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Gaudet

Supreme Elitists
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Posts posted by Gaudet

  1. Unreasonable demands also drive to more extremity. Relentless unreasonable demands that can cause major damage to others as well. Maybe a certain man of the year should really consider dialing up his negotiating skills (if he has any) instead of badly quoting Winston Churchill, and carelessly pushing towards a global warfare with his demands when his country is not even a member of the alliance nor a EU state member.

    Humanitarian help is one thing, a suicide mission dragging everyone in is another. Nobody sane of mind wants a direct nuclear and/or chemical warfare against that stinky turd of Putin and his minions.

  2. By the way, big, huge kudos to Poland for massively helping out Ukraine by taking in so many refugees of the country. Poland is showing a big heart, humanity and superior generosity to a neighbouring country that inflicted so much pain and sorrow to them. Ukrainians are historically remembered by Polish for the horror they did to them during WW2, absolute massacre, terrible terrible thing - check it out. Manipulative mainstream media should mention that about Poland, instead of peddling the racist narrative at its border. 

  3. Point of no return. Only brutal force against Putin and his military yes people, can put a stop to the conflict, and avoid dangerous further escalations. That brutal force is not in the form of sanctions imposed against Russia. I bet Putin had a laugh when hearing about all the sanctions imposed by "evil Westerns". Whatever Putin might say, he is such a bluffer, lying scumbag, it would be impossible to believe him, even if he were to talk about retreating or surrendering - will never happen.

    Personally I fear the conflict will shortly escalate into a nuclear carnage involving other countries.

     

    Wasn't having two continents into one country - largest in the world - enough for Putin? Did he really have to do what he is doing? 

     

     

     

  4. Decades after Chernobyl, war raises nuclear fears in Ukraine

    International Atomic Energy Agency plans an emergency meeting Wednesday, as an expert notes, "We’ve never seen a full-scale war in a country that operates nuclear facilities”

    The International Atomic Energy Agency announced it would convene an emergency meeting Wednesday as fighting closed in on the largest of Ukraine’s functioning nuclear plants.

    Six of the country’s 15 reactors have been disconnected from the electricity grid to reduce cooling needs, according to the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine. The 15 Soviet-era reactors had provided half of the nation’s electricity in normal times.

    Both sides vied for control of Ukraine’s biggest nuclear power complex Monday. Russia’s defense ministry was quoted in state-run media as saying that its forces had taken control of “the territory around” the nuclear power complex in Zaporizhiya. “The plant personnel are continuing to service the site and control the radioactive situation as usual. Background radiation levels are normal,” the defense ministry said.

     

    However, Ukraine’s state-owned firm Energoatom said that the Russian claim was false. The International Atomic Energy Agency said that “additional information” from the operator of the reactors confirmed that Russian forces were “operational near the site but had not entered it.”

    While a direct attack on Ukraine’s nuclear infrastructure seems unlikely, experts raised the alarm that an inadvertent strike by a missile or air attack could trigger a disaster.

    “It is extremely important that the nuclear power plants are not put at risk in any way,” IAEA’s director general Rafael Mariano Grossi said. Without naming the catastrophic Chernobyl accident which took place four decades ago, Grossi said that “an accident involving the nuclear facilities in Ukraine could have severe consequences for public health and the environment.”

    The Zaporizhia complex, 140 miles up the Dnieper River from the Black Sea, has six reactors, more than in any other location in Ukraine’s nationwide fleet. Three of those are among the reactors disconnected from the grid.

    Nuclear experts also said they feared fighting might accidentally damage the pools used for cooling spent fuel, posing a greater danger than any potential threat to the well-constructed vessels designed to protect the reactors’ cores. The open pools, which resemble regular swimming pools, are inside of buildings that are not as robust as other structures.

    “The largest radioactive inventories remain the spent fuel pools,” said Mycle Schneider, a Paris-based consultant and a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials.

    Operators often disconnect reactors to reduce the amount of heat they generate. Frank von Hippel, a senior research physicist and professor of international affairs emeritus at Princeton University’s program on science and global security, said that “when a reactor is operating, each ton of fuel is generating about 30 megawatts of heat.” Disconnecting it decreases the generated heat to about 300 kilowatts, lowering the required amount of cooling water by a factor of a hundred.

    But disconnecting reactors from the electricity grid does not guarantee safe conditions, experts cautioned. It places reactors one step closer to needing auxiliary power, which usually comes from standby diesel generators.

    “All reactors need power to stay safe. That does not stop with the disconnection from the grid,” Schneider said. “Residual heat remains enormous in the core … and needs to be evacuated.”

    “We’ve never seen a full-scale war in a country that operates nuclear facilities,” he added. “You can’t just decide to shut them down.”

    Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said, “it’s in no one’s interest to have any of those plants damaged, but sometimes things spiral out of control.”

    A meltdown took place at Chernobyl’s unit four in 1986, spreading radiation across a swath of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine and ultimately leading to 28 deaths in four months and the eventual evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from an 18-mile exclusion zone. The last of the four reactors there was shut down in 1999.

    But the pools are still used to cool Chernobyl’s spent fuel rods, including 20,000 fuel assemblies that are being transferred from storage pools to more protective, double-walled dry storage canisters designed to last 100 years, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Lyman identified those pools as the area “that would need a relatively high degree of attention.”

    Other parts of nuclear reactors can withstand substantial impacts.

    The IAEA said Sunday that missiles hit the site of a radioactive waste disposal facility in Kyiv overnight, but there were no reports of damage to the building or any indications of a release of radioactive materials, Grossi said in a statement. Staff at the facility were forced to take shelter during the night.

    The incident came a day after an electrical transformer at a similar facility near the northeastern city of Kharkiv had been damaged, but there were no reports of a radioactive release. “Such facilities typically hold disused radioactive sources and other low-level waste from hospitals and industry,” the IAEA said.

    Nonetheless, Grossi said, “these two incidents highlight the very real risk that facilities with radioactive material will suffer damage during the conflict, with potentially severe consequences for human health and the environment.” He said “once again, I urgently and strongly appeal to all parties to refrain from any military or other action that could threaten the safety and security of these facilities.”

    Before Russia’s attack, Ukraine had explored having Westinghouse build four more nuclear reactors. Westinghouse has already been providing some nuclear fuel, previously supplied by Russia.

    “The lesson from this is that these facilities are different and more complex than other sources of electricity generation,” Lyman said, “and they do have additional risks.”

    Nuclear experts worried over fighting near Ukraine’s reactors and spent fuel - The Washington Post

  5. Just now, Jazzy Jan said:

    The silence from China is deafening.  If they back Putin, it would be an absolute disaster for the World. 

    For the moment they did not vote in favor, they did abstain. However, as you indeed said, the consequence of China backing Russia would be a catastrophe for everyone, and I mean everyone in the world. Would that be convenient though to Russia and China destroying us all?

     

    If men ceased to see weapons as extensions of their penis therefore measure of antagonistic power, this damn planet would probably be a more harmonious place to co-exist all together.

     

     

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