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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

Let’s think from other side. It’s a great geopolitical move. Russia build a power plant almost on the EU border. It will be paid by Belarus. That’s even cooler. Now imagine some bad event going in Vilnius. Like some NATO conference. 30 minutes before it radioactive water comes through the river Neris and the city must be evacuated. Conference didn’t happen. I even don’t see a good way for city evacuation. There is not enough road capacity to the west. Like 2 roads with 2 lanes each. During serious nuclear disaster the whole city is sitting ducks, there is not place to hide and no road to run.

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It's a bit of a stretch, isn't it? :) In addition to the safety concerns, you are absolutely right that it was also a Russian geopolitical project, though, just with more realistic and with more practical objectives.

One of the objectives was an attempt to make the Baltic States dependant on the Russian (well, Belarusian, but due to political realities it doesn't quite matter) energy supplies by flooding them with cheap electricity and discouraging them from diversification. Such dependency would give some means to make political influence to the Baltics. This was in addition to another objective of making Belarus even more economically reliant on Russia (in this case, very cheap but large loans given to build the power plant).

However, I don't think they managed to gain anything in the Baltics, because of a robust strategic response from the Baltic States: 1) they diversified their electricity supply with more links to Scandinavia and Poland (see NordBalt, EstLink and LitPol projects) 2) created an open and well functioning electricity market (see Nord Pool) 3) eventually decided to boycott the electricity from the Belarus Power Plant, undermining its economic basis.

Russia succeeded in tightening the economic grip on Belarus, but in terms of economic dependency, things are already pretty grim there..

> Let’s think from other side.

You’re not thinking. You’re fantasizing and projecting. In your fantasy you basically stripped the Russians of all humanity to the point where they would intentionally poison a river with highly dangerous nuclear waste to stop a NATO conference and basically kill off an entire city.

Rather than these complicated conspiracy theories, a far simpler explanation is that Belarus needs energy and Russia has a nuclear power industry. Russia have sold these power plants all over the world, not just next to the EU border. If Russia really wanted to do something so horrific they don’t need to go through all the steps of building a complicated nuclear power plant to do it. They have plenty of weapons in their arsenal to do it already.

Well, these guys like poisoning bad people in foreign countries with weird substances. So dropping couple radioactive barrels into a river does not sound that unrealistic to me. And it then makes a thing called “accident”. Using weapon is an “attack”, what is totally uncool nowadays.

Targeted actions against individuals is bread and butter covert operations for states. Just ask the CIA or the Mossad. I don't think you can use the evidence of targeted attacks to suggest that a state will engage in crimes against humanity.

> In your fantasy you basically stripped the Russians of all humanity to the point where they would intentionally poison a river with highly dangerous nuclear waste to stop a NATO conference and basically kill off an entire city.

That's true, Russians only intentionally poison individuals and not entire cities.

> In your fantasy you basically stripped the Russians of all humanity to the point where they would intentionally poison a river with highly dangerous nuclear waste... and kill off an entire city.

Meanwhile in Nagasaki...

Hum, duplicated. Sorry.

> In your fantasy you basically stripped the Russians of all humanity to the point where they would intentionally poison a river with highly dangerous nuclear waste... and kill off an entire city.

Yep, good people wouldn't never, ever, think about doing something like that. We are 100% safe.

Meanwhile in Nagasaki...

Isn't geopolitical paranoia running too high these days even compared to the Cold War in certain aspects.

I remember Canada building Nuclear Reactors in Romania during the Cold War years.

Even during the 90s USA I think even started work on nuclear reactors in North Korea.

Even recently Russia is building a nuclear power plant in Turkey.

Some nuclear tech choices are geopolitically motivated. Romania licensed CANDU specifically because its then communist leader did not trust the Soviets after the invasion if Hungary and Czechoslovakia. They also have or had domestic heavy water production and domestic nuclear fuel production.

Yep. Belarus is so stupid to pollute its own land just to prevent NATO conference. What are you smoking?

I would do this in SimCity: always build my coal and nuke plants at the corner of town :)

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