I bet they were ready for the next kid who asked that question.🥴
Chernobyl and Fukushima are the closest to worst case scenarios that we’ve had to a full blown meltdown and they sure grabbed the attention. I’ve seen several shows shot near Chernobyl and the place looks like something from a horror movie with everyone gone but the paraphernalia of everyday life still in place. Scary.
That’s Pripyat, the city that was evacuated.
These days everyone in Belarus, Ukraine, Europe and the USA knows about the Chernobyl disaster, how it happened, how Russia bent over backwards to lie to itself, its people and the wider world, and it took 20 years of international cooperation to finally put the reactors permanently under a hugely expensive shield.
We all first knew about it when radiation was detected over western Europe.
For some years now, scientists and urban explorers have been looking at what’s left in Pripyat. There are signs everywhere in Russian making it abundantly obvious that radiation hotspots are there, PPE and limited exposure is recommended.
So remember all of that and then consider how Rusdian soldiers acting under orders dug trenched in the hot zone, had firefighters with the soldiers protecting the civilian monitors, and once in control of the area worked the scientists to exhaustion. While using the complex as a military base.
Under. Orders. From. Moscow.
When Putin and co say that they’ll launch all nukes if they detect radioactivity in the air they totally forget to mention that it’s their own military presence in Zaporizhzhia and Chernobyl, and their own orders, that kicked up clouds of radiation. Thankfully they’re no longer in control of Chernobyl but they ALREADY had their troops lethally exposing the radioactivity.
Sure Ukrainian rickets could hit a Zaporizhzhia reactor or waste pool and send a cloud of radiation into Russian held areas but it is far more likely that Kadyrov/Wagner commanders issue demented orders to the troops in Enerhodar that undermine the monitoring, or they store volatile munitions inside the reactor building and cause an explosion.
That’s not a mad fantasy because it is exactly how cavalier Russian military command is about nuclear.
Nothing has changed in Russia; they’re still obsessed so much about the domestic reputational damage of admitting fault in a nuclear accident they’d rather kill their own soldiers, sailors and scientists.
Putin’s responsible for fuelling that mentality. Remember Kursk. We Brits remember it just as much as we remember Chernobyl.
A Russian sub ended up in Folkestone just down the road from where I grew up. I remember when it first arrived in British waters in 1994.
The inside of it was hellish, the crew ran a tight ship but it’s a miracle they were able to keep it seaworthy. I know because I got to go round it not long after it first arrived.
That’s Russia for you. Proud of the nukes they could’ve had on board it, totally reckless about the seaworthiness of the boat. If it had gone down in the Cold War the Kremlin would’ve denied, denied, denied, and finally blamed the west.
And that’s the glorious Soviet mindset that Putin had then, had when the Kursk sank, and still has now. And people think he wouldn’t do the same if his forces trigger an accident in a nuclear power plant.