# Could a hijacked airliner successfully penetrate through a nuclear reactor? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 22, 2017, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-a-hijacked-airliner-successfully-penetrate-through-a-nuclear-reactor/785000 "2017-04-22T16:48:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2017, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-a-hijacked-airliner-successfully-penetrate-through-a-nuclear-reactor/785000/41 "2017-04-30T13:57:36Z")
> [@Francis\_Vaughan](#): > > That is an understatement! \*\*The political problems here are in danger of creating the next really bad day somewhere in the world. \*\* The politics is an almost intractable gridlock of insanity. You will literally get people who will march in the streets to protest about the construction of a long term high level dump that will be used to store waste \*\*that is currently unsafely stored closer to their homes than the intended dump. \*\* > > Long term waste isn’t really a fully solved problem. **But it can certainly be handled a great deal better than the current shmozzle**. My bolding. Unfortunately this is so true. And unfortunately, we don’t have transparency from the power plants, the regulatory agencies or the other branches of the government on the dangers. I have found a high degree of hubris concerning the safety of power plants, including a in person debate with an American nuclear engineer who works for GE here in Taiwan. From your earlier comment, > [@](#): > > Bad days come more from human reasons than technical. Managerial cost cutting, poor oversight, complacency. Most of the major engineering disasters we have seen come down to these. It is rare that the root cause is solely technical. Nobody sane will claim there will be no more bad days. And given the sparsity of experience there is no sensible way of making useful predictions about probabilities. Actually, one of the reasons why no more nuke plants are being built now is the cost of making them truly safe (well, as safe as possible). TEPCO, the Japanese electric company discovered that when they were initially designing the Fukushima plants. They picked a budget they could spend and worked backwards from there. There had been concern about a possible tsunami, but after it because apparent that safety measures were going to bust the budget, management dictated to the engineers what level of an earthquake to use in the simulations. In a nation with a quarter of the world’s largest earthquakes, this was insane. Complacency comes in from having declared there wasn’t going to be a large earthquake, then not vigorously testing the designs or make contingency plans for such a disaster. They also didn’t have truly redundant systems for back up. If you are in a room in a building, it doesn’t matter how many routes you have planned to get out of the building, if you only have one door to the room, you don’t really have redundancy. Redundancy is expensive and was thus not taken into careful consideration. The GE engineer I spoke to said that it would have been impossible to predict that there would be both a tsunami and an earthquake – but obviously that is completely absurd. Likewise, Japan did nothing (well, very little) in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Because of the complacency, a design which would work great in Kansas, but which was absolutely the wrong choice for the sea shore of Japan, was adopted to save design costs. The last tsunami to hit Topeka would have been more than a few years or eons ago. So it was OK to have the backup generators and electrical panels for the control systems in the basement. The backup systems in case of an earthquake counted on there not being a tsunami. The backup systems for a tsunami didn’t take into consideration an earthquake. They supposedly had triple redundancy for the back up power. The batteries, the diesel generators and a power line from another power company. However, they hadn’t upgraded the batteries even though the US had obligated US operators of the same design to increase their capacities. The generators were under water levels and the earthquake toppled the power lines from the other operator. Pissing away precious hours of sunlight, they were trying to come up with rescue plans on the fly. With the roads impassable, they couldn’t move replacement generators in by truck and because they were withholding information from the government they didn’t ask for Self Defense Force Chinooks. By Day Two, there were operators of the various types of large equipment which could have helped, but no way for those people to get through to the operators. And I could go on much longer, but the point is that they weren’t prepared. The US does emergency planning much, much better than Japan. However, I can’t say how much safer the US plants are. I don’t have access to that information and I was focusing on the situation in Japan. Certainly the GE plant design which was used first in the US and then utilized for Japan did not take into consideration the idea that a jetliner could be hijacked and used as a kamikaze bomb. I have no idea if the US improved the building structures or took other measures, but I know Japan and Taiwan didn’t. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-a-hijacked-airliner-successfully-penetrate-through-a-nuclear-reactor/785000.md?page=2)