too.
    - oddmiral 5y ago
      Just one nuclear reactor can be used to create continent wide Red forest. Chornobyl disaster was just an incident without evil intent. Small fraction of nuclear fuel was released into atmosphere. With evil intent, much larger percent of nuclear fuel can be turned into thin dust and released into atmosphere. Larger reactors contain much more nuclear fuel. With evil intent, much more radioactive elements, such as radioactive iodine or radioactive noble gases, can be breed in reactor before blow up. With evil intent, safety systems can be disabled to produce maximal amount of dangerous elements. Depending on time given for preparation and technique used, it can be from 1 Fukushima to 10k Chornobyls. If NATO will give initiative to Russians, they can blow up reactor in good weather, so RF will not be affected, but EU will gone.

gloriana 5y ago

If the reactors are on, destroying any of the infrasture around it can be devastating. The reactors need external power to operate. If external power disappears, the reactors now need emergency power from diesel gen sets. If those fail due to any reason, the reactors will probably melt down - unless they have already been off for quite a while (~weeks would be necessary). If the reactors melt down, the VVER has both a core catcher and a containment. That's not bad and much better situation than Chernobyl. But other things may go wrong such as a pressure failure and potentially related control rod ejections that could cause the temperatures to rise and pressures to become higher than what the containment can handle. The surrounding war environment, the stressed operators, etc mean that any of these failures are now more likely. It is reaonsable that external power will not be available, it is possible the gen sets will fail, it is possible the operators will do something stupid. To put it simply, warfare is not a design basis accident for current light water reactors like VVER-800.

threatripper 5y ago
Yes, the power plants now need a stable supply of electric power or diesel for cooling in coming days, weeks and months as they have been shut off last night. A failure of cooling is what lead to the newclear disasters in Fukushima.
telomero22 5y ago
That's not correct. It only takes a couple of seconds to shut down a reactor. https://qr.ae/pGdkkv https://qr.ae/pGdkkv
- mlinsey 5y ago
  Your link supports the comment you are replying to; it says that after the reactor is shutdown, additional cooling is needed for some time, and that eg the Fukushima and Three Mile Island incidents both involved damage done by an inability to cool the reactors after they were already shut down.
  - rwcarlsen 5y ago

vegai_ 5y ago

I know I'm steelmanning like a crazy person right now, but a valid reason for Russia to seize those power plants might be to prevent Ukrainians from using them as huge dirty bombs in a desperate last strike.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Nah. They just want control of the power. It's a lot of leverage, and they want to take over the country, so they will need it. The Ukrainians are fighting for their own land. I don't think that there's a single one of them that would deliberately cause another Chernobyl (remember that they have some experience with what happens when reactors go kablooey). But they seem to be quite persistent, in not just just rolling over and letting the Russians have their way. I suspect that they've got plenty of other nasty little surprises in store. One of the things that the last 50 years' worth of guerrilla wars has been, is an object lesson on how to do asymmetric warfare against technologically-advanced, and overwhelming armies. I suspect that every military in the world has been taking notes.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > They just want control of the power. It's a lot of leverage, and they want to take over the country, so they will need it. If they are going to “find” evidence to support Putin’s claim of an offensive Ukrainian nuclear weapons program supported by the US, presumably it will be at one of Ukraine’s actual nuclear reactors. While it's not a hard limit on propaganda, actually having physical control makes a story about such a find more plausible.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    That’s a good point. It seems awful transparent, when they do this “false flag” stuff, but I think they are playing to a domestic audience.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]