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youzicha · 5 years ago

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could the Chernobyl disaster have happened outside the Soviet Union or the communist bloc? was there anything socialist or autocratic about it? or could it have happened in any similarly-dangerous and similarly-complex engineering project?

My immediate reaction is to group the Chernobyl accident with other high-tech accidents like plane crashes, industrial fires, or radiation incidents in the west, but maybe that’s because I like to read step-by-step accident descriptions which focus on the technical aspects! It was definitely the case that Soviet nuclear power plants were much less safe than the western ones, although it’s not obvious if that is due to authoritarianism…

From an outside view, I think the various western incidents should make us less comfortable that it couldn’t have happened here.

• The radiation releases from the Fukushima accident were ten times smaller than at Chernobyl, but it still represents a failure of reactor containment. Apparently quite a lot of Cs-137 was in fact released from Fukushima (like a third of the Chernobyl release), but most of it went into the Pacific ocean rather than the atmosphere.

• The Three Mile Island accident showed that U.S. reactor operators can make mistakes too. I used to dismiss it—in the end there were no big radioactivity releases, so no big deal, right?—but after the Fukushima accident maybe we should re-evaluate it. TMI had a core meltdown and a hydrogen explosion, much like Fukushima, so I guess it could have gone badly.

• The Windscale reactor was also graphite moderated, so the 1957 Windscale fire might have developed into a miniature version of the Chernobyl accident. (The physical size of the reactors were similar—180 tonnes uranium and 2000 tonnes graphite at Windscale, versus 190 tonnes uranium and 1700 tonnes graphite at Chernobyl 4—but the Chernobyl burnup was 10.9 MW-d/kg while a typical value for making weapons plutonium is 0.5 MW-d/kg, so the Chernobyl reactor contained 20 times more radioactivity.)

At Chernobyl the core was scattered and caught fire, and then over the course of a few days almost all the graphite burned and the radioactive material was dispersed in the smoke. At Windscale, the graphite caught fire inside the reactor and there were no plans for how to extinguish it. According to the post-accident report,

[After the fire had been going on for about a day] the use of water was first considered. Two hazards had to be examined: first the danger of a hydrogen-oxygen explosion which would blow out the filters, second a possible criticality hazard due to the replacement of air by water. The Management were informed, however, of the danger of releasing high temperature Wigner energy if the graphite temperatures were to rise much higher than 1200°C. It was thought that this might well ignite the whole pile.

Happily the water worked well and the fire was put out before it spread to the rest of the core, but the filters in the air stack basically did nothing, so a large fire would have created a major radiological disaster.

Chernobyl was much bigger than all western accidents, but to me it feels like an extreme point on a spectrum.

If we take an inside view, the Chernobyl accident happened because of a combination of operator error and poor design, and we could try to trace either of these to Soviet authoritarianism.

As for the operator errors, there were three fateful decisions. First, the Chernobyl chief engineer Nikolai Fomin approved the plan for the turbine draw-down experiment, classifying it as an “electrical” experiment which could be signed off locally. In hindsight, because the experiment involved manipulating the power level of the reactor and the flow-rate of the cooling loop, it affected the dynamics of the reactor and should have been referred to physicists at Scientific Research Institute of Power Engineering (NIKIET) and the Committee for the Supervision of Nuclear Power Safety (Gosatomenergonadzor) for analysis and approval. It’s unclear if that would have changed matters, because the experiment would have been safe if executed according to the plan, but the physicists could perhaps have drawn attention to the safety aspects. As it were, the Chernobyl staff were quite complacent—perhaps because they had already tried it several times before, making various adjustments to the turbine control logic each time. On the day of the accident they seem to have treated it as a routine matter, and Fomin did not even notify plant director Brukhanov.

Maybe you can see the Soviet penchant for centralization here. I don’t know how it works in America, but Swedish nuclear power stations employ staff physicists who carry out calculations about how the plant will respond to various abnormal scenarios. That seems like it may be helpful for ensuring that the operating staff has easy access to physics expertise, compared to the Soviet system where those calculations where done far off in another city, and under a separate bureaucracy (NIKIET was under the Ministry of Medium-sized Machinery, while the reactor staff was employed by the Ministry of Energy).

Then in the reactor control room, deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov gave two crucial bad orders. First, he had the operators deviate from the plan and start the experiment from a 200 MW power level instead of 700 MW. It’s unclear why he would do that—at the trial it was suggested that he might have thought a lower level would be safer, although it actually made the reactor dangerously unstable. Then, when the reactor was inadvertently shut down, he insisted that the operators violate regulations and start it up again, which created the conditions for the explosion. Interestingly, Dyatlov’s position was administrative, outside the operational chain of command, so formally he had no authority to give orders to the operators on duty, but he still expected to be obeyed and threatened to have them fired if they didn’t comply.

The Chernobyl tv-series tries to sell this as part of Soviet authoritarianism too—they insert a fictional scene where plant director Brukhanov pressures Dyatlov to complete the test so that Brukhanov can get a promotion—but that still would not explain the 200MW order. Perhaps some of the blame should go to Dyatlov’s personality: his coworkers say he was knowledgeable but stubborn and intolerant of dissent. Either way, it’s hard to believe that that overconfident, authoritarian managers were unique to the Soviet Union. I don’t have any examples from the nuclear industry, but maybe you could look at e.g. ship captains—it is easy to find examples of captains making bad decisions, either because of pressure from their bosses or because they are just being stupid.

Meanwhile, the reactor design also suffered from several problems that contributed to the disaster. On paper, this should not have happened. The Soviet nuclear energy industry was monitored by the USSR State Committee for the Supervision of Nuclear Power Safety (Gosatomenergonadzor), who produced a set of Nuclear Safety Regulations for Nuclear Power Plants (NSR), and then approved the technical safety report of a reactor design. The Chernobyl plant was approved in May 1975.

It shouldn’t have been. A 1991 report points out that the regulations include NSR Article 3.2.2, the total power coefficient of reactivity is not positive under any operating condition, and NSR Article 3.3.26, the reactor’s emergency protection system must ensure that the chain reaction is automatically, quickly and reliably terminated—which point to the two major flaws which caused the accident. At the time of the approval, Gosatomenergonadzor was part of the Ministry of Medium-sized Machinery, and the same ministry also controlled the NIKIET and the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, the two main designers of the reactors. In this way, there was very little external checks of what the (notoriously secretive) Ministry was doing. Former Chernobyl physicist Vladimir Chernousenko writes:

How could a reactor with so many defects be built and put into operation? Firstly, no-one analyzed the RBMK plans at the design stage (that is, there was no independent, external scrutiny). Secondly, the designers themselves did carry out an analysis, but on a very superficial level (because of the poor experimental facilities, the chronic backwardness of the available computer technology, etc.).

Thirdly, thanks to the monopoly that exists in Soviet nuclear science, the RBMK reactors, unlike airplanes, automobiles, etc., were not subjected to any serious tests or trials of their durability. That is why 16 reactors were brought on line without even a Technical Basis of Safety of Reactor Installation (TBSRI) or a TBS of Nuclear Power Stations (TBSNPS) certificate.However, with these obligatory parts of the project missing, it is illegal to not only operate a nuclear power station, but even to build it (GSG §§1.2.3, 2.1.14). It was only in 1988 that the chief designer made an attempt to officially certify the safety of the second- and third-generation RBMK stations.

As for why the design had these flaws in the first place, both of them can be traced to schedule pressures and cost-cutting. First, the choice of a water cooled/graphite moderated reactor is inherently risky, because a disruption of the water supply can cause a power surge. When drawing up the plans for civilian nuclear power the Ministry of Power had considered three possible designs named RMBK-1000 (water-cooled/graphite-moderated), RK-1000 (gas-cooled/graphite-moderated) and WWER-1000 (water-cooled/water-moderated), and in September 1967 they announced that the RK-1000 had been selected. However, this was too technically ambitious to meet the schedule, and one year later they instead opted for the RBMK-1000, which was similar to the reactors already used to produce weapons plutonium.

A graphite moderated reactor has a positive void coefficient, and as it turned out, when the control rods were fully withdrawn this could get big enough to overwhelm the thermal coefficient and make the overall power coefficient positive. This effect had not been anticipated ahead of time, but was noticed experimentally when the reactors were taken in use:

Neither the designers, nor the plant operators, nor the regulatory body attached proper importance to the large positive coefficients of reactivity which became apparent from experiments, and they did not attempt to find acceptable theoretical explanations. The obvious discrepancy between the actual core characteristics and the projected design values was not adequately analysed and consequently it was not known how the RBMK reactor would behave in accident situations.There are a number of explanations for the poor quality of the calculational analysis of the safety of the design. These include the fact that, until recently, Soviet computer techniques were chronically outdated and the standard of computer codes was very low. Three dimensional non-stationary neutron-thermal-hydraulic models are required in order to calculate the physical parameters of an RBMK reactor under different operating conditions. Such models first became available only shortly before the Chernobyl accident and were not really developed until after the accident.

Second, the scram rods were poorly designed. In addition to the too-short graphite tips (which makes the reactor explode instead of stopping), the system was much too slow—the rods were forced through a water-filled channel and took 18 seconds to fully deploy. Actually, the 1969 technical drawings had neither of these problems, because the scram rod tubes were water-film cooled, so the rods could be inserted in 2.5 seconds and did not displace water. Film-cooled channels are more difficult to construct and more expensive, and the final design reused the water-filled channels for control rods for the scram rods as well.

In addition to the above two flaws, western publications after the accident generally pointed at a difference in design philosophy. Western power plants follow a “Defense in Depth” philosophy, with redundant systems designed to handle multiple simultaneous failures. The USSR took a “different” approach:

The Soviet philosophy of safety with both breeder and conventional reactors places heavy emphasis on excellence of design, reliability of equipment, and careful operating procedures to prevent any releases of radioactivity to the environment. Special containment structures are not thought to be justified because of the improbability of any serious accident, and such domes are therefore judged to be costly and superfluous precautions. The design-basis accident also does not include loss of coolant in the core, and thus the reactors do not have a special emergency core cooling system. Soviet writers question the philosophy of designing redundant systems, for:

“An excess of such backup systems, where the need or the reliability is not clearly assured, introduces operational complexity and reduces over-all safety.”

It is acknowledged that some types of accidents might release radiation accumulated in the coolant, or possibly even some of the activity from unsealed fuel cans, but such releases are not projected as exceeding the daily permissible releases from power stations (1,000-10,000 Curies or less).

The Soviet equipment reliability was far from excellent, so I guess this difference in outlook was mainly due to a more relaxed attitude to radiation leaks. In the 1957 Kyshtym disaster the USSR had suffered what was then the worst radiation accident in history, and successfully kept the whole thing secret.

Indeed, the first six RBMK reactors (Leningrad 1&2, Chernobyl 1&2, and Kursk 1&2) had no structures at all to contain water/steam leaks, so any break in the cooling circuit would lead to a radioactivity release. (A 1991 report about post-Chernobyl safety improvements comments, ��The main aim in these units must be to reduce the probability of large diameter pipe breaks to a point where such accidents may be termed hypothetical. With this in mind, some computerized and experimental research was carried out into the processes which cause cracks to appear.”)

Later RBMK reactors, including Chernobyl-4, added some containment structures more similar to Western reactors, by enclosing parts of the cooling circuit in pressure-tight concrete rooms that vented into a pressure-suppression (bubbler) pool. However, the reactor itself was too big to contain in this way. It was given pressure relief pipes, but they were only dimensioned to handle breaks in at most two of the 1661 fuel channels—the pressure from more extensive breaks could tear apart the entire core. NIKIET estimated the probability of a simultaneous two-channel break as 1e-8 per reactor-year, and three or more as negligibly improbable.

Although a lot of western publications after the accident highlighted the lack of containment, it is not known if a western-style containment building would have prevented the disaster—it’s impossible to say for sure, since it is not even known exactly what caused the explosion or how big it was. But in any case, it clearly shows the higher Soviet risk tolerance.

The risk tolerance is even more visible in the way that accidents were treated. The positive power coefficient was noted soon after the first RMBK reactor (Leningrad-1) was started, but never properly investigated. There were about 10 major accidents at Soviet nuclear reactors between 1970-85, killing at least 17 reactor workers and leading to multiple radiation releases to the environment. RBMK reactors suffered partial core meltdowns at Leningrad-1 in 1975 and Chernobyl-1 in 1982, proving that the supposedly unlikely simultaneous fuel channel rupture could happen quite often. And in 1983, the positive reactivity effect of the scram rods were noticed at both Ignalina-1 and Chernobyl-4. These accidents were more serious than Three Mile Island, and in the west any one of them would had prompted big efforts, but in the USSR they were kept secret.

The reactor designers at NIKIET were notified of the scram anomaly, and started to consider improvement to the rods to eliminate it, but it was not treated as a priority; the Chernobyl-4 reactor was to be upgraded after the next shutdown in 1986. They sent out a short and inconspicuous notice to the reactor operators. NIKIET also revised the operating instructions for the RBMK-1000, specifying a new minimum “operational reactivity margin” (ORM), i.e. a limit on how far the control rods may be retracted. In 1980 the ORM limit was set to 10, and then in 1983 it was increased to 15. (After the disaster, it was increased again to 30.) If this limit had been respected, it would have kept the power reactivity coefficient negative and prevented situations where the scram-rod could cause a reactivity increase, so the NIKIET engineers might have considered the two main flaws of the reactor solved. But the updated manual only stated a number for the ORM; it didn’t flag it as a safety-critical limit. The RBMK reactors were plagued by shoddy workmanship and the operators were in the habit of constantly improvising to work around issues.

So the safety standard of the Soviet reactors was low. But are these failings particular to east bloc authoritarianism? For each cause I listed above, it seems one can find examples of the same thing happening in the west.The RBMK designers assumed there would be no safety issue as long as the reactor operators followed the ORM in the manual; this seems very similar to how Boeing reasoned about the 737 MAX. Very low failure probabilities were invented out of thin air; much like in Feynman’s description of the space shuttle program. Equipment was in disrepair forcing the operators to improvise; much like in the U.S. Navy. Reports of safety incidents were ignored; when the crew was evacuated off the Deepwater Horizon, the installation manager was heard shouting “Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig’s on fire! I told you this was gonna happen” into a satellite phone.

And there was trouble even in the western nuclear program. The 1944 Hanford B reactor was also water cooled/graphite moderated, and it was placed in remote location since the core might explode. In the 1950s there was several core meltdowns in small American research reactors. And as we saw above, the Windscale reactor was rushed into service with no containment at all. Instead of asking why Soviet reactors were shoddy, perhaps we should ask how the western reactors became safe.

Part of the credit must go to the open society. From 1954 onwards, the U.S. government invited commercial companies to build nuclear power plants. Unlike secret military reactors, the application to build such plants were public, as was the Atomic Energy Commission’s decisions to judge them safe or not. And the first serious study of a worst-case nuclear accident, WASH-740, was done because Congress was considering a law to indemnify nuclear power companies.

But the nuclear industry is not unique in being regulated in this way, and nuclear power plants still seem safer than, e.g., oil rigs. Perhaps the other part of the credit belongs to the anti-nuclear movement. The very first commercial nuclear power plant was planned to be built at Bodega Bay near San Francisco—local activist started to organize against it already in 1958, and in 1964 the public pressure forced the AEC to reject the plant. In other words, from the very beginning, America has had a third party which reviews the government/industry decisions and pressure them to take safety seriously. And reading the Wikipedia historical description,

By the early 1970s, anti-nuclear activity had increased dramatically in conjunction with concerns about nuclear safety and criticisms of a policy-making process that allowed little voice for these concerns. Initially scattered and organized at the local level, opposition to nuclear power became a national movement by the mid-1970s when such groups as the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Critical Mass became involved.[43] With the rise of environmentalism in the 1970s, the anti-nuclear movement grew substantially:[42]

In 1975–76, ballot initiatives to control or halt the growth of nuclear power were introduced in eight western states. Although they enjoyed little success at the polls, the controls they sought to impose were sometimes adopted in part by state legislature, most notably in California. Interventions in plant licensing proceedings increased, often focusing on technical issues related to safety. This widespread popular ferment kept the issue before the public and contributed to growing public skepticism about nuclear power.[42]

In 1976, four nuclear engineers -three from GE and one from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission- resigned, stating that nuclear power was not as safe as their superiors were claiming.[47][48] These men were engineers who had spent most of their working life building reactors, and their defection galvanized anti-nuclear groups across the country.[49][50] […] These issues, together with a series of other environmental, technical, and public health questions, made nuclear power the source of acute controversy.

it is striking that every single aspect here—the grassroots organizing, the ballot initiatives, the whistleblowers—would be impossible in the Soviet Union. So according to this story, democracy is not sufficient to create a safe industry, but it is a necessary condition; without it, you can’t get the environmentalist movement.

The U.S. environmentalists got things done. Starting in the mid-1970 there was a dramatic increase in construction costs of nuclear power plants in the U.S., with the capital costs increasing several times over, and in the 1980s companies basically stopped building plants. (You can’t get any safer than that!) Although there are several reasons for the cost increase, the most commonly cited factor is increased safety regulations. Lovering et al. show the following graph, and analyze it as follows:

Between 1967 and 1972, the 48 reactors that were completed before the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 began construction. Their OCC rise from a range of $600–$900/kW to approximately $1800–$2500/kW. These reactors follow a trend of increasing costs by 187%, or an annualized rate of 23%. Phung (1985) attributed these pre-TMI cost increases to emerging safety requirements resulting from pre-TMI incidents at Browns Ferry and Rancho Seco. Two outliers, Diablo Canyon 1 and 2, cost about $4100/kW in overnight construction cost, and were completed 17 and 15 years later, in 1984 and 1985.

A break in construction starts is visible around 1971 and 1972,which is likely attributable to a confluence of events affecting nuclear power construction in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These include the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1971, and the AEC’s gradual loss in public trust and its eventual replacement by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in 1975. Golay et al. (1977) determined that 88 reactors in various stages of permitting, construction, and licensing were affected by the 1971 Calvert Cliffs court decision resulting in revised AEC regulations that included back-fit requirements.Finally, the last 51 completed reactors represent a set that began their construction between 1968 and 1978 and were under construction at the time of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. For these reactors, OCC varies from $1800/kW to $11,000/kW. Thirty-eight of these reactors fall within a mid-range of $3000/kW to $6000/kW, with 11 between $1800 and $3000/kW and 10 between $6000 and $11,000/kW. From the OCC of about $2,000/kW for reactors beginning construction in 1970, OCC increases another 50–200%, or an annual increase of 5–15% between 1970 and 1978.

In particular, the safety factors Phung (1985) highlight for the mid-1970s cost increase were as follows.

Phung also notes that due to new safety regulations, power plants that had already been completed in 1978 then had to be back-fitted to fix issues that had been discovered during the 70s, which increased the cost by 28% on average compared to the original construction cost. This is a rather glaring contrast to the Soviet experience, where reactors were notably not back-fitted to fix the multitude of issues that were discovered. As late as 1983, one Soviet offical boasted that “the evolution in capital cost of Soviet WWERs has no comparison with the increase of pressurized-water reactor costs in the West during the same period.”

Anyway, the environmentalist story seems convincing as long as you only consider the the U.S. and the USSR, but I still kindof doubt it. Environmentalism and the anti-nuclear movement came to the U.S. first, and didn’t really emerge in Europe and Japan until in the first half of the 1970s (with a strong inspiration from America), when it would be too late to have a big effect on the main nuclear build-up. In Sweden, the reactor fleet was designed in the 1960s, by experts who knew best and didn’t particularly talk to outsiders. (Holmberg and Hedberg describe an Edenic state of affairs: “In the beginning of the 1970s all parties in the parliament supported a plan to build eleven nuclear reactors in Sweden. No debate, no conflict, everything calm. At the time energy policies were the topic for experts and a very limited number of politicians. Mass media were silent and the general public ignorant. In this atmosphere, the first Swedish reactor started operations in 1972.”)

Similarly, Lovering et al. notes that the pattern of construction cost increases in the U.S. is somewhat unique, and in other countries you either see more moderate increases (France, Canada), or no clear pattern of increases (Japan). You can see a small increase in French construction costs after the Chernobyl accident, but nothing like the huge jump in American costs after Three Miles Island, so does that mean that the reactor designs also didn’t benefit from the additional democratic scrutiny? By the above logic we would expect the Swedish reactors to be as crappy as the Soviet ones, but as far as I know they are actually perfectly fine…

#xhxhxhx #chernobyl #nuclear power

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the-sound-and-the-fury · 5 years ago

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Books of 2019

The annual book round up! Last year, my goal was 80 books and I read 113, and this year I inched it up to 90 and wound up reading 124. I didn’t super love a lot of books this year, but I reread a ton of books (like TRC, AFTG, and all of Jane Austen) and I borrowed a lot from the library, so overall I’m pleased with my reading year.

But here I’ve bolded my top 19 books and italicized my 10 honorable mentions, as well as struck through my bottom 5 that I managed to finish.

Last Night with the Earl (The Devils of Dover #2) - Kelly Bowen

From Out in the Cold - LA Witt

Rough Terrain (Out of Uniform #7) - Annabeth Albert

The Well of Ascension (Mistborn #2) - Brandon Sanderson

Famous in a Small Town - Emma Mills

Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

King of Scars (Nikolai Duology #1) - Leigh Bardugo

Wicked Saints (Something Dark and Holy #1) - Emily A Duncan

Get Money: Live the Life You Want, Not Just the Life You Can Afford - Kristin Wong

Heartstopper: Volume 1 - Alice Oseman

Fence, Vol. 1 (Fence #1-4) - CS Pascat

The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air #2) - Holly Black

99 Percent Mine - Sally Thorne

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Proposal (The Wedding Date #2) - Jasmine Guillory

Fence, Vol. 2 (Fence #5-8) - CS Pascat

The Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon

Mansfield Park - Jane Austen

An Unseen Attraction (Sins of the Cities #1) - KJ Charles

An Unnatural Vice (Sins of the Cities #2) - KJ Charles

An Unsuitable Heir (Sins of the Cities #3) - KJ Charles

The Hero of Ages (Mistborn #3) - Brandon Sanderson

Starless - Jacqueline Carey

Fake Out (Fake Boyfriend #1) - Eden Finley

Trick Play (Fake Boyfriend #2) - Eden Finley

Deke (Fake Boyfriend #3) - Eden Finley

Blindsided (Fake Boyfriend #4) - Eden Finley

The Trouble With Dukes (Windham Brides #1) - Grace Burrowes

Too Scot to Handle (Windham Brides #2) - Grace Burrowes

No Other Duke Will Do (Windham Brides #3) - Grace Burrowes

A Rogue of Her Own (Windham Brides #4) - Grace Burrowes

Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

Unwritten Law (Steele Brothers #1) - Eden Finley

My One and Only Duke (Rogues to Riches #1) - Grace Burrowes

When a Duchess Says I Do (Rogues to Riches #2) - Grace Burrowes

Arctic Sun (Frozen Hearts #1) - Annabeth Albert

Autoboyography - Christina Lauren

American Dreamer (Dreamers #1) - Adriana Herrera

Alanna: The First Adventure (Song of the Lioness #1) - Tamora Pierce

Bridal Boot Camp (Little Bridge Island #0.5) - Meg Cabot

Emma - Jane Austen

Bloom - Kevin Panetta

The 5th Gender - GL Carriger

Fix Her Up (Hot and Hammered #1) - Tessa Bailey

Arctic Wild (Frozen Hearts #2) - Annabeth Albert

The Friend Zone - Abby Jimenez

Red, White and Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston

The Foxhole Court (All For The Game #1) - Nora Sakavic

The Raven King (All For The Game #2) - Nora Sakavic

The King’s Men (All For The Game #3) - Nora Sakavic

Captive Prince (Captive Prince #1) - CS Pacat

The Unhoneymooners - Christina Lauren

Persuasion - Jane Austen

Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating - Christina Lauren

My Favorite Half-Night Stand - Christina Lauren

Counterpoint (Twisted Wishes #2) - Anna Zabo

Prince’s Gambit (Captive Prince #2) - CS Pacat

Building Forever (This Time Forever #1) - Kelly Jensen

Renewing Forever (This Time Forever #2) - Kelly Jensen

Chasing Forever (This Time Forever #3) - Kelly Jensen

Heartstopper: Volume 2 - Alice Oseman

Sorcery of Thorns - Margaret Rogerson (OwlCrate)

A Rogue by Night (The Devils of Dover #3) - Kelly Bowen

Love and Other Words - Christina Lauren

Between the Devil and the Duke (Season for Scandal #3) - Kelly Bowen

Kings Rising (Captive Prince #3) - CS Pacat

Counting Fence Posts (Counting #1) - Kelly Jensen

Lumber Jacked (Rainbow Cove #3) - Annabeth Albert

You Must Not Miss - Katrina Leno

Reverb (Twisted Wishes #3) - Anna Zabo

The Wedding Party (The Wedding Date #3) - Jasmine Guillory

This Adventure Ends - Emma Mills

Game Changer (Game Changers #1) - Rachel Reid

Heated Rivalry (Game Changers #2) - Rachel Reid

Him (Him #1) - Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy

Us (Him #2) - Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy

Meet Cute: Some People Are Destined to Meet - Jennifer L Armentrout (and others)

The Bone Houses - Emily Lloyd-Jones

Good Boy (WAGS #1) - Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy

Fence, Vol. 3 (Fence #9-12) - CS Pacat

Spin the Dawn (The Blood of Stars #1) - Elizabeth Lim (OwlCrate)

Reticence (Custard Protocol #4) - Gail Carriger

The Lost and Found - Katrina Leno

Twice in a Blue Moon - Christina Lauren

Stay (WAGS #2) - Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy

The Red Scrolls of Magic (The Eldest Curses #1) - Cassandra Clare and Wesley Chu

The Bride Test (The Kiss Quotient #2) - Helen Hoang

Shades of Magic, Vol. 1: The Steel Prince - VE Schwab

The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle #1) - Maggie Stiefvater

Pumpkinheads - Rainbow Rowell

Arctic Heat (Frozen Hearts #3) - Annabeth Albert

No Judgments (Little Bridge Island #1) - Meg Cabot

The Conscious Closet - Elizabeth L Cline

Taboo for You (Love and Family #1) - Anyta Sunday

Made for You (Love and Family #2) - Anyta Sunday

Happy for You (Love and Family #3) - Anyta Sunday

Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices #3) - Cassandra Clare

Tunnel of Bones (Cassidy Blake #2) - Victoria Schwab

Wayward Son (Simon Snow #2) - Rainbow Rowell

The Right Swipe (Modern Love #1) - Alisha Rai

The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle #2) - Maggie Stiefvater

The Music of What Happens - Bill Konigsberg

Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle #3) - Maggie Stiefvater

Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer Trilogy #1) - Maggie Stiefvater

Now Entering Addamsville - Francesca Zappia

Always the Groomsman - Raleigh Ruebins

Mr. Right Now - Annabeth Albert

Get a Life, Chloe Brown (The Brown Sisters #1) - Talia Hibbert

Finally Falling (Rose Falls #1) - Raleigh Ruebins

My Winter Family (Rose Falls #2) - Raleigh Ruebins

Champagne Kiss (Rose Falls #3) - Raleigh Ruebins

Spring for Me (Rose Falls #4) - Raleigh Ruebins

Summer Secret (Rose Falls #5) - Raleigh Ruebins

A Boyfriend for Christmas - Jay Northcote

Mr Frosty Pants (Home for the Holidays #1) - Leta Blake

The Starless Sea - Erin Morgenstern

The Soldier’s Scoundrel (The Turner Series #1) - Cat Sebastian

Rainbow Place (Rainbow Place #1) - Jay Northcote

Safe Place (Rainbow Place #2) - Jay Northcote

Better Place (Rainbow Place #3) - Jay Northcote

Mud and Lace (Rainbow Place #4) - Jay Northcote

Where Love Grows - Jay Northcote

A Family for Christmas - Jay Northcote

Amelia’s Notebook (Amelia’s Notebooks #1) - Marissa Moss

Nothing Special - Jay Northcote

The Alloy of Law (Mistborn #4, The Alloy Era #1) - Brandon Sanderson

DNF

Legendary (Caraval #2) - Stephanie Garber

The Lonely Hearts Hotel - Heather O’Neill

Into the Crooked Place (Into the Crooked Place #1) - Alexandra Christo

#Books of 2019

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eeraygun · 5 years ago

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Top 204 Sonic Releases of 2019

001. Holly Herndon - Proto 002. Barker - Utility 003. Summer Walker - Over It 004. Topdown Dialectic - Vol. 2 005. Vatican Shadow - Berghain 09 006. Polachek, Caroline - PANG 007. Various Artists - It Takes A Village: The Sounds of Physical Therapy 008. Rosalía - A Pale 009. Jenna Sutela - Nimiia Vibié 010. Croatian Amor - Isa 011. Octo Octa - Resonant Body 012. Special Request - VORTEX 013. Fabio & Grooverider - 30 Years of Rage 014. Oli XL - Rogue Intruder, Soul Enhancer 015. Karenn - Grapefruit Regret 016. Stenny - Upsurge 017. Geo Rip - TTT Mixtape 018. DJ Gigola & Kev Koko - Tender Trance 019. Davis Galvin - Davis Galvin 020. INSTINCT - INSTINCT 05 021. Daes, Cam - Mechanosphere 022. Blawan - Many Many Pings 023. LOFT - and departt from mono games 024. Various Artists - PDA Compilation Volume 1 - And the Beat Goes On 025. PJ Swerve - "24 Seconds" 026. IVVVO - doG 027. Hilda Guðnadóttir - Chernobyl 028. Aurora Halal - Liquiddity 029. Endless Mow - Possession Chamber 030. Lee Gamble - Exhaust 031. Contagious - Contagious 032. Aseptic Stir - Year of Detachment 033. Various Artists - CRXSSINGS 034. Clairo - Immunity 035. Overmono - POLY011 036. Schacke - "Trained To The Floor" 037. Various Artists - Various [Крым Мрык - KMV02] 038. Off The Meds - Belter 039. Andy Stott - It Should Be Us 040. Ioannis Savvaidis - Diataxis 041. ISSHU - IS 042. Kali Malone - The Sacrificial Code 043. Brannten Schnüre - Erinnerungen An Gesichter 044. Various Artists - Total Solidarity 045. Erika de Casier - Essentials 046. Madteo - Dropped Out Sunshine 047. Helm - Chemical Flowers 048. Hugo R.A. Paris - Threaded Habitat 049. Holdie Gawn & Micawber - Gleech Huis, Parsec Telemetry 050. Carla dal Forno - Look Up Sharp 051. Eris Drew - Raving Disco Breaks Vol. 1 052. Luc Ferarri - Photophonie 053. Various Artists - SUPER XXXCLUSIVE LIMITED FR33 COMPILATION 054. Rare Silk - Storm 055. Thought Broadcast - Abduction 056. River Yarra - Frogmania 057. Exael - Dioxipp 058. James Shinra - Darkroom EP 059. Varg & Coucou Chloe - I Get Lit 060. Various Artists - Oscillate Tracks 002 061. Ariana Grande - MONOPOLY 062. Various Artists - Tiny Planet Vol.1 063. Peter Van Hoesen - Kelly Criterion 064. Various Artists - SPORTS 065. Ariel Kalma - Nuits Blanches au Studio 116 066. Felicia Atkinson - The Flower and the Vessel 067. Itchy Bugger - Double Bugger LP 068. Funky Doodle - Live From Yellowknife 069. E L O N - Pneumania 070. Ka Baird - Respires 071. Lena Andersson - Söder Mälarstrand 072. J. Albert - Wake Me Up 073. LXV - Loss Function 074. Panthera Krause - "Spring Irre" 075. M.E.S.H. - Hart Aber Fair 076. HOOVER1 - HOOVER1-2 077. Alleged Witches - Initiation Rituals 078. Panda Bear - Buoys 079. Various Artists - Slam Jam, Vol. 1 080. SSTROM - Drenched 5-8 081. Roger 23 ‎- Is Demanding For A Cultural Negotiation 082. Alec Pace - Luminous 083. Innere Tueren - Innere Tueren 084. Alex Falk - OOF 085. Moor Mother - Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes 086. Dothedu - Lick The Gloom EP 087. Stef Mendesidis - Klockworks 26 088. Dream Cycle - Part Three 089. Various Artists - 4 Down 090. Desert Sound Colony - Zenome Archetype 091. juneunit - juneunit 092. S Transporter - S Transporter 093. Meitei - Komachi 094. Ama Lou - "NORTHSIDE" 095. Wata Igarashi - Kioku 096. Conducta - KIWI KRUSH 097. Skee Mask - ISS004 098. 100 gecs - 1000 gecs 099. Metrist - Pollen Pt. I 100. 6siss - Prisma 101. Various Artists - Drie 102. Pelada - Movimiento Para Cambio 103. Renick Bell & Fis - Emergence Vol. 1 104. BLD - Toby 105. Various Artists - Σ2 [radio.syg.ma] 106. J E L L V A K O - INTEGRATION 107. Ana Roxanne - ~~~ 108. Ziur - ATØ 109. Amazondotcom - Mirror River 110. Vladimir Dubyshkin - Budni Nashego Kolhoza 111. SDEM - IIRC 112. Hontos - Subway Series Vol. 2 113. Ekhe - Hed Fuq 114. JV & Palf - Wren EP 115. FKA Twigs - Magdalene 116. Adlas - Currents 117. Rory St John - Excommunication 118. aphtc - Rewind The Subject 119. Steve Hauschildt - Nonlin 120. Anne Imhof - Faust 121. Tenebre - Polystructures 122. Sa Pa - In A Landscape 123. Jas Shaw - Exquisite Cops 124. Nathan Micay - Blue Spring 125. Quirke - Steal A Golden Hail 126. Kallista Kult - Kallista Kult 127. Actapulgite - Le Malin 128. Jorg Rodriguez - VCO Fields 129. Bergsonist - د 130. No Moon - Where Do We Go from Here 131. Sean McCann - Puck 132. Jessica Pratt - Quiet Signs 133. Mahalia - Love and Compromise 134. Régis Renouard Larivière - Contrée 135. Chris Watson - Glastonbury Ocean Soundscape 136. J Colleran - EP01 137. Locked Groove - Sunset Service 138. DJ Bogdan - Love Inna Basement 139. Second Storey - The Cusp 140. A.Fruit - Nocturnal 141. Blenk - Fragments of Vision 142. Katsunori Sawa - An Enlightenment Manual, Your Consciousness Of Truth 143. K-Lone - Sine Language 144. Rhyw - Biggest Bully - Felt 145. Seth Nehil - Skew _ Flume 146. Stanley Schmidt - Smart Replies 147. Al Wootton - Body Healthy 148. Marja Ahti - Vegetal Negatives 149. Ena - Baroque 150. Mister Water Wet - Bought the Farm 151. Tujiko Noriko - Kuro OST 152. Astor - The Aubergine Dream CS 153. Leon Vynehall - I, Cavallo 154. Koffee - Rapture 155. dgoHn - dgoHn EP 156. Shiken Hanzo - The Centipede 157. Gacha Bakradze - Extensions 158. Various Artists - PNP 004 159. Jenny Hval - The Practice Of Love 160. Joy O - Slipping 161. Keplrr - Translucence 162. Shadowax - Nikolai Reptile 163. Shygirl - BB 164. Cucumb45 - Slother EP1 Lyf Og Bio Ao Heilsa 165. Yan Cook - Somatic 166. Charli XCX & Christine and the Queens - "Gone" 167. Interplanetary Criminal - Move Tools 168. Ariel Zetina - Organism 169. Japanese Acid Person - Keep Falling Asleep 170. Michael Speers - xtr'ctn 171. Yak - Termina EP 172. Roberto Clementi - Plebiscite EP 173. Elmono - Coopers Dream 174. Ellll - Confectionary 175. Plantetary Assault Systems - Plantae 176. Various Artists - CHERUBEAST 177. City & I.O - Spirit Volume 178. Shed - Oderbruch 179. Pris - Sulphur City EP 180. Sharon Van Etten - Remind Me Tomorrow 181. Sophia Saze - Self Part I 182. Naco - EP 183. Banshee - Thought Bubbles EP 184. 33emybw - Arthropods 185. Yung Baby Tate - Girls 186. RHR - Nocturnal Fear 187. Private Press - .370 EP 188. Mani Festo & LMajor - Borai & Denham Audio Present Club Glow Vol.2 189. r²π - Largo Nilo EP 190. Voiski - The Bat Who Wanted to See the Sun 191. Semma - Ribbons & Bows 192. PTU - Am I Who I Am 193. Rod Modell - Captagon 194. Lurka - Stay Let's Together 195. Inland - Time Leak 196. DJ Safeword - Post Love Electronix 197. Mike Davis - Anti-Mimesis 198. Alan Backdrop - Natives EP 199. MATRiXXMAN – Planet X EP 200. exos - Alien Eyes 201. A², Stopouts & Andy Panayi - RM12005 202. J Tijn - 4x4 203. Kapoor - Extract Part One 204. emptyset - Blossoms

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nikolayfedorov1-blog · 5 years ago

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About me

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newstfionline · 8 years ago

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Twenty years ago, Russians loved the US. Where did it all go wrong?

Fred Weir, CS Monitor, January 10, 2017

MOSCOW--Looking back now, there’s a hefty dose of sour irony in Time magazine’s July 15, 1996, cover.

It depicts Russian President Boris Yeltsin, recently reelected at the time, grinning and clutching an American flag under the headline “Yanks to the Rescue!” The story tells of a group of high-powered US political consultants who were secretly brought to Russia amid the hard-fought presidential elections of 1996, in which a beleaguered Mr. Yeltsin was trying to battle his way back from single-digit public approval ratings to defeat a Communist challenger.

The consultants were kept holed up in a Moscow hotel suite lest any hint of their existence--and apparent American hand in Russian politics--leak out to the electorate. They coached Yeltsin’s people in the tactics and technologies of modern political campaigning, and helped to secure his ultimate victory.

Judging by the tone of the Time story, few in the US at the time seemed to doubt that American involvement in the struggle for Russia’s highest office was basically a good thing. Even Russians didn’t seem to mind. Indeed, a tracking poll regularly conducted by the independent Levada Center in Moscow reported that a whopping 72 percent of Russians had a “positive” attitude toward the US just a year later, against just 18 percent who viewed it “negatively.”

That 20-year-old episode can’t be directly compared with the present furor over alleged Russian interference in the recent US presidential election. But the two events and their reversal of fortunes--including the two-thirds of Russians who now express a negative view of the US, per Levada--bookend the epic death of Russia’s love affair with the US. Much of it may seem inevitable in hindsight, but some Russians argue that the relationship would be much healthier today if Americans had just not tried to “help” as Russians struggled with the fallout of their own country’s collapse and painful transformation.

In the immediate post-Soviet aftermath, Russian attitudes toward the US were sky high. And even that wasn’t a major change from the Soviet days.

“What struck me in 1952 at the depth of the cold war, was how little actual anti-Americanism there was here,” says Vladimir Posner, a legend of Russian broadcasting, speaking of the year he moved to Moscow from the US. Mr. Posner has lived in Moscow ever since. “Sure, people thought Wall Street and American leaders were to blame for bad things,” as Soviet propaganda suggested, “but nobody thought ill of Americans in general. I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve heard Russians say that our two countries are the world’s biggest, and if they could just get together we could solve all the problems.”

“The general idea in Russia at that time is that we would all be winners at the end of the cold war, that we should be partners,” says Nikolai Petrov, a political scientist who worked as an aide in the Russian parliament during the early ‘90s. He says he knew that Moscow was filled with US advisers of various kinds during those years, but he saw it as largely positive cooperation. Even the news that American consultants secretly worked for Yeltsin’s re-election “didn’t seem like such a big deal to me at the time,” he says.

In the US, the Clinton administration appeared to offer unqualified support for Yeltsin--despite growing evidence that millions of Russians were growing disaffected with painful economic reforms that they increasingly equated with Western-style democracy.

And when Russia’s economic and social collapse did finally climax in the late ‘90s, it came to be closely associated with Yeltsin, and what is seen in retrospect as a naive faith in US friendship in general. “The feeling now is that the ‘90s were just a time of losing all our connections to greatness, and that our downfall was aided and abetted by all that US involvement. People think we were cheated,” says Mr. Petrov.

Even the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the cold war and staked everything on a new world order based on cooperation with the West, has grown deeply disillusioned. His long-time personal translator, Pavel Palazhchenko, says that Mr. Gorbachev voluntarily agreed to disband the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military alliance and accepted the reunification of Germany on the understanding that a new European security architecture would include Russia as an equal partner.

Later, although he was already out of power, Gorbachev watched with dismay as the West expanded NATO into the former Soviet sphere and took unilateral action to regulate the break-up of Yugoslavia.

“There was a lot of good will, but it turns out that there were a lot of illusions, too,” says Mr. Palazhchenko, who now works at the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow. “Some of it was just silly. People back then thought the US was some kind of paradise, and a force for pure good in the world. The pendulum was bound to swing back....

“But Gorbachev became disillusioned not because some specific promises were broken, but because the spirit of what had been discussed with US leaders was violated. Today we really feel the failure to design a new European security system that would have had strong preventive diplomacy, to deal with issues that have since come up like Georgia and Ukraine,” he says.

While average Russians experienced the 1990s as a time of economic deprivation, including a horrific financial crash in 1998, the Kremlin began to break sharply with US global leadership when NATO launched a 78-day air war against its Yugoslav ally over the Albanian enclave of Kosovo in 1999. Then-Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, on his way to an official visit to the US, turned his plane around in mid-air when the bombing began.

“We had all rejected the Soviet propaganda view that the US was an aggressor state, but now it looked to be true,” says Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the independent Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. “What the US believed to be a humanitarian operation was viewed by the Russian public as aggression against brotherly Serbs.”

When Vladimir Putin came to power, championing a stronger and more assertive Russian state, the idea of a Russia-US partnership was already in tatters. Yet even Mr. Putin made an attempt to reach out, phoning George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to propose that Moscow and Washington form an alliance to fight terrorism.

At the time, Russia was in the midst of its own assault on its secessionist republic of Chechnya--whose rebel leaders had embraced extreme Islamism. But many in the US declined to acknowledge any parallel, in part because of the brutality that Russian forces used in Chechnya.

“Russia wanted to have a military partnership with the US, and was ready to cooperate,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, head of the Foundation for Effective Policy, who was a close adviser to Putin in those days. “But we didn’t find the right response from the Americans, and the opportunity was lost. Then the Americans invaded Iraq, and all faith was lost in the idea.”

Russia enjoyed a relative economic boom in the first decade of this century, which helped boost Putin’s popularity, which still hovers above 80 percent. But most experts believe it is the Kremlin’s defiance of the US-designed world order, and Putin’s efforts to restore Russia’s great power status, that keep his image untarnished among Russians despite a sharp economic downturn in the past three years.

“I don’t think it’s about economics at all,” says Posner. “Russians are a proud people, and for them a leader has to speak for their inner feelings. In Putin they see someone who stands up for Russia, makes the US realize they can’t treat us as some kind of afterthought.”

In more recent years, the US--like other Western countries has expressed deep concern over the Kremlin’s crackdown on Russian civil society, its seizure and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, its backing of rebel separatists in eastern Ukraine, and most recently, its alleged hacking of the Democratic National Convention and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Yet that too has fed into Russian disenchantment with the US.

“Without being insulting, Putin expresses the widespread disappointment Russians now feel for the US and most of what it does, and he asserts Russia’s place in the world,” says Posner. “The love affair was always kind of one-sided, and now it is definitely over.”

#Russia #Russian-American relations

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