If we bombed the North Korean atom plant would it create an a-bomb size explosion?

Or would it just make a cleanup mess like 3-mile Island?

It would “only” be a mess; it’s very difficult to make fission/fusion.

As Revtim says, no. Bomb-type nuclear explosions need a mechanism that creates a very precise geometry and timing. You would get an event worse than Three Mile Island (which was largely contained) and more like Chernobyl: lots of emission of radioactive material into the air (with a large pollution plume downwind) and the ruptured core melting down into the debris.

Yeah, the mess would be rather large but you wouldn’t see any nuclear explosions. The required conventional explosives involved in a nuclear weapon (which compress the fissionable material down to a density extreme enough to cause an uncontrolled reaction) are precise. A large scale conventional hit on the plant would blow the materials around, making cleanup a bitch.

Yeah… I repeated what everyone else said. :smiley:

(And I don’t think that an attack on the plant is even being considered, the international community wouldn’t stand for it…
But going on the U.S.'s record with international opinion…)

Nuclear bombs are difficult to set off, and need very precise timing devices on the conventual explosives used to denotate them. You could drop a 2,000 lb bomb right on top of a nuke and the nuke wouldn’t go off. But you would still have a very nasty mess. A reactor is even less likely to go off, because the nuclear material inside of it is typically of lower grade than weapons, and the material is more spread out. Now, I wonder if a bunker-buster bomb could be developed that would go through the containment dome with a relatively small hole, and then blow up the reactor, with a mostly intact dome containing most of the radiation. This is of course assuming that the North Korean reactor even has a decent containment dome; Chernobyl didn’t.

Nuclear weapons do much more than just spread radioactive material around. They initiate a fission chain reaction, where atoms are split by neutrons, releasing more neutrons to split more atoms. This ramps up very quickly, causing a massive explosion millionths of a second after the initial detonation. To achieve this reaction, you need a critical mass of fissile material compressed down to a very high density. Nukes achieve this by slamming two precisely-machined pieces of fissile metal (usually uranium or plutonium) together using precisely-calibrated and precisely-timed explosive charges. If the explosives don’t work exactly right, or if the pieces of metal aren’t milled to tight enough tolerances, you end up scattering radioactive metal around with no chain reaction occuring at all.

The common name for a bomb that simply scatters radioactive material is a dirty bomb. Dirty bombs can be made with anything radioactive, not just fissile material. (Fissile material is tightly controlled by most governments, as it can be used to make nukes.) In fact, a devastating dirty bomb would spread something like cobalt-60 to create long-lived fallout and cause cancer. Given how hard it is to make a nuke, which is more precise than fine clockwork, and how easy it is to obtain and create radioactive materials, dirty bombs are credible terrorist devices.

Needless to say, bombing a nuclear reactor would create a new variation on the dirty bomb scenario, not a nuclear explosion.

Just out of interest, does anyone know what sort of mess the Israeli bombing of an Iraqi nuclear plant created? Chernobyl sized, or what?
-Oli

It would depend on whether or not the fuel rods were already there. I don’t konw if they were.

Actually, I’d be willing to go farther and say that as long as it hadn’t yet been put into operation, it would be fine. Most atomic power plants use uranium fuel rods; even enriched to the ~5% U-235 that they need, these are not especially radioactive. Scattered by the bombs, the effects would be hard to distinguish from background radiation …

Now the waste products in spent rods, that’s another story …

Other than rubble and debris, it didn’t make a mess. The Israelis intentionally attacked before the plant was operational.