Lights Out

Out of Bounds

There are lots of places where it seems to be a bad idea to “wage war”.  Nursery schools and playgrounds ought to be “out of bounds” when it comes to bombs, artillery, and even ground fighting.  Two Ukrainian teenagers killed last week, hit by artillery fire, just playing soccer on a practice field.  Why target the places where it’s likely to find children, and put them in the line of fire?

There are the traditional places, the ones that the original Geneva Conventions agreed to keep safe:  hospitals and civilian shelters.  Remember the World War II movies with the white hospital ships with the big red crosses painted on their sides?  There was always outrage when torpedoes from either side accidentally found their mark. It happened far too frequently.

One way to try to protect targets was to move prisoners onto the site of enemy action.  It worked sometimes – though the American pilots held in Hiroshima weren’t so lucky.  It always came down to one of those “good of the many versus good of the few” things.  

“The rules” say don’t bomb churches, or historic sites . That didn’t work last week at the Babi Yar Memorial in Kyiv. The United States didn’t drop an atomic bomb on Kyoto, Japan, because of the cultural and historic importance of the city. 

Nuclear Playgrounds

It would seem logical that one of the highest “protected” priorities would be nuclear power plants. It’s just common sense: having a battle around a nuclear reactor is just a terrible idea.  Nuclear power plant safety is based around a series of protections from radioactive leaks, called “containment”.  Containment is literal – concrete structures designed to contain radiation leaks, and even some level of explosions that contain nuclear material.  

Bombs, bullets, shoulder mounted missiles:  all of those things can damage the containment barriers that keep the outside world safe from nuclear materials.

Even if the containment facilities aren’t damaged, the nuclear power process is based around keeping extremely hot (temperature) nuclear materials from literally becoming “too hot to handle”. If nuclear materials are allowed to interact too fully, they will reach a temperature when no material can contain then.  It’s called a “meltdown” – when the nuclear core becomes so hot it melts through everything holding it – going down into the ground.  

Contamination

That is, until it hits ground water, which explosively turns to steam and blow the core apart.  The blast spreads nuclear material across a widespread area.  How widespread?  When the Chernobyl reactor (just north of Kyiv) partially melted down, the area downwind was contaminated for a thousand miles.  Children in nearby Poland, and farther away Sweden, were given Iodine to protect their thyroids from radiation damage.

Nuclear plants have multiple “failsafe” systems that can either shield the nuclear materials to stop them from interacting, or cool a “too hot” nuclear core down.  Those systems are run from outside the “reactor” chamber, so that even if power from the nuclear reactor is lost, they can still interact with the core to stop a runaway meltdown.

All of that, the containment, the shielding processes, and the cooling processes are vulnerable to military attack.   In addition, nuclear plants require continuous supervision to keep them in balance.  It’s hard for the “second shift” to show up to work when a battle is being waged around the plant.

Lights Out

So why is it that the Russian Army is not only fighting around nuclear plants (including the scene of the world’s worst nuclear plant disaster, Chernobyl, just north of Kyiv) but targeting them?

Nuclear plants are huge industrial complexes. To build them, both road and railroad transportation is needed, capable of bringing in large machinery. That transportation ability makes it a prime staging area for troops: capture the plant, and capture the capability to use the transportation hub.

In addition, the five nuclear plants in Ukraine provide fifty percent of the nation’s electric power.  The Russian Army already controls two of those, and is approaching the third.  One way to gain control of Ukrainian life, is to control the power – and the Russian Army moving in position to do it.  It’s much harder for cities like Kharkiv and Kyiv to resist Russian occupation if they can’t see what they’re doing, or are required to use generator or battery power to maintain communication.

(Special credit to Clint Watts, former FBI agent, US Army officer and an MSNBC analyst for his lucid explanation of the military value of nuclear plants).

 Base of Operations

The Russian offensive clearly hasn’t gone as planned.  What was supposed to be a “blitzkrieg” attack to de-capitate the Ukrainian government by swift capture of Kyiv didn’t work out.  Part of this is because the Russians didn’t anticipate Ukrainian resistance, part because of surprising incompetence from Russian forces.  So Putin’s armies are regrouping, preparing for siege warfare against Kyiv, and a long drawn out fight against Ukrainian insurgents led by the charismatic Volodymyr Zelenskyy.  

They need a base of operations.  The Chernobyl site, and the newly captured Zaporizhzhia facility, are perfect (if you don’t mind exposing your soldiers to dangerous radiation levels, particularly at Chernobyl).  There’s lots of room, lots of power, and lots of transportation connections to the rest of the country.

And if you decide to – you can turn out ALL the lights.

Ukraine Crisis

Author: Marty Dahlman

I'm Marty Dahlman. After forty years of teaching and coaching track and cross country, I've finally retired!!! I've also spent a lot of time in politics, working campaigns from local school elections to Presidential campaigns.