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Comment by fridif | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully nobody flies a plane into it like on 9/11, otherwise the fallout will be larger than a few city blocks.

Regulations require all nuclear reactor containment domes to be able to withstand the impact of a fully loaded passenger jet. It is literally a requirement - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building. You can also check out this video of experiments investigating the strength of containment-dome-like reinforced concrete: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4CX-9lkRMQ

I genuinely appreciate this response. It is good to know that someone is thinking about preventing nuclear from being used as an attack vector, while others in the thread think nuclear can do no wrong.

Can you point to any planes flying into the many existing nuclear reactors? For that matter, can you point to any planes flying into any buildings other than 9/11?

There's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack but I still think it's pretty rare.

Somehow this didn't show up on my radar back then

I remember the day it happened, a lot of people were suggesting that Glenn Beck's far right rhetoric encouraged the person to do what they did, so Glenn Beck spent his entire 5PM tv block saying that he had nothing to do with far right terrorism.

If that's supposed to be a joke, it's in poor taste.

As many of the best are.

Why is it that I would need to prove that?

Do the laws of physics somehow not apply to nuclear reactors and planes until someone has crashed into one?

I would think there are plenty of more effective targets for terrorist planes then a nuclear plant in rural wyoming.

Well, look at what 9/11 did to this country (Patriot Act, NSA, Iraq, Afghanistan) and that was only 3,000 people dead and a few city blocks covered in cancerous dust.

Now imagine an entire timezone covered in radiation?

I'm not convinced a plain crash into a molten salt reactor would cover an entire timezone in a meaningful amount of radiation. Do you have reason or source explaining why you think it would?

As somebody pointed out, all nuclear reactors built of a long time have been build to defend against that.

But with modern GenIV reactors it wouldn't actually do what you think it would do. I would recommend you actually read about how these reactors work instead of writing comments like this.

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