12 ms·

Ukraine's three nuclear power plants have restored electricity production

223 points by mpweiher 2y ago

panaeon 2y ago
Well, this is good news, but this is not enough. Nuclear power, especially huge soviet systems don't maneuver as good as natural gas or hydro. What Ukraine grid really needs are small/medium gas turbines or large scale storage systems. Also large amounts of electrical equipment as it constantly being destroyed by ruskies.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Nuclear power is something Russia is afraid to attack. Those others are in many ways better, but they are something Russia will attack.
  - panaeon 2y ago
    yeah, so afraid that they occupied zaporizhzhia plant, which is the largest of it's kind in Europe and put military systems in it. Also nuclear is useless without the grid, and as a matter of fact, an active hazard.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      They areenot accacking the plant.
_hl_ 2y ago
What would happen if Russia attacked these power plants directly? Are they built to "fail safe" even when hit by a missile, or is there a big risk of nuclear meltdown?
- jonathanstrange 2y ago
  Big risk of nuclear meltdown...
- justsomehnguy 2y ago
  > What would happen if Russia attacked these power plants directly There is zero need to attack a NPP directly. If you really need to shutdown it then just target the power distribution system - a reactor can't run without providing the energy and if there is no load then you need to shutdown it.
- oneshtein 2y ago
  Big risk of nuclear meltdown. Nuclear reactor cannot stop immediately. Gigawatts of power will damage equipment by high voltage and current, then reactor will melt. Nuclear reactor in Zaporizzhya finally turned cold after more than year, with multiple attempts made by Russians to disconnect it from grid by shelling the grid and targeting repair teams.
  - justsomehnguy 2y ago
    > with multiple attempts made by Russians to disconnect it from grid by shelling the grid and targeting repair teams. Russians again shell themselves on the NPP they control since 2022.
_1tem 2y ago
I live in Ukraine and run a software company here. I still don’t understand how the power grid is still functioning and how quickly it is repaired after an outage. I’ve been here since the war started, including some of the worst hit front line cities like Kharkiv and power outages after strikes were always resolved within a 48 hour period max, usually faster. How it’s possible to replace damaged substations within hours, I have no idea. Now I live in a relatively quiet area with a solar inverter battery (similar to the Tesla wall) and I have almost uninterrupted power sufficient to keep my business going. Just have to avoid using heavy appliances like the washing machine when on battery power.
- Moru 2y ago
  Realy impressive, we have places (north sweden) after the last storm that took 7 days to restore power.
  - cinntaile 2y ago
    That's probably because it's so remote. If it was a city in the south of Sweden it wouldn't take that long.
  - kvemkon 2y ago
    Reminds me of about 7 days of prominent power outage (13.01.2024 - 19.01.2024) during Linux 6.8 merge window. Linus Torvalds: https://social.kernel.org/notice/Ae0uyq3AkW1tDXeDYW https://social.kernel.org/notice/Ae0uyq3AkW1tDXeDYW Linus Torvalds postpones Linux 6.8 merge window after being taken offline by storms https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/15/linux_kernel_merge_window_postponed/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/15/linux_kernel_merge_wi...
- bluGill 2y ago
  Power grid operators around the world are used to storms taking out their local grid all the time. Some storms are worse than others, but the world has gotten good are repairing damage fast. Ukraine is drawing on that experience for a lot. Substations are hard only because of quantity. Every power operator has experienced a substation having a catastrophic failure so they keep spares of the big parts on hand so they can restore power in hours when that happens. The only difference here is normally they are doing a few of these per year (and most of that is planned end of life replacements not sudden catastrophic failure) not a few per day. Manufactures of substations have had to scale up their production to meet Ukraine's needs and this is the real hard part. The rest is just normal overtime (that has been going on for several years now), and thus the normal overtime fatigue.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
7e 2y ago
Not newsworthy. They dialed them back last week, now they dialed them up.
amelius 2y ago
How do you protect a power grid from state actors?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- libertine 2y ago
  > How do you protect a power grid from state actors? I think one of the best ways is mutual destruction assurance. Ukraine should be given the capacity and clearance to also take down Russia's power grid.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    It doesn't matter if they get the capacity and clearance - they are not stupid enough to do it. Modern war has done a lot of studies and things like taking out the enemy power grid just make the enemy more inclined to fight. Ukraine wants to take out things that would make Russia less willing to fight on (or lacking that things that would make Russia unable to fight on)
    - libertine 2y ago
      > Modern war has done a lot of studies and things like taking out the enemy power grid just make the enemy more inclined to fight. Russia is pretty inclined to fight, so I'm not sure if I understand your point here.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        For how long? Russia isn't doing a mobilization despite needing it because they are afraid of the blacklash.
        libertine 2y ago
        They've been killing Ukrainians for almost 3 years. So if they're not inclined to fight, they sure don't mind the killing and destruction of Ukraine, which is more of an entrepreneurial motivation than anything else: - Some want to try to enrich themselves by killing Ukrainians; - Others don't want that risk, but they're ok with it;
throwiit 2y ago
[flagged]
- roenxi 2y ago
  "Betray" isn't really the right term, the west were clear from the start that they were in this to bleed Russia and were only planning to provide enough weapons to keep the conflict simmering in a bloody fashion. Ukraine hopefully understood that they were just running out the clock in the hope that something miraculous would happen on the way through. It still might, wars are unpredictable. We've already gone far beyond the limits of sanity in Ukraine. There is no upside, lots of potential downside and the stench of hypocrisy follows everyone who contributed to the recent expeditions into Iraq and Afghanistan that look mighty similar to what Russia was doing but wasn't met with anything more than shrugs and harsh language. It is a profound mystery why only one of the 3 needs to be escalated like what has been done.
  - Paradigma11 2y ago
    And yet Iraq and Afghanistan are today politically independent from the US. The occupied territories in Ukraine are now Russia.
    - EasyMark 2y ago
      *claimed by Russia
  - meindnoch 2y ago
    It's not a mystery. The US, the UK and France ratified the Budapest memorandum. Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons in return for security assurances. No such treaties existed for Iraq nor Afghanistan.
    - _ugfj 2y ago
      This is a popular narrative but really, those nukes were a burden on Ukraine and nothing more -- the forces possessing and maintaining those weapons reported to Russia and any launch needed authorization from the Чегет the Russian head of state held, whoever that was. Sure, they were on Ukrainian land but that was all. That is why Ukraine so easily surrendered all those weapons for extremely weak reassurances. If you were to read the text https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/files/policymemos/files/2-23-22_ukraine-the_budapest_memo.pdf?m=1645824948 https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/files/policymemos/files/... you would notice how there's no real security guarantee whatsoever. Basically it says if someone nukes or threatens to nuke Ukraine they will "seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine". Sure, there are words saying "the Russian Federation [...] reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine [...] to respect the Independence and Sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine" but what if they don't? tough luck. No one promised help, there's no built in penalty mechanism, nothing.
dtquad 2y ago
I grew up in Denmark and went to a school and gymnasium with many Middle Eastern kids. Many were 1990s Iraqi Arab and Kurdish refugees. Many spent their holidays back home in Iraq during 2005-2011 and one family actually moved back to Iraq. In my young head it didn't compute with the weekly sectarian violence and suicide attacks. Now when following the war in Ukraine I finally understand how war can be incredibly localized in specific regions of a country with long-range attacks targeting only high-value infrastructure targets.
- anelson 2y ago
  It is true that war can rage in a country and people not on the frontline can live reasonably normal lives. I returned to Kyiv in August of last year, and lived for over a year during some of the worst air attacks on the country. It’s not so much that there is no danger or the war is far away. I woke up many times to explosions in the distance and air raid alarms in the capital are a daily occurrence. Attacks are absolutely not limited to critical infrastructure. Even if Russia didn’t deliberately target civilian populations (and they definitely do), air defenses don’t vaporize enemy ordnance so it’s going to fall down somewhere, and when attacks are happening in cities then it’s likely that it will land on something populated. It’s more that the odds of being killed or wounded as a civilian in the capital are higher than in a peaceful country but low enough that the mind just gets used to it and you go on with life. I finally left Ukraine a few weeks ago, for fear of how bad the winter will be with the infrastructure bombing. My wife and I moved to Budapest. Believe it or not, we miss Kyiv and want to move back in the spring, war notwithstanding. Having said all that, I was in Baghdad in 2006 and I do not understand why any Iraqi family would move back there during that time, unless they were Kurdish and moved to the northern Kurdish territory.
  - vladgur 2y ago
    That a pretty intense career trajectory - curious to hear your story. Kiev was wonderful in the peace time, but what made you stay during war, given your ability to move around freely
    - 2y ago
Synaesthesia 2y ago
They are basically the only functioning power plants to my knowledge right now. Russia can hit any target it wants in Ukraine.
- threeseed 2y ago
  Ukraine is importing power from continental Europe. And Germany and US are sending more air defence systems e.g. IRIS.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  Russia does not want to hit nuclear power plants. They know the consequences would be very negative for all sides.
  - k_bx 2y ago
    Yes, they would get very deep concerns from the West, which they fear so much.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Maybe, or they might get all of NATO running to attack Russia. China is also currently giving Russia support (while claiming to be neutral, their actions are clearly leaning to support Russia), but is very likely to invade. Nobody wants nuclear weapons used in war again.
      - k_bx 2y ago
        Would you and your friends volunteer to run to attack Russia? Hell, most of my friends in Ukraine did not run to defend our country, many ran away to Europe. Now talk about fighting a foreign war..
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      More practically, the fallout would blow in their direction.
    - 2y ago
renewiltord 2y ago
[flagged]
- ajuc 2y ago
  Nuclear disasters would have to happen every month for years to get to the number of deaths per GWh produced that coal has. And till we have vastly cheaper storage - fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear for baseload.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    It's not cost that limits storage, it's how many factories are building batteries. For what's currently being made, the cost of PV+batteries is already on par with nuclear.
    - frafra 2y ago
      Cost != price/value. You can produce energy cheaply at noon, but it has little value compared to electricity produced at 18:00. The higher the share of renewables in the electricity mix, the more storage is needed, and it grows faster than linearly. You can also not stock electricity in advance for months in northern areas. There are a lot of factors to keep into account, and the cost of electricity production is often a minor one, when considering the total price.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        > You can produce energy cheaply at noon, but it has little value compared to electricity produced at 18:00 Batteries literally solve this problem more cheaply than nuclear. And given the speed with which people have actually been building both reactors and batteries, this specific issue is also being solved with batteries faster than with nuclear, too. > The higher the share of renewables in the electricity mix, the more storage is needed, and it grows faster than linearly. What's needed for the grid is also less than needed just for fully electrifying cars. > You can also not stock electricity in advance for months in northern areas. There's a single grid connecting bits of Canada with bits of Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interconnection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interconnection Pertinently to this case, all of Ukraine is south of me (I'm in Berlin), and both Ukraine and Berlin are on the same grid as Spain and Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...

223 points by mpweiher 2y ago

Well, this is good news, but this is not enough. Nuclear power, especially huge soviet systems don't maneuver as good as natural gas or hydro. What Ukraine grid really needs are small/medium gas turbines or large scale storage systems. Also large amounts of electrical equipment as it constantly being destroyed by ruskies.

bluGill 2y ago
Nuclear power is something Russia is afraid to attack. Those others are in many ways better, but they are something Russia will attack.
- panaeon 2y ago
  yeah, so afraid that they occupied zaporizhzhia plant, which is the largest of it's kind in Europe and put military systems in it. Also nuclear is useless without the grid, and as a matter of fact, an active hazard.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    They areenot accacking the plant.

_hl_ 2y ago

What would happen if Russia attacked these power plants directly? Are they built to "fail safe" even when hit by a missile, or is there a big risk of nuclear meltdown?

jonathanstrange 2y ago
Big risk of nuclear meltdown...
justsomehnguy 2y ago
> What would happen if Russia attacked these power plants directly There is zero need to attack a NPP directly. If you really need to shutdown it then just target the power distribution system - a reactor can't run without providing the energy and if there is no load then you need to shutdown it.
oneshtein 2y ago
Big risk of nuclear meltdown. Nuclear reactor cannot stop immediately. Gigawatts of power will damage equipment by high voltage and current, then reactor will melt. Nuclear reactor in Zaporizzhya finally turned cold after more than year, with multiple attempts made by Russians to disconnect it from grid by shelling the grid and targeting repair teams.
- justsomehnguy 2y ago
  > with multiple attempts made by Russians to disconnect it from grid by shelling the grid and targeting repair teams. Russians again shell themselves on the NPP they control since 2022.

_1tem 2y ago

I live in Ukraine and run a software company here. I still don’t understand how the power grid is still functioning and how quickly it is repaired after an outage. I’ve been here since the war started, including some of the worst hit front line cities like Kharkiv and power outages after strikes were always resolved within a 48 hour period max, usually faster. How it’s possible to replace damaged substations within hours, I have no idea. Now I live in a relatively quiet area with a solar inverter battery (similar to the Tesla wall) and I have almost uninterrupted power sufficient to keep my business going. Just have to avoid using heavy appliances like the washing machine when on battery power.

Moru 2y ago
Realy impressive, we have places (north sweden) after the last storm that took 7 days to restore power.
- cinntaile 2y ago
  That's probably because it's so remote. If it was a city in the south of Sweden it wouldn't take that long.
- kvemkon 2y ago
  Reminds me of about 7 days of prominent power outage (13.01.2024 - 19.01.2024) during Linux 6.8 merge window. Linus Torvalds: https://social.kernel.org/notice/Ae0uyq3AkW1tDXeDYW https://social.kernel.org/notice/Ae0uyq3AkW1tDXeDYW Linus Torvalds postpones Linux 6.8 merge window after being taken offline by storms https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/15/linux_kernel_merge_window_postponed/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/15/linux_kernel_merge_wi...
bluGill 2y ago
Power grid operators around the world are used to storms taking out their local grid all the time. Some storms are worse than others, but the world has gotten good are repairing damage fast. Ukraine is drawing on that experience for a lot. Substations are hard only because of quantity. Every power operator has experienced a substation having a catastrophic failure so they keep spares of the big parts on hand so they can restore power in hours when that happens. The only difference here is normally they are doing a few of these per year (and most of that is planned end of life replacements not sudden catastrophic failure) not a few per day. Manufactures of substations have had to scale up their production to meet Ukraine's needs and this is the real hard part. The rest is just normal overtime (that has been going on for several years now), and thus the normal overtime fatigue.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

7e 2y ago

Not newsworthy. They dialed them back last week, now they dialed them up.

amelius 2y ago

How do you protect a power grid from state actors?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
libertine 2y ago
> How do you protect a power grid from state actors? I think one of the best ways is mutual destruction assurance. Ukraine should be given the capacity and clearance to also take down Russia's power grid.
- bluGill 2y ago
  It doesn't matter if they get the capacity and clearance - they are not stupid enough to do it. Modern war has done a lot of studies and things like taking out the enemy power grid just make the enemy more inclined to fight. Ukraine wants to take out things that would make Russia less willing to fight on (or lacking that things that would make Russia unable to fight on)
  - libertine 2y ago
    > Modern war has done a lot of studies and things like taking out the enemy power grid just make the enemy more inclined to fight. Russia is pretty inclined to fight, so I'm not sure if I understand your point here.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      For how long? Russia isn't doing a mobilization despite needing it because they are afraid of the blacklash.
      - libertine 2y ago
        They've been killing Ukrainians for almost 3 years. So if they're not inclined to fight, they sure don't mind the killing and destruction of Ukraine, which is more of an entrepreneurial motivation than anything else: - Some want to try to enrich themselves by killing Ukrainians; - Others don't want that risk, but they're ok with it;

throwiit 2y ago

[flagged]

roenxi 2y ago
"Betray" isn't really the right term, the west were clear from the start that they were in this to bleed Russia and were only planning to provide enough weapons to keep the conflict simmering in a bloody fashion. Ukraine hopefully understood that they were just running out the clock in the hope that something miraculous would happen on the way through. It still might, wars are unpredictable. We've already gone far beyond the limits of sanity in Ukraine. There is no upside, lots of potential downside and the stench of hypocrisy follows everyone who contributed to the recent expeditions into Iraq and Afghanistan that look mighty similar to what Russia was doing but wasn't met with anything more than shrugs and harsh language. It is a profound mystery why only one of the 3 needs to be escalated like what has been done.
- Paradigma11 2y ago
  And yet Iraq and Afghanistan are today politically independent from the US. The occupied territories in Ukraine are now Russia.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    *claimed by Russia
- meindnoch 2y ago
  It's not a mystery. The US, the UK and France ratified the Budapest memorandum. Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons in return for security assurances. No such treaties existed for Iraq nor Afghanistan.
  - _ugfj 2y ago
    This is a popular narrative but really, those nukes were a burden on Ukraine and nothing more -- the forces possessing and maintaining those weapons reported to Russia and any launch needed authorization from the Чегет the Russian head of state held, whoever that was. Sure, they were on Ukrainian land but that was all. That is why Ukraine so easily surrendered all those weapons for extremely weak reassurances. If you were to read the text https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/files/policymemos/files/2-23-22_ukraine-the_budapest_memo.pdf?m=1645824948 https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/files/policymemos/files/... you would notice how there's no real security guarantee whatsoever. Basically it says if someone nukes or threatens to nuke Ukraine they will "seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine". Sure, there are words saying "the Russian Federation [...] reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine [...] to respect the Independence and Sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine" but what if they don't? tough luck. No one promised help, there's no built in penalty mechanism, nothing.

dtquad 2y ago

I grew up in Denmark and went to a school and gymnasium with many Middle Eastern kids. Many were 1990s Iraqi Arab and Kurdish refugees. Many spent their holidays back home in Iraq during 2005-2011 and one family actually moved back to Iraq. In my young head it didn't compute with the weekly sectarian violence and suicide attacks. Now when following the war in Ukraine I finally understand how war can be incredibly localized in specific regions of a country with long-range attacks targeting only high-value infrastructure targets.

anelson 2y ago
It is true that war can rage in a country and people not on the frontline can live reasonably normal lives. I returned to Kyiv in August of last year, and lived for over a year during some of the worst air attacks on the country. It’s not so much that there is no danger or the war is far away. I woke up many times to explosions in the distance and air raid alarms in the capital are a daily occurrence. Attacks are absolutely not limited to critical infrastructure. Even if Russia didn’t deliberately target civilian populations (and they definitely do), air defenses don’t vaporize enemy ordnance so it’s going to fall down somewhere, and when attacks are happening in cities then it’s likely that it will land on something populated. It’s more that the odds of being killed or wounded as a civilian in the capital are higher than in a peaceful country but low enough that the mind just gets used to it and you go on with life. I finally left Ukraine a few weeks ago, for fear of how bad the winter will be with the infrastructure bombing. My wife and I moved to Budapest. Believe it or not, we miss Kyiv and want to move back in the spring, war notwithstanding. Having said all that, I was in Baghdad in 2006 and I do not understand why any Iraqi family would move back there during that time, unless they were Kurdish and moved to the northern Kurdish territory.
- vladgur 2y ago
  That a pretty intense career trajectory - curious to hear your story. Kiev was wonderful in the peace time, but what made you stay during war, given your ability to move around freely
  - 2y ago

Synaesthesia 2y ago

They are basically the only functioning power plants to my knowledge right now. Russia can hit any target it wants in Ukraine.

threeseed 2y ago
Ukraine is importing power from continental Europe. And Germany and US are sending more air defence systems e.g. IRIS.
mytailorisrich 2y ago
Russia does not want to hit nuclear power plants. They know the consequences would be very negative for all sides.
- k_bx 2y ago
  Yes, they would get very deep concerns from the West, which they fear so much.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Maybe, or they might get all of NATO running to attack Russia. China is also currently giving Russia support (while claiming to be neutral, their actions are clearly leaning to support Russia), but is very likely to invade. Nobody wants nuclear weapons used in war again.
    - k_bx 2y ago
      Would you and your friends volunteer to run to attack Russia? Hell, most of my friends in Ukraine did not run to defend our country, many ran away to Europe. Now talk about fighting a foreign war..
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    More practically, the fallout would blow in their direction.
  - 2y ago

renewiltord 2y ago

[flagged]

ajuc 2y ago
Nuclear disasters would have to happen every month for years to get to the number of deaths per GWh produced that coal has. And till we have vastly cheaper storage - fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear for baseload.
- ben_w 2y ago
  It's not cost that limits storage, it's how many factories are building batteries. For what's currently being made, the cost of PV+batteries is already on par with nuclear.
  - frafra 2y ago
    Cost != price/value. You can produce energy cheaply at noon, but it has little value compared to electricity produced at 18:00. The higher the share of renewables in the electricity mix, the more storage is needed, and it grows faster than linearly. You can also not stock electricity in advance for months in northern areas. There are a lot of factors to keep into account, and the cost of electricity production is often a minor one, when considering the total price.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > You can produce energy cheaply at noon, but it has little value compared to electricity produced at 18:00 Batteries literally solve this problem more cheaply than nuclear. And given the speed with which people have actually been building both reactors and batteries, this specific issue is also being solved with batteries faster than with nuclear, too. > The higher the share of renewables in the electricity mix, the more storage is needed, and it grows faster than linearly. What's needed for the grid is also less than needed just for fully electrifying cars. > You can also not stock electricity in advance for months in northern areas. There's a single grid connecting bits of Canada with bits of Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interconnection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interconnection Pertinently to this case, all of Ukraine is south of me (I'm in Berlin), and both Ukraine and Berlin are on the same grid as Spain and Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...