The Two Lies and the War in Ukraine

This little note assumes the reader is familiar with the nuclear establishment's Two Lies.

The war in Ukraine has created a dilemma for the nuclear establishment and the Two Lies. Recent attempts to resurrect the Negligible Probability Lie have focused on claimed improvements in safety due to technical progress: natural circulation, passive decay heat cooling, etc. The argument was never very compelling. We may be able to reduce their frequency, but releases are going to happen. But the war in Ukraine makes it crystal clear that no technical improvement can withstand man's destructive capabilities. Does anybody believe that the probability of a release from one of the Ukrainian plants caught in the middle of the war --- for practical purposes, all of them --- is so low we don't have to worry about it?

The Russians are using the 6 unit Zapo plant as a human shield. The Ukrainians are hitting targets within the plant anyway. The Ukrainians, abetted by the IAEA, are cleverly and aggressively using the Intolerable Harm Lie to put pressure on their allies for more help. But the Russian counter move is to threaten or even create a release to end the war on their terms. This is not beyond Putin. A strike on a plant, intentional or inadvertent, will occur if the war lasts long enough.

The plume will depend on the weapon. There are bunker busters that can easily penetrate the containment. A standard cruise missile can probably breach the containment. A hole in containment combined with loss of cooling or rupture of the primary loop will produce a Fukushima-like release. A bunker buster will make a big hole and then create a secondary explosion after penetration. This would produce a Chernobyl-like plume.

In the Ukrainian case, employing a bunker buster against a plant seems very unlikely:

1) A bunker buster would expose malice aforethought on the part of the Russians.

2) It is unnecessary. It's the fear of radiation that is the weapon, not the actual number of casualties.

But a bunker buster-like plume from a combination of more conventional weapons is not inconceivable. The claim that there will never be another Chernobyl is not necessarily true.

Provided you accept a roughly realistic radiation harm model such as Sigmoid No Threshold, the resulting casualties become just another part of the horrors of war. According to SNT, the radiation from a Fukushima style release will detectably harm nobody more than a kilometer or two outside the plant boundaries. A Chernobyl-like plume could result in eventual radiation induced Lost Life Expectancy equivalent to several hundred immediate fatalities. This is equivalent to a few days of the fighting in the war.

But if you are promulgating the Intolerable Harm Lie as the IAEA and others are doing, either plume becomes terrifying. The combatants are handed a Damocletian Sword which they can dangle over the head of Europe. And the revival of public support for nuclear hangs by the same thread.