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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

No. It is many orders of magnitude less dangerous. It would potentially cause thousands of deaths, not hundreds of millions. This is true even if a melt down was caused, like Chernobyl, which others have already explained is quite improbable.

Chernobyl caused between ~100 and ~16,000 deaths, depending sensitively on how one models the effects of small (sub-natural-background) radiation increases over a large population.

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Still, maybe we should be amending the list of war crimes to include certain types of sabotage of nuclear power plants.

In a war situation, shutting off highways and disabling power plants or oil refineries are all strategic targets that affect both the military and civilians. But shutting down a refinery is different than dumping all of the chemical tanks into the water supply, setting oil fields on fire, or making the nuclear plant blow up.

Yes, I agree. Its plausible to me nuclear power plants should have special protection during time of war.

The chief issue is that, unlike something like cultural artifacts, power plants have significant strategic military importance. Perhaps a rule that (a) fighting be confined outside a certain perimeter and (b) plant workers have special protected status like medics, and are required to obey shutdown orders if the invading military takes control of the perimeter (so that the invaders don't have incentive to physically destroy the plant).

I am using nuclear war in a literal sense, but I do see how my wording seems sensationalist given historical context.

It's not equivalent to nuclear war with Ukraine in either the sense of relative risk (for the reasons I gave) nor in the sense in which the term "nuclear weapons" is actually used. Russia intelligence agents poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium, but this was not called a nuclear attack because that's not what the term means.

One could argue, at most, that this would be equivalent to a radiological weapon ("dirty bomb"). But even then it wouldn't be correct because of the important difference between purposeful radiological dispersal and radiological dispersal as a side-effect of a legitimate military action.

It is war, and it involves nuclear things. That’s what he meant by “literal sense,” I think.

Ah, behold, my fist is an atomic weapon because ultimately the damage it inflicts is because of the Coulomb repulsion force of the fist atoms with other atoms.

No. Your fist is a biological weapon.

A kinetic weapon, really.

D) All of the above

I am Mars made flesh, a glorious warrior brimming with weapons of mass destruction.

There is a distinction between nuclear warfare and radiological warfare, which is what this would (arguably) be.

A single nuke would be more like 100k deaths, still several orders of magnitude safer. But yes, the actual danger posed by radiation is far less than what it is imagined to be

Sure, but this is neither a nuclear weapon (it would be, at most, a radiological weapon) nor risk-similar to one.

OP argued this is risk-equivalent to nuclear war. it's not even close

Nuclear war can be many things. There are small nukes not designed to level cities.

Some people are really talking insanity.

These insane people I think need to watch the Tsar bomba go off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwlNPhn64TA

We aren't talking about fatman and little boy. Talking about thousands of H bombs and literally the apocalypse for the human race.

Person you are replying to is writing about a meltdown at a nuclear power plant

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