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The first link is for an operating pipeline, which is as I'd expect -- the second does seem to indicate that they were keeping it at pretty high pressures for whatever reasons though, so hydrate formation was certainly a possibility.
Questions remain as to why the Russians would be fooling around with a pipeline that nobody was using -- "Russians dumb" is a nice catch-all argument, but not really very convincing. "Russians lazy" doesn't really work in this case, as the lazy thing to do would be to leave the pipeline alone.
Also you and @HlynkaCG will need to explain why the Swedes claim to have found "foreign objects" and "explosives residue" around the incident site:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-18/nord-stream-explosions-were-caused-by-sabotage-sweden-concludes?srnd=premium-europe
I hadn't seen this the last time I looked into the hydrate plug thing, but it seems pretty dispositive?
The Swedish claims are largely why I've adjusted my view of the hydrate stuff down from maybe 60% to 40%. I don't think it's enough to discount it completely, just because the details from the Swedish Public Prosecutor (Mats Ljungqvist) at the investigating authority (aklagare.se) have been pretty woeful. It's been impossible to find anything substantive even going through all the swedish language reports.
You're starting to require a lot of incompetence everywhere with this theory -- what should be the prior on hydrate plugs blowing up pipelines? I know that hydrate is a problem in pipelining, but it's pretty rare for NG pipelines to explode in dramatic fashion for any reason on a given day -- now take the third power of that number, and multiply by the chance of Sweden incorrectly detecting explosive residue and I think the prior is getting pretty small to come up with a 40% chance of this event unfolding as it did.
That's not the correct way to calculate your posterior. The probability that hydrate plugs are to blame given that the pipeline has indeed blown up should be very high.
Three pipelines blew up on the same day.
Two pipelines blew up roughly 18 hours apart.
A hypothetical: Either through incompetence or intentional sabotage someone opens a valve or disables a failsafe creating a condition in both pipes where in an explosion is becomes increasingly likely as time goes on. Some indeterminant number of hours later the first pipe goes boom and the second some time after that.
The only real reason to buy the diver story that I've seen is the Swedish prosecutors' claims that they found explosive residue and foreign materials at the site, but even that strikes me as a pretty thin. Ok what sort of explosive? What sort of materials?
If the Hersh account is correct, it should be RDX residue (readily identifiable via spectrometric methods). Another frustrating area where the slightest detail from the Swedish office would shed a lot of light (ammonium nitrates would raise the probability of non-state actors, on the other hand).
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Two of them blew up at the same time, then the other one blew up 18 hours later. (or the other way around? I don't remember but the two pipelines are both twinned; one of the NS II lines is still intact I believe)
This seems like an awful lot of blowing things up in one day, which is why I say that "I assume the Russians are comically incompetent in all things" may not be a bad heuristic a lot of the time, but is probably a dangerous thing to base your worldview upon.
Seriously, you are saying that some pipeline operator was trying an operation which everyone knows is difficult and dangerous to clear a plug (which did not urgently need to be cleared, as the pipelines were shut down), noted sensor readings consistent with a catastrophic failure of a couple of multi-billion dollar undersea pipelines, and then tried the same thing on the other pipeline under his control a few hours later!?
No I think they did one action once and differences in local conditions caused the different pipes to fail at different times.
If the pipes had been blown by charges placed by divers I would've expect the explosions to have been much closer together both in terms of time and location, furthermore I would expect to see all 4 pipes cut.
Wouldn't they, like, stop doing that once they blew up the first two pipelines?
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