Hmmm, glad I didn't get that dang Moscow contract after all :)

Y2K - France Disowns Own Diplomat Over Ukraine Nuke Risks

8-5-99

PARIS (Reuters) - France on Wednesday dismissed a warning by one of its own diplomats in Kiev about the hazards posed by the millennium bug in Ukraine, where the world's worst nuclear disaster occurred at Chernobyl in 1986.

The French Foreign Ministry's deputy spokesman, Francois Rivasseau, said the warning "does not correspond to the current state of thinking at the ministry".

An unnamed French diplomat based in Kiev was reported as saying that French nationals should leave Ukraine before the New Year holidays because of worries tied to potential millennium computer problems.

Rivasseau denied that the diplomat had mentioned a risk of a nuclear accident and said the comments had been made in jest and were misinterpreted.

Rivasseau said the embassy in Kiev had issued a statement on Wednesday saying there were "no grounds at the moment to issue any security advice whatsoever" to French nationals staying in or travelling to a foreign country around the time of the New Year.

Ukraine's nuclear authorities have said the millennium bug will not affect its nuclear plants because of their unsophisticated computer equipment.

But independent Ukrainian nuclear power expert Serhiy Parashin has said the plants could be paralyzed.

http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=83441 RADIOACTIVE TOAST

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), August 05, 1999

Answers

Andy,

Thanks for the article.

You have to wonder how anyone could remain an optimist when things in Russia and the Ukrain are looking so dire. I don't see them even considering a shut down of their power generating nukes let alone their weapons. What will the world be like, especially Eurasia if a few of these plants go south at the same time?

We're talking disaster of all disasters. Anyone who really does believe in a BITR should consider that cloud and how those plants are going to melt into the earth and try to draw some new conclusions.

This is f'n' scary.

Mike

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-- Michael Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), August 05, 1999.

unsophisticated computer equipment

yeah...that makes me feel a whole lot better.

damn.

Mike

===================================================================

-- Michael Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), August 05, 1999.

Yerp Mike,

the Finns and Swedes are crapping themselves... won't be pretty...

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), August 05, 1999.

The French Government is right. It won't be any safer in France than in Kiev. I believe August is the month when all French programmers take a month off to go to St. Tropez.

-- Dog Gone (layinglow@rollover.now), August 05, 1999.

Yes, I think all Diplomats are trained in the fine art of cracking jokes about Nukes melting down...NOT!

What a freaky world we inhabit.

-- Deborah (infowars@yahoo.com), August 05, 1999.

(1) Diplomats may leak the truth when they are drunk. You will rarely get much on sensitive topics when they are sober...

(2) France itself isn't much better off...

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), August 06, 1999.

France itself isn't much better off.

Great point Mad Monk.

What will Europe look like if these nukes go south? Even if the US is unaffected directly what kind of world is left? What means would a country affected by these things go to continue to exist?

War is certainly a possibility.

Mike =====================================================

-- Michael Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), August 06, 1999.

I'll defer to an expert, but I think that Chernobyl-style plants may actually be less of a risk than the USA's pressurized-water ones with respect to Y2K problems.

All nuclear plants have multiple levels of hair-trigger fail-safe. Basically if things get even slightly out of control, the control rods are dropped and all fission stops immediately.

The question is, what next? The radioactive decay products keep generating heat for quite some time, and have to be cooled.

PWR cores are compact (ie concentrated). If the cooling fails you get Three Mile Island, or the "China Syndrome".

Chernobyl-style cores are very large (ie dilute). I suspect that they can look after themselves, and certainly give human operators longer to get things back under control. And because the automation is relatively primitive, the human operators are much more involved in keeping the plant running safely.

The Chernobyl disaster didn't happen during normal operation, and wasn't caused in the first instance by a plant failure. It was caused by a criminally irresponsible experiment in operating the plant well outside its normal safety parameters, and the disaster that resulted could easily have been predicted if they'd asked the right people. However, in the former USSR, things didn't work that way, and they didn't.

-- Nigel Arnot (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), August 06, 1999.

Lets all hope you're right Nigel! However the latest CIA reports say otherwise, alas...

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), August 06, 1999.