I’m thinking of what might happen should the US or Israel decide they want to bomb Iran’s nuclear power plant, which has now been fueled by the Russians. (Unlike Saddam’s Osirak plant, which was still being built when it was bombed, IIRC.)
So an F-15 drops a bunch of conventional explosives on the plant, either while it is operating, or now, while nuclear fuel is present but the plant is not yet running. What happens? Plant blows up, small local radioactive contamination? Plant blows up, radioactive waste spread on the wind all the way to China? Something else?
Really? Then why are American officials so concerned about our own domestic nuke plants being blown up by terrorists, if the only thing you have to worry about is a modest power loss?
You can fairly well expect a fire in which a lot of moderately radioactive materials will be released. If the ability to pull out the control rods is damaged (a possibility), and the cooling system is also damaged (a likely possibility), then the core can experience a meltdown. A meltdown stands a good chance of breaching the containment. If this happens then some seriously radioactive materials will be released. This happened in Cernobyl… many people died, the area around is virtually uninhabitable, and there was moderate contamination all over Europe.
So yeah, not much to concern yourself about, provided that you’re living on the other side of the world. :rolleyes:
Interesting question. I’d imagine it depends on the failure modes of the reactor and what exactly gets hit. Any nuclear engineers around? Are there publicly available safety studies for nuclear reactors? I hope there are, at least.
My WAG is that it could range anywhere between Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, depending on how the containment holds and if there’s enough fuel left in a small area to go critical.
Hmm. I hadn’t thought about a meltdown, per se. I assumed the core would be blown up too seriously and the fuel dispersed.
Would things be worse if the bomb hit the core dead on, obliterating the fuel rods, or worse if the plant machinery was simply massively damaged (and personnel killed) and a full meltdown allowed to occur?
This would be a guess, but if you blew the core apart, then the fuel would be too dispersed to continue the reaction. This is small comfort though, because if you’ve done this, you’ve breached the core containment and caused an ugly mess. The only upside would be that you might not see a Cernobyl-like inferno that would spread the material much more widely.
You don’t necessarily have to damage the control rods. You just have to damage the mechanism or computer that inserts them. If that happens then you better pray the coolant system is still working, otherwise you’re looking at a meltdown.
Of course there are many designs of reactors and there are many different ways they can fail, so that’s just a generalization.
Nuclear energy stations, in the US, are apparently made to be pretty resistant to attack. Someone on the board here’s father (if I recall correctly) was part of a project to crash an airplane into a nuclear power plant to verify the strength: Not a dent in the concrete.
Right. I was aware that the reactor containment was something on the order of 10m thick reinforced concrete. That would certainly stop most most attacks, but it might not stop a bunker buster or three.