Cite? You realize the plant is a for-profit company, and each guard salary costs money. A guard who carries an assault rifle (and is former military in a combat MOS) is going to cost a lot more than a standard rent-a-cop. Actual plant tour videos I have seen recently show about 1 guard. Maybe there’s a SWAT team hiding somewhere, but I doubt it.
I read about that crash years ago. The plane only penetrated an inch or so into the concrete - which I think means that most of the debris that’s splashing away from the impact zone is atomized plane rather than atomized concrete.
An airliner is large and heavy, but the combined result of both of those factors is that it’s not a very dense projectile. The impact is spread out over a large area and a long time, and it’s mostly aluminum bits that are involved. AIUI, the parts that do the most damage are the engine spindles, which are steel and are oriented longitudinally. But even those don’t penetrate terribly far because the plane isn’t going that fast, several hundred MPH at most.
Armor-piercing tank projectiles are made of tungsten (7X as dense as aluminum) and have a muzzle velocity of about 3000 MPH; that gives you some idea of what kinds of speeds and densities are required to get through armor, and the situation isn’t hugely different for massively thick steel-reinforced concrete. Bunker buster bombs have a supersonic impact speed, as they are gravity-propelled from high altitude. The weapon described at that link has a casing 2.25 inches thick filled solid with explosives, and is able to penetrate 22+ feet of reinforced concrete. That’s quite different from the composition of an aircraft, which is comparatively…fluffy. It’s the difference between throwing a two-ounce rock at your buddy’s head as hard as you can, and lobbing a two-ounce beanbag at him instead.
I worked at a research reactor. Trust me, lots of armed guards.
I also had the opportunity to visit and audit the largest power reactor complex in Canada. Actually, I just Googled it and it’s the largest nuclear power plant in the world by output.
You think these places provide cites on their security staff on the internet?
They also have security vehicles that look like this.
Oh, and the research reactor facility even had it’s very own fire department with 4 or 5 fire trucks.
ETA: Security wasn’t a major concern until 9/11. Then it became a huge priority.
The vast majority of the damage from 9/11 was from the fuel fires. Unlike the containment vessel, normal buildings have openings - basically the Pentagon appears to have acted like a soup strainer, letting the fuel gush through the outer ring.
Google pictures of the Pentagon damage. The outer wall appears to have collapsed as a result of the fire inside weakening the support structure, same as the cause of the WTC collapse. The wall itself was not heavily damaged from the pictures I see. It just fell down. And this was a fairly thick masonry wall (Concrete?) but not specifically designed to withstand impacts. An airliner is more like a package of tin foil, other than the motors. The heaviest impact would be the blast of a full weight of heavy jet fuel impacting at 600mph. If that initial impact doesn’t do any damage - the specific design of a containment vessel - then the burning fuel will mostly run off instead of creating a blast furnace internal to the structure, and the structure will survive.
Supposedly this sort of impact is one of the things specifically designed against. The only question is whether the structure was designed with a 707 impact as the standard, back in the day. Today’s passenger jets pack a much larger wallop.
Although you are talking about research facilities, this was the problem at Fukushima. The core itself was in a containment structure, but that and everything such as the spent fuel pools were in a steel and brick building.
Because no one has been able to come up with a good answer to nuclear waste, the spent fuel pools are filled with large quantities of spent fuel with nowhere to go.
Without a constant influx of cooling water, the fuel will go critical. This almost happened at Fukushima. According the the PM of Japan at the time, TEPCO wanted to withdraw its workers, which would have resulted in the situation getting out of control.
When the plants were designed, no one really thought that terrorist would use hijacked airliners as kamikazes, and the buildings didn’t reflect that.
Correction: We have come up with good answers to nuclear waste. It’s not that hard: You reprocess what you can into new fuel, vitrify the rest, and pile it in a geologically-stable hole in the ground. We just haven’t been able to get people to accept that they’re good answers.
Destroying a nuclear plant is a dramatic possibility and feeds into the public’s fear of unleashed radioactivity. However the actual harm done would be low. Nuclear plants are not bombs - there is no mushroom cloud.
For example with Fukishima there were three deaths. Medical events or accidents at the time and very little radioactive exposure.
The greatest harm from attacking a nuclear plant will be the loss of electricity from the grid and its likely that can be adapted for. As happened with Fukishima.
Counter Correction: They ain’t good answers if they ain’t acceptable.
Oh come on. The ongoing issues with the clean up from Fukushima is well known. Saying that it was over in a couple of days is absurd. The total cost is staggering, US$188 billion.
The bigger issue was that it was almost a much worse problem as it took the Prime Minister convincing the power company to not abandon the facility (according to his personal account), which would have led to the spent fuel pools going critical. PM Kan was considering that a good portion of the Kanto plains (where Tokyo is located) would have to be evacuated. That would have had really serious economical repercussions.
It just happened that Reactor No. 4 was undergoing maintenance at the time, all of the reactor’s fuel was in the pool at the time.
No one who has actually studied the issue is concerned about the reactor blowing up. This is the real world, not a comic book. However, the danger from contamination is much worse.
I haven’t really looked too closely but here is one report.
There tends to be a generally accepted view among science literate people that nuclear energy has no problems at all. I actually held that view until Fukushima and was forced to do a lot of research to see what exactly was happening.
Unfortunately, there is too much hysterical nonsense about nonexistent and misplaced dangers. However, that still don’t mean that there aren’t real dangers and from the best of what I could figure out, it seems that the fuel in the spent fuel pools is the major concern.
Because of the NIMBY problem then these pools have far too much fuel stored there. Solving that would make things a lot safer.
It’s not that nuclear power has now problems. Nothing is completely without problems. It’s just that it has less problems than the alternatives.
Fewer.
I was considering not only the quantity of problems, but their severity. I don’t think a problem can be fewer severe.
All fine and dandy, but your conviction (on grammatical grounds, not on nuclear safety) still stands.
Lesser problems is a very hard call. There is no simple metric for the size of a problem that can be used to relate the disparate problems from different technologies.
Nuclear doesn’t dump a slew of nasties into the atmosphere continuously like coal. Nor does it contribute to global CO[sub]2[/sub] levels. Both definite pluses.
Coal has killed vastly more people than nuclear could ever be imagined to. But that isn’t a useful metric alone. The economic cost of early deaths from black lung, and mining deaths is there, but it is, sadly, mostly considered a cost of doing business.
On the downside for nuclear, a bad day is economy cripplingly bad.
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.
In between coal and nuclear we have a slew of intermediate technologies. Methane - which compared to coal is almost pristine clean, but does contribute to the CO[sub]2[/sub] problem, albeit at half the rate of coal. Oil, which isn’t clean, or cheap, but is easy. Then you get to the renewables. The one area where there are major technical advances, ones that are also reaching the market and attracting investment dollars, is in the renewables sector. Battery storage is now commercial reality. Solar thermal similarly so. Solar voltaics continue their price plunge. Technical advances in any nuclear remain decades and billions of dollars away. And have a propensity for bankrupting major corporations. Fusion, it would appear, has been 50 years in the future for the last 50 years.
If you are investing my money in nuclear, I will sack you. Of all the problems of greater or lesser degree, the one metric that is commensurate is the economic one. Nuclear loses.
My father ran the F4 phantom test linked to by TriPolar. He is the world expert on this subject. That test was run in 1986, iirc. I remember him giving me an 8x10 of the test stating ‘This is what I did last month’. I lost the photo, which really sucks. Though for Father’s Day one year I had a shirt printed with the image. On back it said ‘Other people work for a living. I smash things.’
If a plane hits a containment dome, you end up with a dead pilot, a little bit of cement to sweep up and a bill for some cement and paint.
In the test the wall was 12 feet thick. The deepest dent was 2.5 inches. The fire won’t do jack, the walls are cement and rebar.
Slee
The impact and subsequent fire may do little to the containment dome, but what about the surrounding structures? Are your cooling pumps well protected? How about the pipes that feed water? The cooling towers? The emergency generators? The tanks that hold spent fuel rods? There are a lot of other, softer, targets than just the containment dome and reactor itself.
Ok. Now take a fully fueled A380 (the type of airliner normally seen on the London to the Gulf run specified in the OP) and smash that against a dome.
A fully loaded F4E (max take off weight) is 23,000KG. An A380 max takeoff weight is 575000 kg (575 tonnes). 500 mph gives us 223.52 meters per second. Lets say the stopping time is 0.5 seconds.
Imperfect calculations.
Force of the F4E collision; F=m x a, [ 23000 x (223.52/0.5)]= 10.3 MN
Force of A380 collision= F =m x a, [575000 x (223.52/0.5)]= 257 MN.
About 25 times more force than the F4 in the test.
Yeah, not so sure the dome will be safe.
Why is the impact duration the same for both aircraft? An A380 is 3.8X as long as an F4, so the F4’s duration should be shorter and its impact force should be higher - 39 MN instead of 10.3 MN.
The area over which the impact is distributed also matters. It’s harder to assess, especially since a significant portion of the A380’s wings won’t even hit the containment building; they’re just too wide. Also, assuming the fuselage is aimed at the center of the building, the portions of the wing out near the edges of the building will be striking a glancing blow rather than a head-on impact (and they’ll also hit a little later), reducing the force.
If you consider just the fuselage cross section, the A380 is about 7.1 meters across, and the F4 is…3 meters? So the impact area ratio for just the fuselages is 5.6, which starts to put the F4’s collision force on par with that of the A380. But of course we can’t just consider the frontal area of the fuselages, we should also consider the frontal area of the wings, which is much more difficult. Suffice it to say this figure is much, much larger for the A380. Look how thick the wing root is; that’s maybe seven feet, tapering to a few inches at the wing tip. That’s a lot of impact area.
A rigorous analysis this is not, but I think it’s fair to say the difference between an A380 hit and an F4 hit will not be nearly as large as you have indicated.
Besides the fact that the A380 is way more spread out than an F4 so the impact will be very different (as noted by Machine Elf), the test was run to get baseline numbers on an impact into a containment dome wall. They had modeled various impacts but wanted to test the assumptions. So Dad bought an F4 and ran it into the wall on the rocket sled at Sandia Labs. The test verified the models. A note, the wall was built out of cement and rebar, nothing else. The F4 was moving at 480 mph.
These guys and gals ain’t dumb.
Even if we assume your numbers are correct, 25 x 2.5 inches = 5.2 feet, assuming a linear impact effect, which I doubt mainly because the A380 is a lot less dense than an F4 at the point of impact. For example, the engines are what causes the main damage while the fuselage crumbles like a tin can. The engines on an A380 are off to the side and would be much more of a glancing blow.
The walls are 12 feet thick. The difference between an A380 and an F4 will be in how much crap you have to sweep up afterwards.
Terminus Est, yes there are soft structures and they looked at those issues as well. I don’t know much about that but will try and remember to ask my Dad next time I see him. I do know that as far as attacks on nuc plants goes, Dad considers this a very, very small risk and he was a world expert on these types of risks.
I do know that the on-site storage of waste is an issue which is easily solved but hasn’t been due to political issues, not technical.
Slee
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.
Heh, I remember watching that show when it was first broadcast.
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