nuclear-news

“……It Gets Even Worse  Of course you have heard of the failed, exploded nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, Ukraine. That plant has never been and cannot be repaired. It will remain dangerously radioactive for untold thousands of years to come. The surrounding region is a poisonous no man’s land.

What many people overlook, including many prominent analysts and commentators, such as Paul Craig Roberts, is that there are several other nuclear power plants in the Ukraine. Please click here to see their locations.

Note that the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant is just to the west of the present combat zone in the eastern region of the Ukraine, and not far north of the Crimea, which is now part of the Russian Federation. It is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and the fifth largest in the world. It is also right on the banks of the Dnieper River, which empties into the Black Sea, which in turn empties into the Mediterranean Sea. Failure of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant will massively radioactively contaminate the Dnieper River, which will then flow into the Black Sea and radioactively contaminate the Black Sea, which then flows into the Mediterranean Sea, etc. You see the problem.

Just northeast of Odessa is another, the South Ukraine nuclear power plant.

Many armchair analysts, including commentators such as Paul Craig Roberts, have publicly advocated, or come very close to doing so, that Vladimir Putin send his military racing across the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, in a blitzkrieg from the Russian border all the way toTransnistria, on the border between Moldova and the Ukraine, in order to incorporate that swath of territory into the Russian Federation, and present NATO and the regime in Kiev with a military fait accompli. 

In my view, Putin has not done that because no military operation is ever as simple as it appears on paper; what can go wrong frequently does go wrong. And there are always unexpected complications.

Beyond that, Vladimir Putin knows that military combat produces societal disruption right across the board. It also can and does produce a lot of physical damage to key economic and industrial infrastructure — things like roads, bridges, railroads, electrical power grids, airports, factories — and, oh yeah, nuclear power plants.

Zaporizhia is already dangerously close to the active combat zone. What happens if it comes under artillery bombardment? Or what if the electrical grid goes down, due to heavy combat in the region, and the several nuclear reactors and spent fuel pools melt down and/or blow up? The Crimea is due south a short distance, and southwestern Russia, as well as the ethnically Russian region of eastern Ukraine, are directly downwind.

If Putin were to order his army to cross the border and drive west to Transnistria, then the South Ukraine nuclear power plant would also be in danger of catastrophic damage or outright destruction from military combat.

That would only compound the military and political situation and result in an apocalyptic scenario that would lay waste a wide geographic area for all meaningful human time to come. The devastation would be multiple times worse than that from Chernobyl and Fukushima.

I believe that this is an important factor in why Putin has stayed his hand. The risk is not worth it. He cannot trust what NATO and the USSA might do as the Ukrainian positions would be overrun. Would they resort to a radioactive, scorched earth retreat? Would they blow the nuclear power plants and falsely blame the destruction on the Russian army?……………http://eventhorizonchronicle.blogspot.com.au/