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Comment by lazyjones | Hacker News Reader

> We couldn't have a worse nuclear power disaster than Lake Karachay even if we tried on purpose.

How can you write such a ridiculous sentence? We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion. It's a permanent subject of dispute here in Europe.

> If every single operational nuclear power plant had a meltdown incident after operating for 20 years, they'd still be orders of magnitude less damaging than what we're doing today. The environmental impact and safety numbers are just that far apart

One single accident in Europe would dwarf these inflated WHO numbers.

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> We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion.

Cite please. The tens of millions affected by a feasible powerplant issue. Explosion is not really in the realm of feasible unless we're talking about bombs or uncontained soviet reactors.

I'm sure you will be able to look up the location of active nuclear power plants in central Europe and determine the population figures within the range of impact of an accident like Chernobyl's if you try. Start with Mohovce (largely uncontained and litigation since 2005 or so), Bohunice, Temelin and the large cities nearby...

Why would we leave out terrorist attacks? Because they destroy your argument?

What would a terrorist do with a nuclear powerplant exactly? We've flown fighter jets into nuclear powerplants to test them[1]. They're protected by armed guards. The US has a nuclear emergency task force ready to fly pumps and generators to any plant. The best attack even a highly resourced terrorist could mount would be to damage the cooling tower and not really make any difference?

If you're imagining some kind of super coordinated military unit taking control of a powerplant yeah sure maybe? They'd be much better used just poisoning the water supply.

This is exactly the kind of baseless fear driven hypothetical sentiment that I'd like to understand.

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3072967/ns/business-check_point/t/...

They can make "dirty bomb". I know some people which had training about how to destroy hostile Western country by using their own radioactive materials.

For example, in 2014, rebels in Donetsk had attempt to create "dirty bomb" using radioactive waste from abandoned chemical plant. Fortunately, they were spotted and stopped.

A bit off-topic (but still nuclear-related): All that adds big cost to nuclear and makes it less feasible

On what basis are you determining that armed guards are a big cost? It's certainly a readily identifiable cost that's larger on a per-power plant basis for nuclear than other forms of power, but is it really large enough to matter to the overall economic viability of nuclear power?

A bomb powerful enough to breach reactor containment but small enough to be smuggled past power plant security is already a nuclear bomb in its own right, and would be more effective used against population centers directly.

Explosion as in a nuclear one? Really isn't possible. The fissile material isn't pure enough.

I believe graphite rods are used as the safety to capture the neutrons in a nuclear fission reactor and effectively kill off the reaction.

Explosion as in Chernobyl level? That was basically water pressure.

Chernobyl had two explosions, a few seconds apart. The second, larger one was after most of the water had left the core. The reactor had a positive void coefficient, so losing water increased reactivity.

Of course these were prompt supercritical reactions in a moderated system, so they are not explosions in the sense of bombs, which are fast systems with neutron doubling times measured in fractions of a microsecond.

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