Why Zaporizhzhia?

 As you doubtlessly know, Russian invaders recently shelled the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, the Zaporizhzhia plant in Ukraine. The images of burning plant (more precisely, burning building housing offices and training facility) swept the world in no time at all.

Tonči Tadić, a physicist I had a pleasure of working with and knowing for ages, also for a brief time an outspoken conservative member of Sabor (Croatian parliament), commented on this on our public TV, denouncing the move as "idiotic" because, in the unlikely event of the reactor meltdown and containment failure (the plant's reactors are of relatively modern pressurized light water design) the cloud of radioactive fallout would mostly move over Russia.

Sorry, Tonči, but this time your inner physicist won over your (former) inner politician. I will explain, but first a bit of background:

Oil and especially gas make up about 50% of Russian exports, and about 30% of its GDP. Russia has become a classical "petrol state" (and not Norway type of petrol state; more Nicaragua type.) Ukraine was trying to squeeze as much money from Russia for "hosting" gas pipelines as possible; Russia built other pipelines in response, including two "Northern stream" ones leading under the Baltic sea into Germany - the second of which is still not operational, despite being physically finished. Then Ukraine discovered large gas deposits under the Black sea, and started to develop them in joint efforts with Western companies. The annexation of Crimea was Russian response.

Germany invested heavily into wind power all over the country, but especially in Baltic North, and in residential solar, the latter being pretty much fool's errand, at their latitude and with their climate.They reacted to Fukushima incident (which should have served as a testament to safety of nuclear energy, because despite cutting corners in construction of plants, almost unprecedented earthquake and botched response, released radiation killed nobody!) by closing down immediately or in a year or two of all their nuclear power plants, relying heavily on "peakers" burning Russian gas and even reactivating some lignite mines! So much for fulfilling their Paris Accord pledges.

German reaction to the invasion of Ukraine, along with freezing or outright seizing various Russian assets, was pledging to raise its defense expenditure to above 2% of its GDP permanently, to set aside 100bn EUR for that immediately, to allow its military to participate in NATO operations outside of Germany, and to build up a strategic reserve of oil, gas and coal. COAL! No mention of keeping the nuclear power plants running to their design age, let alone building any new ones.

I think it should be clear now what was the purpose of burning an inconsequential auxiliary building at Zaporizhzhia power plant site: to fan again the irrational fears of nuclear energy among European population and make sure we stay dependent on their gas. And European, German in particular, "greens" are accomplices. 

A side note on new crop of Small Modular Reactors: they are manufactured industrially, rather than built, and therefore much cheaper; they are installed close to the places of high demand, diminishing the need for expensive and vulnerable long distance, high voltage transmission lines; they are housed in underground water pools providing passive emergency cooling and making them invulnerable to terrorist or other kinds of attack. More and more countries are considering SMRs as a source of their baseline electricity supply, Something had to be done about it; Putin did, and Germany reacted obediently (as I am afraid others, except perhaps France, will.)