Scary Situation at ZNPP

I don’t understand Russia’s attitude about ZNPP. If they cause it to be breached or the spent fuel rods to catch fire, mitigating burning nuclear fuel in a war zone will be completely different than the full-court press that Russia did when Chernobyl opened up - which wasn’t very effective anyway.

I’m not a nuclear scientist but it seems to me if fuel rods burn, there might not be much difference between them being in or out of a reactor. The Chernobyl reactor that went up had a single load of fuel rods in it. The cooling ponds have many loads of reactor fuel in them in varying states of cooling-off decay, but still, more fuel that must be cooled and protected - and not in thick-walled pressure vessels.

If the fuel rods catch fire, the radiation will spread with the wind, wherever that wind takes the fallout. Russia should talk to the soldiers that dug in around Chernobyl and ended up evacuating a few weeks later after they all started showing acute radiation sickness. If you don’t have a radiation sensor, you have no idea what kind of dose you’re getting and any significant exposures can lead to blood diseases, cancers, birth defects, thyroid issues, etc, ad nauseum (another symptom of radiation exposures).

But extreme exposures to radiation are horrific. (You are warned to not read further if easily upset.)

You start out turning red like a hunk of corned beef. You taste metal and your skin feels like it’s being pricked with needles all over. In heavy exposures, your cells lose their ability to reproduce so cells that reproduce quickly (mucous membranes and hair follicles in particular) die quickly too with no replacements. Hair falls out in clumps. The gastrointestinal tract is all mucous membranes so vomiting up blood comes early. Skin sloughs off leaving people looking like they’ve been skinned alive. In places at first but it spreads. The first responders at Chernobyl would stand up in the hospital and the skin on their legs would slide down like a sock. You can’t drink, you can’t eat, and you suffer as your body kind of dissolves as cells die. The body literally rots while you’re alive. Death is a gift. Those who don’t get such high exposures have high probabilities of cancers later, birth defects in children conceived and carried afterwards, and just all sorts of hell.

So hell yeah! Let’s treat the largest nuclear power plant in Europe like a punching bag, with a stressed-out skeleton crew working under threat of death, with military equipment moved into the buildings, the buildings booby-trapped with explosives, and shells dropping around the plant where just one bomb could start the cascade into hell on earth.

Everyone’s insurance policies have exceptions for nuclear accidents. Check the fine print. That came from a study back when nuclear power was first being commercialized that showed reactor accidents can be devastating. Huge areas become uninhabitable, areas around the uninhabitable areas are still dangerous to children, pregnant women, and basically anyone not past reproductive age. Birth defect rates skyrocket, etc.

The radioactive elements released in these kinds of events also tend to have lots of elements low on the periodic table which means they are more reactive and displace elements higher up. It’s why strontium is so dangerous. It’s just below calcium so it shows up in cow’s milk and when ingested, the strontium atoms displace and replace calcium in bones and teeth and wait to decay with a high energy dump into surrounding tissues. The other way is that radioactive elements are chemically just like their stable-isotope brethren and your body happily uses them. This is the iodine connection. Radioactive iodine is produced in reactors and when ingested collects where regular iodine does - in the thyroid. That’s why the iodine pills are being distributed around ZNPP. Giving your body excess iodine reduces the amount of radioactive iodine the thyroid takes up and provides some protection. Iodine is why thyroid cancers go way up around nuclear accidents.

Anyway, it’s absolute madness to be fighting around a nuclear power plant. It’s absolutely insane. And the fallout goes wherever the wind takes it.

Well put. I haven't seen a follow up on the Russian soldiers who were kicking up dust at Chernobyl at the start of the war. My bet is that they "disappeared" into the Russian medical system.

Shelling shows up on FIRMS today. One fire is very close to the reactors. The Russians are truly insane, considering that the prevailing winds will blow any radiation into Russia!

The surrounding radiation sensors are normal. Will be monitoring these closely throughout the day.

All radiation sensors in the surrounding area are at normal levels. Will be monitoring these closely!

All's quiet today, according to FIRMS.

The cooling ponds appear full of water in the satellite images. They are probably full or mostly full as long as they can run the generators to be able to run the pumps.

There is a big delay from when the plant loses power to when the fuel can burn since the water in the ponds has to heat to boiling and then boil away. IIRC it took 3 days to happen at Fukushima.

ZNPP is in a little better position because 4 of the reactors have been shut down for a while and have had time for the fission by-products to decay somewhat so they won’t overheat quite so fast. Two reactors have stayed running mostly and those would be very important to keep cool. Don’t know how long old rods have been in the cooling ponds but the longer the better. If any recently got moved into the ponds during a reactor refueling, though, they would also be more dangerous.

At some point, the fuel rods have enough fission products decay out that they don’t need water cooling to keep from melting and burning. That’s when they get moved to dry cask storage and are much less of a danger - though still very much a danger if the casks get breached.

So day to day the cooling ponds are less of an immediate hazard but take away the water cooling and they escalate quickly. They can still be breached by an errant bomb or rocket depending on how reinforced the ponds are.

It’s dangerous as hell if they let the fuel burn, though. That would free a plume of highly radioactive contamination that could travel all over Europe.

I use Windy a lot to follow lightning strikes. Great suggestion to use it to follow possible radiation spread! Right now the prevailing winds over the ZNPP are SW - away from Russia. A release of radiation now would be bad news for Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria.

A great site to be monitoring now is

Unfortunately, e sensors at the ZNPP have been turned off since Feb. 28. Those at Chernobyl are still active, however.

Click on the circles to see a time line graph of radiation levels.

If you look at lightning, lightningmaps.org is a great site that shows strikes in real time (2-3 seconds delay) as well as the thunder ring that expands at the speed of sound. You can tell when you’re about to hear the thunder from the ring. Very cool.

I'll certainly have to check that out next time we have a storm!