Charts for Potential Fall out from damage to Nuclear sites in Ukraine

I was studying in Germany in '95 and carried out a field study into the effects of precipitation patterns following the Chernobyl disaster on soil radioactivity in southern Germany. Where rain had fallen in the weeks after the disaster, gamma radiation from Cs-137 (half-life 30 years) in the soil was notably higher than in the areas where it hadn't rained. Where no rain fell, radioactivity was almost completely absent.

So it's not just wind direction but also precipitation patterns that are things to look out for.

Well the bottom half of the atmosphere (which is where most nuclear fallout from non-weaponized explosions would remain) continues to flow mostly southwestward across the Black Sea in the case of the southern facility and across western Ukraine for Chornobyl, and in fact there will be some unseasonably cold weather most of this month in the entire region including the Balkans, Turkey, Greece and the eastern Med. One wave of more extreme cold is underway now and another one occurs about a week to ten days from now. The 510 dm thickness contour makes occasional appearances over Ukraine in this time frame and even heads into Turkey although it degrades to 516 dm once there. This will be 10 to 15 deg (C) below normal in some of those southern climates. We'll be hearing a few stories about snow in Athens and Istanbul and higher parts of Israel too.

Sometimes part of this colder air mass shears off and tries to move west into southern Germany and France. If there was to be a high radiation crisis in the conflict zone, some of this would advect west at times but it doesn't look sustained enough to become a major hazard for western Europe, central might be a different story.

My hope is that this ends sooner rather than later. It seems to me that Putin's strategy is to punish eastern Ukraine where he seems to think the de-Nazification is most needed, probably that translates to the observation of some perceived atrocities over the past few years against Russians that he associates with cities in that region, which is perhaps why the shelling and military activity around those cities is perceptibly greater so far than in other parts of Ukraine. I think he has the massive convoy buildup near Kyiv mostly to pin down a large part of Ukraine's armed forces there, so they cannot fully deal with the events in eastern Ukraine. This tells me that perhaps he does not plan a major incursion into Kyiv at least for a while, and hopes to get a favourable settlement (favourable to him that is) so he can retreat into the three enclaves that he claims should be in Russia.

However, trying to read this guy's mind is perhaps beyond anyone's ability, particularly mine.

Well we have lived a charmed life in terms of avoiding the big nuclear disaster that could have happened several different times over the nuclear era, I'm sure you are all familiar with some of the times where events big or small could have gotten us into the nightmare. This is no doubt the most concerning time since the Cuban missile crisis which I vaguely recall hearing about as a kid, just after a few years of monster Soviet nuclear tests in their arctic, and feeling apprehensive about it all (at the age of 12-13). This is a murky business because we can't really tell whether Putin has lost some of his legendary smarts, or is just misinformed and looking for a way out of an unexpected mess, although surely anyone could have told him this would be the result. We cannot even be 100% sure that Biden is playing it straight either, U.S. political forums are always buzzing with rumours about Hunter Biden and close associates of other "uniparty" politicians, notably Mitt Romney, the friendliest Republican now that McCain is gone.

The alternative is Trump who has his own balance sheet where in some ways he might do better with this file and in other ways he might be even more worrying. Joking about false flags involving China might appeal to his base but as somewhat of a neutral I would say it sounded strange coming from somebody who could return to power, if you or I said it in a bar that's one thing, but this is on a different level.

It makes me wonder, since we cannot really trust too much of what we are told by either politicians or intelligence services nowadays, since they don't seem to be working in our interest, how could average people like us create fact finding agencies that could report those things that are currently only the subject of rumour or speculation? Should there be as many secrets in the world as we seem to tolerate? I get why some military info is classified but some of the other things are very much in the public interest, and the bottom line is, if elites actually operate on assumptions that involve the general expendability of billions of unconnected people like us, then should we not have some way of pushing back rather than being herded around like cattle for their exclusive benefit? I'm sure the people of Ukraine feel like that, big powers absent-mindedly debating in the abstract what should happen while their lives are turned upside down and for no apparent benefit to anybody, I'm sure Ukraine is not going to be absorbed willingly into a greater Russia, and any attempt to do that would probably end up in years of violence if it didn't lead faster to Putin's removal from office. That seems like one way out, but then we are stuck with all the murky business unexplained and back to the other files where we are gradually losing what freedoms we used to have.

Getting back to the actual subject of this thread, unfortunately the lower to mid-level atmospheric flow will be pointing more towards western Europe than the Balkans by end of the week, another potent shot of very cold air is due into Ukraine around Thursday-Friday, but any wafting radioactivity that might occur for any reason would increasingly be likely to travel towards central and parts of western Europe. Eventually a more zonal flow would develop and then any such hazards would shift back towards parts of Russia and countries further east. That looks like being delayed to very late March or some time in April and only for intervals, not all the time. A southerly flow would be good in that it would be aimed at Moscow which might serve as a deterrent to anything risky or foolish. But that doesn't seem to be very likely for sustained periods. There are patterns where that can happen but I don't see those in the near future or even medium term.