Serhii Plokhy
speaker
375 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Chernobyl was taken over by the Russian Army, or National Guard rather, on the first day of the invasion. Then there was Zaporizhzhia, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. where the battle was waged on the territory of the nuclear power plant, the missiles being fired, buildings catching fire. The situation that brought the Fukushima disaster was there in Zaporizhia more than once.
Fukushima came because the reactors were shut down, as they are in Zaporizhia, but they still needed electricity. to bring water and to cool them down. In Fukushima case, it was the tsunami that cut off the supply of electricity. In the case of Zaporizhia, there was the warfare that was happening in the area around Zaporizhia that did the same effect.
We have 440 reactors in the world today, plus minus. None of them was designed to withstand the direct missile attack or to function in the conditions of the warfare. If operators, they're human, they make mistakes like they did at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, but think also if the war is happening around them, if they're not sure what is happening with their families.
If they don't know whether they will be next missile, whether they will hit the control room or not, that multiplies also. We are in a situation where we are not done yet with the nuclear accidents. It's not like we don't pay attention or we don't learn. Smart people work on that. And after every accident, try to figure the way how not to step into the same trap.
But next accident would actually expose a new vulnerability. You deal with Chernobyl and then tsunami comes. You deal with tsunami and then war comes. And we really... In that sense, we have sometimes wild imagination, but sometimes it's difficult to imagine what can happen next. We are not done. There will be nuclear accidents, unfortunately, in the future.
That makes nuclear energy so problematic when you count on it to fight climate change. I'll explain why. You gave the figures how many people die from burning coal, from how many people die from radiation. And it's a good argument.
Some people would question them because it's also the issue of not just dying, but impact of radiation on cancer, on our health, which is not completely understood yet. So still there is a lot of question marks. But let's assume what you are saying. That's the figures. That's how it is. But we as people, we, for whatever reason, are not afraid of coal. But we are very much afraid of radiation.
It's invisible. It's COVID. It's everywhere. And you can't see it. And then you start having issues. And then you have problems. And during the COVID, the governments closed the borders. Maybe a good idea, maybe not so good ideas. Isolation. So that was the way. The government started to fight for access to Pfizer, to Moderna, to Sputnik, to whatever it is, to vaccine.
So now back to the radiation. What is happening once Chernobyl happens? That's the highest point in the development of nuclear industry so far in terms of how many new reactors were commissioned or the licenses were issued. The next reactor after Three Mile Island in the US go-ahead was given, it seems to me, 10 years ago or something like that.
If Fukushima happens, the reaction is in China to that as well. They're very much concerned. There is a saying in the field, anywhere is Chernobyl everywhere. After Fukushima, Germany decides to go nuclear-free and gets there at the expense of burning coal. That's how we react. Each major accident, that means global freeze. on the nuclear reactor production for at least another 10 years.
That's what I mean that nuclear industry is not just in terms of technology, not just in terms of radiation, impact on health, but also politically a very, very unreliable option.
I think we can be trained, right? We can be trained.
Education. But generally, we are afraid of things that we see. But even more we are afraid of things that we don't see. And radiation is one of those.
As a historian, I'm trained that way. I have a feeling of deja vu. I see the Cold War is coming back in many of its features. And the war started, and we discussed that, in 2014, at least in my interpretation, with Russia trying to really reestablish its control over the post-Soviet space, and Ukraine was crucial for that project.
And the more globally Russian vision since 1990s was that they didn't like the American monopolar world. They knew and realized that they couldn't go back to the bipolar world of the Cold War era. So the vision was multipolar world in which, again, it wasn't just academic exercise.
It was a political exercise in which Russia would be one of the centers, one of the poles on par with China, on par with European Union, on par with the United States. That's very broadly speaking the context in which the war starts in 2014. Where we are now?
Well, we are now in Russia certainly trying to regain its military strength, but no one actually believes that Russia is the sort of a superpower it was imagined before 2022. We see certainly Russia finding the way to deal with the sanctions, but we don't see certainly Russia as an economic power with any sort of a future.
It is not an implosion of the Russian military, economic, and political power, but it's significantly, actually, it is diminished. Today, very difficult to imagine Russia emerging as another pole of the of the multipolar world. Not impossible, but the war certainly made that very problematic and much more difficult.
On the other hand, what the war did, it basically awakened the West, the Old West, United States and Western Europe, transatlantic alliance. On the top of that, there are East European countries. that are even much stronger proponents of assistance for Ukraine than is Germany or the United States of America.
It is the replay of the Cold War story, The Return of the West, that one of the chapters in my book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, is called that way. We also can see the elements of the rebuilding of the Beijing-Moscow alliance of the 1950s, which was a very important part of the Cold War. It was an extremely important part of the Korean War that in many ways launched also the Cold War globally.
Showing 341–360 of 375 · page 18 of 19
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