For the last week or so, the Ukrainians have been shelling the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant (that has been taken by the Russians at the very onset of the war and not part of any military action). The Russians have arrested two Ukrainian agents inside the plant, who have been providing the Ukrainian military with the coordinates guiding artillery fire.
The danger isn’t from them hitting the reactors; nothing short of a nuclear bomb could penetrate the reactor dome. The main problem is the interruption to the power supply to the water circulation pumps in the reactors, which is what triggered the Fukushima Daiichi incident, because this is the weak point of the solid fuel fission reactors; if you either cut the cooling, or the moderator rods get stuck on the outside position, you get a meltdown. You can guard against this by initiating a complete reactor shutdown. The second problem is the spent fuel rods pool, which is nowhere near as well protected as the reactors. However, in my opinion this can cause only a localized incident, since you need a reactor meltdown for shit to really hit the fan, because it is then that the superheated steam carries the vast amount of highly radioactive particles high into the atmosphere, from where they spread globally, which took place in Chernobyl. In my opinion, threat to the reactor coolant circulation pump power supply is the greatest danger in any solid fuel fission power plant.
The Western press has been spreading Ukrainian lies, such as this one:
KYIV, Aug 14 (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has warned Russian soldiers who shoot at Europe’s largest nuclear power station or use it as a base to shoot from that they will become a “special target” for Ukrainian forces. (Reuters)
Yeah, somehow the small Russian military contingent that basically guards the powerplant against potential Ukrainian attempts to blow it up (which showed amazing foresight by the Russians, by the way) are “threatening” the power plant and the poor Ukrainians simply have to defend themselves by trying to cause the next Chernobyl, and the Western press is just spreading this propagandistic lying garbage.
By the way, Ukrainian artillery fire is being guided by the Americans, to the point where the American specialists are both providing the Ukrainians with coordinates and entering those coordinates into the American weapons. Which makes one think which country meets the definition of a sponsor of international terrorism.
I’ve been talking about good and evil recently, and if this isn’t an obvious example of evil, then I don’t know what to say. Systematically shelling a nuclear power plant in attempt to cause a radiological incident that could spread across Europe, and brazenly lying about it to shift blame, that’s just evil. If that isn’t evil, then nothing is.
As I’m not the expert od NPPs, especially that Soviet type in Zaporozhye (I’d presume it’s a bit different from Western NPP type?!) how long does it take to shutdown that NPP. I’d guess Russians would already shut it down if it was managable in short term? Or they guessed Ukro Huis wouldn’t be that evil and stupid to fuck Ukraine, Russia and the rest of Europe. What puzzles me also is why Russia hasn’t issued ultimatum that they will decapitate Herr Grünzeigowski and his minions if they don‘t stop doing that stupif shit they are doing? 🤔
I’m not sure about the exact procedure. I would say that you insert the moderator rods fully and thus scram the reactor, making it subcritical; then, the temperature of the reactor core needs to gradually go down, meaning that the pump needs to be powered to circulate water through the core, and the process might take weeks. After that, you can remove the fuel rods from the reactor and make it inert and safe. The problem is that the thing operates at very high temperatures and you can’t cool it down quickly due to the physics of the materials involved.
If the Russians think there is actual danger to the power supply, they can initiate this process quite quickly, and the “problem” is that the power plant will stop supplying electricity to Ukraine and the Ukrainans can then accuse the Russians of staging the whole thing in order to blackmail the poor innocent Ukrainians. The additional problem is that I’m not familiar with the design of the plant; in Fukushima Daiichi, the design was incredibly flawed, because the coolant pump was powered from the grid. When the earthquake struck, the grid was disconnected, and power to the pump was switched to local diesel generators, which were flooded by the tsunami soon thereafter. Then the power switched to the secondary backup, the local batteries, which were soon depleted and coolant circulation ceased, causing a fuel rod meltdown, in turn causing production of hydrogen in the reactor core, which had to be periodically vented to prevent reactor vessel explosion. The hydrogen accumulated in the reactor building and eventually ignited, causing an explosion which destroyed the reactor building. Also, circulation of water through the spent fuel rod pool was compromised, so that thing overheated as well, but at this point I stopped paying attention, since I concluded that the Americans in charge of the decontamination procedure will fuck everything up but it will probably be a contained disaster.
To return to what the Russians can do – they would probably be best advised to continue doing business as usual, meaning to simply grind down the Ukrainian army positions in Donbass, and eventually take a very wide buffer zone that would prevent the Ukrainians from targeting critical positions. Also, in their place I would power down the nuclear plant safely, and cut electricity to Ukraine permanently, and also cut transit of gas and oil through Ukraine permanently. The fact that they didn’t do that means they don’t feel threatened yet.
What they can also do is take very precise measurements identifying the exact positions from which the power plant is shelled, and then devise an attack that will neutralise those positions permanently. If they feel there’s an actual danger to the power plant, they can deploy thermobaric bombs and basically kill everything in the area, because that would actually be preferable and a lesser evil compared to a nuclear incident.
Basically, the reasonable thing to do is to take measures that minimise the immediate danger and proceed with the original plan.
https://tass.com/politics/1495247
It seems they have shut down all except one reactor.
The most useful piece of information I got from this is that the NPP’s systems are powered by the plant itself, and not the grid, which is an improvement over Fukushima: