For the pedantic nuclearphiles, it doesn't have to be an airstrike. Domestic terrorism is a real thing as well.
An older and perhaps more beautiful solution is to put the reactors fairly deep underground, or underwater. Sadly, underground construction is extra pricey.
EDIT: I was thinking of aircraft impact here rather than hostile military attack. Defending against hostile military attack is not built into the regs.
"partly" seems like it's doing a lot of work in this sentence.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a...
Hostile military airstrikes are another thing entirely, that's true. See edit above.
https://assets.sourcemedia.com/8c/d8/6686933e49518782cdc7cc1...
Haven’t looked in a while, but I’m pretty sure a Fukushima every month of our life (and onward) is much less worse than current coal consumption.
Reactor buildings themselves are extremely sturdy already. And if you do serious damage to the reactor it'll probably spread out the fuel so nothing particularly bad happens before you can do cleanup.
And how much safer than coal does it have to be, anyway? Coal kills so many people.
So, continued operation of coal plants depends on uneconomic behavior, typically via cultural inertia or domination by entrenched interests. Of course that is always possible, but it is disfavored.
You mean the 1 to 3 pilots that used the anti-hijacking doors to help them commit suicide by intentionally crashing passenger airliners? It’s a stretch to blame the taliban for that, and 9/11 was over twenty years ago.
Additionally, they seem to have a budding relationship with China, who are capable of manufacturing more advanced aircraft.
Which, I don’t exactly know Canada-US defense agreements, but given we share assets like NORAD—I assume an attack on southern Ontario would be tantamount to declaring war on the US, which would probably go poorly for everyone.
EDIT: Oh, strike that, they literally mean Canada attacking the US, which is the stupidest idea I’ve heard in a while.
If this pandemic has taught me anything, it's that contingency plans are put together with great effort and careful thought, and are then placed into a filing cabinet somewhere.
Short answer, the design is such that reactor shuts down automatically with loss of cooling.
Meltdowns are hard to cause, because once the reactor slags itself it also stops reacting because it's destroyed its moderator.
You're probably thinking of "what if Chernobyl?" and the issue there is that it took genuine, sustained effort to create Chernobyl, and a reactor design that could do it: Chernobyl's big problem wasn't a meltdown (3 mile island was a meltdown) it was a steam explosion beneath the reactor, and then the subsequent graphite fire which spread radioactive particulates over the surrounding area.
No practical air strike is going to create a Chernobyl equivalent explosion - there's not enough energy in explosives to do it.
You don't need a "meltdown". All four of Fukashima's active reactors exploded after the cooling systems lost power. They had been automatically SCRAM'd when the earthquake hit and had been cooling for a while before the tsunami hit and destroyed the generators, but reactors take months to 'cool down.'
https://youtu.be/saM85y8lFm4?t=1997
One of the spent fuel storage pools at Fukashima was still generating 3MW of thermal heat at the time of the disaster. Waste fuel that hadn't been in the reactor for months. It came within one degree Celsius of its safe storage temperature - 85 degrees. Its normal operating temperature was 30 degrees.
> Physically exploding the reactor core might make a mess, but other then a very small amount of radioactive dust, the pieces, consisting of heavy uranium, would be scattered over a small area around the plant,
"Small area"? The Fukashima explosion has left an area around the size of Tokyo proper uninhabitable in one of the most expensive, constrained real estate markets in the world.
Anyway, we know how to build nuclear plants that are physically incapable of melting down. Also, foreign and domestic(1) terrorist organizations are largely funded by oil (and, since I count putin as a terrorist, gas and coal) magnates.
Rapid nuclearization (and renewable energy roll outs) cuts the funding.
(1) Fox News, etc are clearly recruitment tools for right wing domestic terrorist groups. Even if you disagree, my point on foreign terrorists still holds.