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The Military Power

Chernobyl Is Being Run By 'Exhausted' Staff Held Hostage for 10 Days (ksby.com) 164

Posted by EditorDavid from the running-out-of-energy dept.
When Russia's invasion of Ukraine first began, Russian forces seized control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant — and then took its staff hostage.

A week later the Associated Press filed this update: The United Nations' atomic watchdog says Ukraine has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that staff who have been kept at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant since Russian troops took control of the site a week ago are facing "psychological pressure and moral exhaustion." IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said Thursday that the staff must be allowed to rest and rotate so their crucial work can be carried out safely and securely.

Grossi received "a joint appeal from the Ukraine Government, regulatory authority and the national operator which added that personnel at the Chornobyl site 'have limited opportunities to communicate, move and carry out full-fledged maintenance and repair work,'" the IAEA said in a statement...

Ukraine has lost regulatory control over all the facilities in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to the Russians and asked the IAEA to undertake measures "in order to reestablish legal regulation of safety of nuclear facilities and installations" within the site, the statement added.
Their article quotes the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency as saying that "Any accident caused as a result of the military conflict could have extremely serious consequences for people and the environment, in Ukraine and beyond."

This morning CNN shared this update: The growing exhaustion of staffers confined for "10 days" at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is not only "difficult," but could pose "a danger to the world," Yuriy Fomichev, the mayor of Slavutych, told CNN in a telephone interview on Saturday. "People are tired; they are exhausted, both mentally and emotionally, but mainly physically," Fomichev said, adding that more than 100 people in the plant are shift personnel who should have been handed over after 12 hours. "A nuclear facility run by the same shift of 100 people without a break for 10 days in a row means their concentration levels are too low ... the main thing we want to convey is that it is very dangerous," Fomichev said.

Staffers in the plant only eat one meal per day and have limited amount of time to contact their families, Fomichev said.
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Chernobyl Is Being Run By 'Exhausted' Staff Held Hostage for 10 Days More

Chernobyl Is Being Run By 'Exhausted' Staff Held Hostage for 10 Days

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  • No complaining [pbs.org].

    "I started saying that I’m not happy with all finances going for this palace. And I was told that Putin is the czar and you are his serf."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      "What could possibly go wrong?" That's the joke I was looking for. But kind of an interesting FP.

      Hopefully the answer to my rhetorical joke is not much, since Chernobyl is hopefully not doing much these days. Is the staff doing anything much besides monitoring the mess?

      However the situation in Zaporizhzhia is much more serious. Obvious Putin ordered them to capture that nuclear plant so they can shut it down and make the Ukrainians freeze in the dark. But shutting down an active nuclear plant is a tricky op

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by edis ( 266347 )

      I would suggest using form of Tsar, personally I call him Tsar Novichok.
      Cz is commonly used to designate, for example, Czech Republic, so is bound to the expression of different sound.
      There may be local or other heritage to your usage, I'm not aware of.

      • Oh, I just quoted it directly from the article. I'm used to weird spellings when cyrillic can't be used.

        After what he did in St Petersburg and Moscow, he should be called Tsar Impaler. It wasn't good.

  • Nail in the coffin for nuclear? (Score:3)

    by galabar ( 518411 ) on Saturday March 05, 2022 @02:41PM (#62329367)
    We have to worry about various natural disasters. We never thought about war. I don't see how we can make nuclear safe when you consider that. Has the fat lady sung?
    • That's for sure. As much as I think solar and wind are less efficient, it's far more decentralized and "safe". I used to think nuclear was a good compromise even with the high costs and difficult to manage waste - - but there was never any discussion about problems with nuclear when war breaks out. No way techs and Operators will stick around unless they want to be held hostage or killed as collateral damage.
    • Russia isn't going much further than Ukraine. There's a couple other odds and ends Eastern European countries that don't belong to nato that they might try to invade depending on what's left of their economy after their botched invasion of Ukraine. But they're not going to tango with NATO because NATO would stomp them into the ground.

      The problem for nuclear isn't War it's corrupt businessmen who are skilled to convincing people that they're magical geniuses. Sooner or later people are going to privatize
      • This claim keeps getting repeated but there's no evidence to back it. Every time Putin threatens nukes or WW3, the rest of the world backs down. There's no reason to believe it will be any different with a NATO country. Putin will use the Ukrainian territory to launch terror attacks against NATO countries and arm separatists with plausible deniability. He will do this until a NATO government is barely holding together. The Russian propaganda machine will then have citizens of other NATO countries quest
  • I hope all the smoke goes toward Russia.

    • Wind is defined by the direction it's coming from. An easterly wind would mean the nations west of Ukraine would get all of the smoke.

      What you want are winds out the west. Which, thankfully, is the prevailing flow in those northern latitudes anyhow.

  • Closed (Score:2)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 )

    Chernobyl has been shut down. What are the people there operating? The cooling pumps were shut down 9 years ago, meaning nothing is running.

    • Not all the reactors were shut down.

      • The three other reactors were all shut down by 2000. The cooling pumps were shut down in 2013. No cooling pumps means they *definitely* aren't running the reactors.

        Here's an archived video of them draining the cooling basin.
        https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]

        • You need operating cooling pumps when you congregate spent nuclear fuel in a storage pool (i.e. Fukushima). If all the cooling pumps were actually shutdown in 2013, lets hope they made a concerted effort to disperse & bury the spent nuclear fuel that may have been on that site.

      • The last operating reactor was shut down around 2004-5. They ran beyond 1986, but are not presently working.
      • Incorrect. Chernobyl is entirely dark. The only work going on there is watching the decom. There's no risk of a nuclear disaster. Worst case, someone drops a huge fucking bomb on one of the reactors and throws fission byproducts into the air- but we're not talking high atmosphere. The contamination would be local.
    • They actually have some active reactors that were only decommissioned in 2000. So God only knows what is going on there. I don't know much about decommissioning a nuclear power plant, but I do know that you don't just turn off the lights and walk away.

      • Presumably there is still spent fuel storage pools, which IIRC operate about 20 years after transfer from the reactor, and then the fuel is transferred to dry cask storage.

        100 people per shift to manage that seems like a lot though; I didn’t think there was much active management of a spent fuel pool.

    • Plenty of nuclear material and monitoring systems that need attention. Why else would you pay staff to be there?

      • Honest question: do you mean they're "running" a nuclear reactor to do practically nothing? Or is there some science experiment or other non-energy generation stuff being done at the site?

        Confession: after having read some pop-science article on the disaster that mentioned the reactors having been entombed, I stopped paying attention to any Chernobyl article that I come across every once in a while.

    • While all 4 RBMK's have been shut down since the early 2000's, there is still 20+ years of spent fuel on the site, in large spent fuel ponds. That water needs to be processed, cleaned, and cooled.
      They were also doing lots of fuel handling work, getting it in a form suitable for long term dry storage (ISF-1 and ISF-2).
      I've taken the workers train from Slavutych into the Chernobyl exclusion zone a few times; three trains depart each morning, each with about 500 people on board. There's a reasonable amount of

    • That was my question too - I thought Chernobyl was simply a disaster area now. Did Ukraine restart the reactor on the sly?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      They're decommissioning units 1-3, transferring fuel to a new long term waste storage site. They were also demolishing the original, jerry-built sarcophagus, which was supposed to be complete two years ago but is still ongoing. Monitoring *that* is pretty complex. The nuclear stuff happening in the ruins of unit 4 keeps changing; it's kind of like having a smoldering fire.

  • Putin wants a nuclear disaster, he will claim it was sabotage or weapons research gone wrong and will use it as a pretext to say Ukraine must not exist.

    It could kill 1,000,000 russians and he would not care.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jzanu ( 668651 )
      A nuclear disaster matches the actual goals of Putin; he wants to kill millions, all Ukrainians and all Russians -- comprehensively he wants to kill all the Slavic peoples who betrayed the Soviet idea. He is not just suicidal, he is an experienced serial-killer with authority over millions of people who he wants to kill before he dies. It will be the largest mass-murder in history unless Putin is stopped now.

      • There are communists and socialists in Russia such as CPRF, but they were side-lined long ago when Putin rigged the elections. Putin is no friend of Soviets and he doesn't behave or think like one. Whatever he is trying to rebuild isn't at all like the USSR.

        It would be more accurate to describe what we are seeing as Russian imperialism, and the claiming of Russia's place as in the world as a superpower. The funny thing about nuclear superpowers is they can invade other countries and there isn't shit anyone

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Jzanu ( 668651 )
          I do not mean the politics of the Soviet, that was lost in the first decade. I mean his Soviet, the absolute power. His childhood and experience in youth shaped his mind. That is what we face. The desires he has , the motivations underneath, expressed through absolute brutality. Putin is what the age-old warnings about Satan and the anti-Christ were actually cautioning against. He is the evil that siphons the hope from all men, destroys for destruction alone, kills to kill and enjoy it as ending the life of

        • > Putin is no friend of Soviets and he doesn't
          > behave or think like one. Whatever he is trying to
          > rebuild isn't at all like the USSR.

          Where on earth did you get that idea? Putin is on-record as pining for his good-old-days of the KGB and Soviet Union; having called their dissolution âoethe greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.â That is not speculation or interpretation. Those are his very own, publicly spoken, words.

        • The US has been schizophrenic for the past few decades. That's the heart of the problem. The regime changes have become less peaceful, and the commitment to established foreign policy has wavered during some administrations, creating opportunities for threat actors against The West and many missteps in foreign actions. Please recognize the difference between "the US needs to do this" and "the US needs to work with its allies to do this".

      • Yes. A George W. Bush ordered the 9/11 terror attacks.
        Honestly. Do people believe these sorts of conspiracy theories?
        Was it also Putin who invaded Dagestan?

        • There is no question the FSB did apartment bombings. Did Putin know about it? He was the head of the FSB. What do you think?

  • The plants make excellent targets for invaders or terrorists who want to hold whole countries hostage.

    • I'm sure Japan is paying attention to this with North Korea lobbing err testing missles again. If it was a Japanese policy maker, it'd start moving all the depleted fuel they're currently storing on site ASAP.

    • The tactic only works for nations that can't be held accountable for war crimes or invaded. So Russia, the US, and to a lesser degree China. As well as terrorist organizations that have no country to invade or leaders to prosecute.

      If Japan or Brazil or Germany were to invade another country or blow up nuclear power plants. They'd have American Marines in their capital faster than you can say "regime change". I'm not saying out of some patriotic pride, I'm trying to explain that the rules don't apply equally

      • My point is that Japan has a lot of nuclear power plants and store all the depleted fuel on site. Now they need to factor in a North Korean or Chinese missle strike on these power plants as a very real risk. i.e move all the depleted fuel off site from the power plants to another underground waste facility.

        • It's not a risk because North Korea would be invaded if it committed an overt attack like that, regardless of its nuclear arsenal.

          China too but it would be complicated by its more robust military defense. They would probably suffer blockades and destruction of ports. Things that are not possible to impose on Russia or the US.

  • Giving crazy Presidents, I mean leaders control over nuclear shit is fucking scary.

  • For those with capability to dig Russian, quality coverage link below, acceptable sound starts about 30 min into.
    Hats off to the analyst from Bellingcat and the host. High grade material.

    https://fb.watch/bzz_2h42zX/ [fb.watch]

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