05 March 22
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He wasn’t idly musing. For the last six years, McKeever has been active in open-source intelligence, or OSINT, which involves gathering and analyzing online information in much the same way that government intelligence professionals analyze classified data: identifying when and where events took place, who was involved, what kinds of weapons were used, and so on.
The movement began in 2011, when internet hobbyists began studying social-media posts to identify war crimes and human-rights violations in Syria. It grew steadily in the years that followed, then accelerated when Russian forces started massing near Ukraine late last year. OSINT findings proved vital in validating the Biden administration’s claims throughout February that an attack was imminent, and they informed subsequent coverage by traditional print and broadcast outlets. That exposure, in turn, drew a wave of new volunteers, many of them eager to help the Ukrainian cause. “I’ve had 50, 60 people a day getting in touch, offering their skill sets,” says Ross Burley, executive director of the Centre for Information Resilience, a U.K. nonprofit focused on countering misinformation. “We’ve had teachers, engineers, doctors. It’s staggering how everyone is coming together for this.”
McKeever, who works part-time as an OSINT researcher for a Syrian human-rights group, took a closer look at the Bucha video. Finding no distinctive landmarks that would help him pinpoint the location, he searched for “Bucha” on Twitter and found an image that showed the same scene from a different angle. Two buildings with distinctive roofs stood side by side behind a fence.
Poking around the area on Google Maps, he found only one road wide enough to match the image: a major artery that ran from the suburb into Kharkiv. Using Google’s Street View mode, he explored along the road until he found a pair of buildings under construction that might fit the bill. The image was from 2019. He switched to Google Earth and found an image of the completed buildings from 2020 that looked “pretty compelling” but whose resolution was too low to provide definitive proof. Returning to Street View, McKeever compared the details of the fence and the trees across the street. They matched. He took a screenshot and tweeted it alongside the original image with the exact coordinates: 50.543838 degrees north, 30.226820 degrees east. “The whole process took 20 or 30 minutes,” McKeever says.
Geolocation is just one of the methods that OSINT researchers are using to clarify what is happening in Ukraine. Others include identifying Russian projectiles from the fragments they leave behind, locating military convoys in satellite imagery, and tallying equipment losses. And clever researchers are forever adding to the tool kit. One enterprising college student uses automated air-traffic data to keep tabs on Russian oligarchs’ jets.
On its own, a single tweet like McKeever’s doesn’t mean much for the outcome of a war. But taken together, OSINT contributions can provide a panoramic perspective. The sheer volume of thousands of eyes poring over a vast stream of information allows the community to digest information on a scale that not even a superpower spy agency can manage. Marco Rubio, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, underlined the value of OSINT in a recent tweet: “Much respect to the international online #OSINT community, many of whom may not realize how much of their geolocation & vetting of videos & satellite imagery is integrated into the broader work of the intelligence community.”
Lukas Andriukaitis, who used to serve in the Lithuanian special forces and is now the associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, says that information produced by OSINT often makes its way to NATO intelligence officials. “Open source is a huge part of the work they’re doing,” he says. “There’s no need to rely on a huge network of spies because guess what? It’s out there for free.”
With the war in Ukraine, OSINT researchers have been helped by the huge amount of data generated every day by the local population. “This is the first war which is almost live-broadcast,” says Andriukaitis. “We’re getting so much information from social media.” Then there’s all the data being shared by Russians inadvertently. Invading troops made little effort to conceal their encampments from satellites, leaving trunks and tanks lined up in plain sight. Short on military radios, they have reportedly had to communicate via unencrypted transmissions, some of which have been intercepted and recorded by ham-radio hobbyists and then published on Twitter.
With no real rules governing the movement, some of the activity approaches or crosses ethical lines. Pro-Ukraine hackers managed to steal a database with the names of 120,000 Russian soldiers and publish it on the web. And after the 2014 Russian shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, the Dutch journalism collective Bellingcat used stolen data to track down the culprits.
Still, the work being done by OSINT practitioners is growing in scope and influence, and not just in the realm of war. Traditional news organizations are building out their own open-source departments — the New York Times calls its division “Visual Investigations,” while the Washington Post prefers “Visual Forensics” — and using them to examine topics from police shootings to the January 6 riot at the Capitol. “Originally, open-source was quite a sort of geeky thing to do,” says Ben Strick, director of investigations at the Centre for Information Resilience. “Now, we’re almost like the people’s army.”
interested in getting involved, McKeever says, should start by learning the basics. Of the many guides available online, he recommends Strick’s YouTube channel. From there, it’s a matter of jumping in and taking a whack at an image or video. If you’re able to reach an interesting conclusion, you can post it to an online discussion or as a reply to a Twitter thread. “A lot of the people in this community are open to people who reply to them with work that’s accurate and clear,” McKeever says.
For advice and guidance on projects to work on, there are OSINT-focused discussion groups both on Reddit and at the Project Owl server on Discord. Volunteers can also pitch in at nonprofit organizations like the Digital Forensic Research Lab, Bellingcat, and the Centre for Information Resilience. The latter has set up a centralized resource called the Russia-Ukraine Monitor Map that collates hundreds of OSINT reports about military movements, bombings, civilian casualties, and destroyed equipment.
“People want to contribute towards a bigger picture and do good,” says Strick, “and there are people doing good already that have never done this before.” He cites the case of a new volunteer who so expertly analyzed photos of shrapnel that Strick assumed he had a background in the field. “I said, ‘You must be some sort of explosives expert.’ And he said, ‘No, I’ve got Google Images. I can just cross-reference the pictures.’”
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (photo: Getty)
The Kremlin has dispatched two separate groups of mercenaries to Kyiv in an attempt to kill the Ukrainian President.
Since Russia’s unprovoked war on its western neighbor began last week, Zelenskyy has been conducting business from a handful of bunkers throughout the nation’s capital, having declined an offer from the U.S. to evacuate him.
That’s left him vulnerable to attempts on his life by teams of Kremlin-backed assassins.
Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov told a Ukrainian television network that anti-war elements in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) have been essential in helping foil some of the plots.
In a defiant speech last week, Zelenskyy acknowledged that he is “target No. 1” in an effort to “damage Ukraine politically by destroying the head of state.”
“But we are not afraid, we are not afraid of anything,” he said. “We are not afraid to defend our country. We are not afraid of Russia.”
U.S. officials warned last month that Russian forces have compiled a hit list of Ukrainian citizens to be killed or sent to detention camps.
The Kremlin has reportedly dispatched two separate groups of mercenaries to Kyiv in an attempt to fulfill that directive. One is being orchestrated by the Wagner Group, a private military contractor run by Vladimir Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, aka “Putin’s Chef.” The other is a group of elite Chechen fighters controlled by Chechen Republic leader Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov.
Danilov said on Tuesday that an assassination attempt by the Chechens over the weekend failed, and the group responsible for the attempt had been “destroyed.”
Among those killed by Ukrainian forces was Chechen-Russian Gen. Magomed Tushayev, who has been accused of torturing and killing LGBTQ+ people in Chechnya.
“As we’ve seen in the past, we expect Russia will try to force cooperation through intimidation and repression,” a U.S. official speaking on condition of anonymity told Foreign Policy.
“These acts, which in past Russian operations have included targeted killings, kidnappings/forced disappearances, detentions, and the use of torture, would likely target those who oppose Russian actions, including Russian and Belarusian dissidents in exile in Ukraine, journalists and anti-corruption activists, and vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons.”
"I think policymakers right now know that they have a lever at their hands that, if pulled, would move millions of children out of poverty," Sophie Collyer says. (photo: Alamy)
The research director of Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy discusses a staggering new report on child poverty in the United States.
The child tax credit has existed in several different forms since it first became law, in 1997, and Biden’s expansion of it was the biggest in its history: the payments became bigger, and were distributed through monthly checks instead of a single annual lump sum. Perhaps most crucially, Biden made the benefit available to families with little to no income, who were previously ineligible for the credit. I discussed the Columbia report with one of its three authors, Sophie Collyer, the research director at the center. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what made the child tax credit so effective, the impact of its disappearance on Black and Latino children, and what the pandemic has taught us about how to improve the social safety net.
What did your study find at the most basic level?
We found that 3.7 million more children are in poverty as a result of rolling back the child tax credit between December and January. We’ve been measuring poverty over all and among children since the beginning of the pandemic, but using a monthly framework. Traditionally, poverty’s measured in an annual framework, where you take people’s incomes across the year and evaluate it against a poverty threshold that’s calculated for that year. What we’ve seen though, with the pandemic, is much volatility in terms of income that families are receiving from month to month, because different government policies have been in effect for part of the year and not in effect for other parts of the year. Some examples would be things like stimulus checks and unemployment benefits.
So it’s been a really useful tool for evaluating the impact of the expanded child tax credit in real time. Over the summer, with the initial payments, we saw an immediate reduction in the rate of child poverty, particularly because it was being paid out monthly for the first time and reaching about one in three children who were previously ineligible for the credit. So over the summer you’re seeing both the initial payments being paid monthly for the first time but also a much greater share of the child population being eligible for the credit. But it was only in effect in terms of monthly payments through the end of 2021. And the expansion of the child tax credit was only in effect for the calendar year 2021. With the change in the year from December to January, January was the first month where families would not receive these monthly payments of either three hundred dollars or two hundred and fifty dollars per child, depending on age. So the exact reverse of what we saw over the summer happened, and we saw a spike in child poverty as a direct result.
Intuitively, it seems very likely that the end of the credit is responsible for the spike we saw from December to January. But are there ways to control for the increase so that we know it was due to the child-tax-credit expiration?
That’s a great question. Within December, for example, you could see the number of children moved out of poverty by the credit in that month. In December, we saw about 3.7 million children being moved out of poverty as a direct result of the credit. Then when we move to January, we’re seeing 3.7 million more children in poverty. I think the difference between those two months lends more evidence to the fact that this is a direct result of the absence of the credit.
When you’re studying this, obviously you’re not talking to 3.7 million people, but you’re studying individuals. Are you having people tell you directly that the credit is why they have less money, or something else?
This framework is developed using data from something called the Current Population Survey, which is run by the Census Bureau. The Census Bureau every year releases an annual poverty rate based on data collected in the March version of this C.P.S. survey. But there’s actually a survey done every month. And there’s a methodology that allows us to use the most recent data from the C.P.S. to estimate or project what the monthly poverty rate is within a month, and also account for these variations in income from different policies.
What did you find about poverty rates for Black and Latino children specifically in this December-to-January change?
A big piece of the expanded child tax credit last year was that the earnings requirement associated with the credit was removed for 2021, and it was made fully refundable. The amount that you received was independent of your earnings. This was the first time this has ever happened. Before the expansion, many Black and Latino children were left behind when it came to receiving the full benefits of this credit—one out of two Black children and one out of two Latino children were ineligible for the full credit because of family income levels.
Then, with the expansion, you saw that gap being filled in. Now, with the absence of the credit, we saw a 5.5-percentage-point increase in the poverty rate of Black children and 7.1 percentage points for Latino children, translating to about nearly seven hundred thousand Black children falling into poverty and 1.3 million Latino children falling into poverty as a direct result of the credit being removed. It gets tricky when you are talking between these relative increases and percentage-point increases, but over all Black and Latino children saw the largest percentage-point increase in their poverty rates.
You said that you’ve been studying child poverty since the beginning of the pandemic. I just wanted to take a step back. What did child poverty look like for the first year-plus of the pandemic, before this expanded child tax credit went into effect?
Child poverty in 2020 was actually lower than you might have expected. And that actually had to do with the stimulus payments and the unemployment-insurance benefits that many families received. Counter to what many people probably think, 2020 actually had one of the lowest poverty rates on record as a direct result of the policies in place in that year. That said, child poverty has been higher in the United States than nearly any other wealthy nation for decades, or at least for the past decade. We had a child-poverty rate of about thirteen per cent before the pandemic, which again was extremely high, and it was much higher in various areas, and by ethnicity there were also dramatic variations. Before the pandemic, people were pushing for this expansion to the child tax credit, knowing that it would address the problem that we had, and had for a long time, which is strikingly high rates of child poverty.
So it was introduced and included as part of the American Rescue Plan, in part because of the knowledge that it would help address child poverty at the same time as levelling income in response to the pandemic. But it wasn’t necessarily thought of as a specifically pandemic-related policy. In 2019, the National Academy of Sciences released a report on policy packages that would reduce rates of child poverty, and the expansion of the child tax credit was found to have the greatest potential impact on the child-poverty rate.
So it seems like what you’re saying is that before the pandemic, we had these terrible child-poverty rates compared with other rich countries, and then things actually got better than people expected during the pandemic. But it appears, from the latest report, that child poverty has now risen above what it was prior to the pandemic. Is that accurate?
Before the pandemic, it was about fourteen per cent. Now it’s higher than it was before the pandemic. All of the government support, in terms of what families were receiving to stabilize their incomes, is basically gone at this point, with maybe the exception of some continued expansions to food stamps. That’s the only piece of pandemic-related income support that is still being made. But also the seventeen per cent is based on a monthly framework, and it’s not necessarily apples to apples because it jumps around from month to month, and you tend to see dips around March and April.
Why is it that the child tax credit is so effective, do you think?
Well, it’s giving families money directly. When you’re thinking about poverty, you’re evaluating a family’s income relative to a line, and this is a direct way of increasing family income. That’s why it’s so effective. It’s also been extremely effective because it fills in so many of those gaps that existed beforehand. Children in poverty and low-income children benefitted disproportionately from this expansion because they were ineligible for the full value of the credit beforehand, so they were seeing greater gains than middle-income families as a direct result of the expansion. But basically all children were receiving this credit. More than ninety per cent of children in the country were eligible for either the full thirty-six-hundred-dollar credit or the three-thousand-dollar credit in 2021.
Does the incredibly steep rise from December to January change any of your prior assumptions about the social safety net?
I think it wasn’t that surprising, and that’s an unfortunate thing. We knew that providing this money to families had a direct impact, and so the inverse of that is the same, where it has a direct impact below the poverty line or further below the poverty line. I wouldn’t say it was something unexpected, but what I think about is the volatility that families are facing. We’re both seeing an increase in the poverty rate, and that it’s connected to families having had a stable flow of income for six months in 2021, and then that just disappearing. We’re seeing the impact of it in terms of the poverty rate, but it’s also creating more instability for families and children across the country.
There has been a lot of well-done qualitative work on what families have been using the money for. What is a theme across all data sets and many different sources of information is that many families have been using this to purchase food. Just as we’re seeing this increase in poverty, one might expect—we don’t know yet—an increase in the rate of food insufficiency and hunger among households with kids and among children, which is deeply troubling.
But another very interesting aspect of the program is that it’s cash-based. So many social policies and social programs in the United States consist of in-kind transfers—housing subsidies, food stamps—and they’re infrequently cash. But with this you saw families receiving a cash payment, and cash is fungible. In one month, you might need it to fill in a food budget, but for the next month, it might be used to fix a car. Another month, it might help with child care. That flexibility is also something that comes out of the data, with families using it to meet needs that vary from month to month. I think that’s a really important takeaway in terms of the importance of cash in families’ lives and the importance of the monthly aspect of this. As I said, it used to be this tax refund that would come at tax time in a lump-sum payment for those who were eligible for the full credit. Bills often come once a month. They don’t just pile up and come at tax time, when you might be able to use a refund to pay them back. The monthly aspect of this also contributes to that stabilizing effect.
I don’t want to put a rosy spin on any of this, but it seems like, from what you’re saying, the one positive that might come out of this, even if it is not renewed, is that there are some new ideas about smart ways to do social policy.
Yeah. I think policymakers right now know that they have a lever at their hands that, if pulled, would move millions of children out of poverty. I think that’s just an important thing for everyone to know: that there’s a choice at hand that people can make, and it will have dramatic impacts on the poverty rate. I think that the pandemic also over all has revealed how effective policy can be at stabilizing family income. We did not see a sharp rise in the poverty rate in 2020, and I don’t think anybody in March of 2020 thought that would be the case. Every family experienced a lot of financial strain, but it also revealed that policies can be effective at least at keeping people out of poverty.
A Border Patrol agent walks by the border wall near Sunland Park, N.M. (photo: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The barrier Trump touted as ‘impenetrable’ can be breached with common power tools, the Washington Post reports
Nearly 500 miles of barrier was constructed by the Trump administration beginning in 2019, mostly in rural New Mexico and Arizona. Former president Trump touted the “big, beautiful wall” as the “Rolls-Royce” of barriers, but smugglers have breached the wall at least 3,272 times, mostly with common power tools found at hardware stores.
“No structure is impenetrable, so we will continue to work to focus resources on modern, effective border management measures to improve safety and security,” Luis Miranda, a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) told the Post.
He added that border security “requires a variety of resources and efforts, infrastructure, technology, and personnel”, much of which was not funded when Trump’s wall was constructed.
Before its construction, former president Donald Trump promised Mexico would pay for construction of the border wall and that it would be “virtually impenetrable”.
Ultimately, 458 miles of new border fencing was paid for by taxpayers at a cost of $11bn and there was evidence as early as 2019 that smugglers were sawing through the boundary with $100 power tools.
Part of the border wall is constructed using posts cemented in concrete at the base which support a long lintel at the top. Smugglers are easily able to saw through the posts and swing them open, then continue using the same breach until the damage is detected by the border patrol. Other sections have been damaged by monsoons.
Smuggling organizations have sawn large enough holes to pass an SUV through. In one instance, an SUV loaded with 23 migrants passed through a section of border wall near San Diego and soon after collided with a semi-truck, killing 13 people.
By 2021, the government had spent another $2.6m in taxpayer funds to repair the “wall”, and cited the lack of infrastructure infrastructure and personnel as an impediment to keeping it intact.
Locals pose for a photo at a rally in support of a union for Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, February 26. (photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty)
New polling finds that a near supermajority of black residents in Jefferson Country, Alabama, back the worker-led effort to unionize the massive facility in Bessemer.
Perhaps nothing has made the chasm between Amazon’s professed racial-justice commitment and its actual behavior more obvious than recent developments in Bessemer, Alabama — where workers will vote once again this month on whether to form a union. Located in the state’s Jefferson County, Bessemer is home to about twenty-seven thousand people, nearly three-quarters of whom are black and more than a quarter of whom live below the poverty line.
During its campaign to dissuade the same workers from unionizing last year, the company mandated anti-union meetings for warehouse employees, pressured the United States Postal Service to install a special box so workers would feel surveilled, and even changed the timing of local traffic lights to disadvantage labor organizers (these tactics proved so Orwellian that the vote was ultimately thrown out by a judge and a second election was scheduled). In an especially cynical move, Amazon has even used the Black Lives Matter logo on its anti-union literature in the past.
Regardless of what the company does this time to try and suppress worker organizing, a new survey commissioned by the Institute for Policy Studies finds overwhelming support among the people of Jefferson County for unionization. Of those polled, a full 62 percent favor the union drive — including 49 percent of white residents and a 78 percent supermajority of black residents. As Matthew Cunningham-Cook and Marc D. Bayard point out in a recent essay for the American Prospect, the heavily black worker–led effort to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) represents a critical step in the broader struggle for racial justice in the South and beyond:
The campaign by the Black workers in Bessemer will have ripple effects across the South and the country — yet it presents a quandary for a labor movement that still lacks a cohesive and comprehensive strategy to organize Black workers, particularly in the South. The Amazon battle takes place in a context of more than 150 years of post–Civil War aggressive labor control that combines white supremacy with anti-Black violence, limiting the growth and the potential of unions across the region. As union density decreases further, there is a major untapped well of Southern workers. If organized, they would simultaneously bring the movement new members and prevent further dilution of labor standards in the North.
If Bessemer’s heavily black Amazon workforce ultimately forms a union, it will thus represent a significant victory for both racial equality and working-class power — and a monumental rebuttal to those who cynically pretend you can have one without the other.
A damaged administrative building at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant on March 4. (photo: Reuters)
‘Imminent Danger’ Continues As Russian Forces Near Second Active Nuclear Site, US Ambassador Says
That smoke. Those tracers. That fire. They, more than most others, knew the precise mechanics of how an accident could quickly turn into disaster. Although the damage appears to have been contained — and Europe spared a nuclear disaster on the level of Fukushima — nuclear experts said they were still fearful as Russia’s military battles its way across Ukraine. The country has four active nuclear power plants and one failed one, Chernobyl, whose radiation still requires constant upkeep.
“This morning I thought about the Cuban missile crisis,” said Frank von Hippel, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University, who tracked loose nuclear weapons on behalf of the Clinton White House and helped lead efforts to calm the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
“This is the first time we’ve had a war among nuclear reactors,” von Hippel said. “That was not a scenario we considered.”
Nuclear fears already shot up last week in the opening phases of the invasion, as Russian troops took control of the Chernobyl nuclear site as they swept south toward Kyiv from Belarus. And as they battled along a key stretch of the Dnieper River on Thursday near the industrial city of Zaporizhzhia, they swung into position around the vast nuclear power plant and eventually captured it. Ukrainian officials warned that the South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant in Mykolaiv province could be next, with fighting underway about 19 miles from the site.
The risks to the plants amid the fighting are multiple and compounding, since a swift fix to any mounting problem depends on the quick and energetic work of the highly trained personnel who work inside each facility, experts said. Nuclear engineers who are forced to work multiple shifts at gunpoint — or who may be worrying about family and friends who are dead or at risk — are going to be less effective than if they were to face the same technical challenges under peacetime conditions.
“This morning there were a lot of people who were really freaked out,” said Mycle Schneider, a Paris-based consultant and a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, who said he traded emails early Friday with other experts around the world who were deeply concerned by what they had seen of the incident at the Zaporizhzhia plant.
“When you see fire on a nuclear power site that’s always bad,” Schneider said. “To see the images of fighting on a power plant site is horrible. For everyone that knows what that means or could mean, it’s very bad news.”
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, warned in a statement Friday, “It is high time to stop an armed conflict from putting nuclear facilities at severe risk, potentially endangering the safety of people and the environment in Ukraine and beyond.” He declared his willingness to travel personally to Chernobyl to arrange for the plant’s safety.
The battle for control of the power facilities had Ukrainian leaders speculating that Russian forces might be using them as a form of nuclear blackmail, to intimidate Ukrainians and the world at the same time Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his country’s nuclear forces to be put on alert. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called it “nuclear terrorism” and asked the United Nations Security Council to declare a no-fly zone over his country in response — a step that NATO rejected on the grounds that it would risk drawing Western forces directly into combat with Russian warplanes. But experts interviewed by The Washington Post suggested that the plants may have limited appeal as strategic targets.
To start, taking a nuclear power plant offline wouldn’t shut off the lights in Ukraine. The country’s grid operators could probably increase power production elsewhere, especially because overall power consumption is lower than normal because of the wartime conditions.
Turning off the power plants would be difficult, and probably not appetizing for the Russian forces that captured them, said Alex Riabchyn, a former Ukrainian deputy energy minister. “If you disconnect, okay, you shut everything down. There are a huge amount of processes there. It will be a technological catastrophe for everybody,” he said.
At Zaporizhzhia, at least part of motivation for taking the plant could have been control of territory as Russian forces push northward, Riabchyn said: “It’s controlling the riverbank, it’s controlling the territory. It’s very strategic.”
That also may have been why Russia took Chernobyl, since it is located at a key site that Russian forces needed to pass through as they rushed toward Kyiv from Belarus.
Other experts on Russia’s nuclear forces said they suspected that the power plants were incidental in the broader assault on the country.
“I would guess that Russia would rather those stations wouldn’t be there, but it cannot avoid them,” Pavel Podvig, the Geneva-based director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project, wrote in an email. “On the other hand, Russia probably had a choice of not going there at all — there is no particular military value in taking control over these facilities. And that choice was not made. I would say it’s rather irresponsible.”
Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, told the Security Council on Friday that the discussion about the Zaporizhzhia plant was “a false information attack, as if Russia had fired against the power plant.” The “plant and the surrounding areas have been placed under the protection of the Russian military,” he added.
“I don’t think we have ever seen anything of this sort that could be called comparable,” he said. “The largest risk is an accident, is a misguided missile, is somebody who points the tank cannon in the wrong direction. It is somebody shooting a helicopter or a plane from the sky and it falls on some vulnerable, crucial parts of the facility.
“A nuclear reactor is designed for peacetime and is very much regulated in detail,” he said. “We have a situation where there’s no rules anymore, none.” He said the complexity of the plants meant there were many things that could go wrong. Several experts noted the potential unreliability of the backup diesel-fired generators that help cool the reactors and spent fuel when electricity from the grid is cut. A similar failure helped contribute to the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in 2011.
But Schneider said any fighting near the power plants was a tremendous risk.
“Every single issue you look at is cumulative with other issues,” Schneider said. One nuclear expert said there needs to be a negotiated agreement under which workers can have shift changes and undertake maintenance unimpeded if there is an extended conflict.
“These plants are now in a situation that few people ever seriously contemplated when they were originally built, and that is the potential they’d be in the middle of a war zone,” said Edwin Lyman, director of the nuclear safety project at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “No nuclear plant has been designed to protect against a full-scale military attack.” Asked if Russia could sabotage or weaponize the nuclear facilities as part of its offensive, Lyman said he certainly hopes that scenario never comes to pass.
“I don’t think there’s much strategic value in this context for Russia to contaminate the very land it is trying to control,” he said.
Brady Dennis contributed to this report.
A mountaintop removal mining site operated by A&G Coal Corporation in the Appalachian Mountains in Wise County, Virginia, in 2012. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty)
TNC hopes the project can be a model for similar sites nationwide. The conservation group views the Appalachian Mountains as one of the most critical regions on the planet for conservation and has purchased more than a quarter million acres of forest in the region.
Partnering with Dominion Energy and Sun Tribe, TNC hopes to capitalize on the large areas flattened by mining operations near existing transmission lines and bring clean energy jobs to the overwhelmingly rural and Republican area that has lost more than 27,000 people since 2010.
“We’re very proud to be an energy-producing community,” Lou Wallace, whose family has relied on coal for generations and who now chairs the Russell County Board of Supervisors, told the Post. “This is helping us to reimagine how we produce energy. So we’re still able to say we’re keeping the lights on somewhere.”
As reported by The Washington Post:
In 2019, the Nature Conservancy acquired 253,000 acres of forest in the central Appalachian Mountains that it calls the Cumberland Forest Project. It’s one small part of the group’s efforts in the mountain range, which reaches from Alabama to Canada.
“We’ve identified the Appalachians as one of the most important places on Earth for us to do conservation,” says Brad Kreps, the Nature Conservancy’s Clinch Valley program director, who is leading the solar projects. “We put the Appalachians in a very rare company along with the Amazon, the wild lands of Kenya and the forests of Borneo.”
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