President cites Ukraine intelligence that Moscow has mined Zaporizhzhia nuclear station and sent away staff
A modern nuclear plant is not a bomb, and cannot be made into a bomb without a lot of work.
Just laying down mines and structural charges might not actually be enough to spread radioactive material outside the plant. See, modern nuclear plants are designed in such a way that they can survive a direct strike from a small missile without breaking containment. The reactor itself will be inside a giant steel tank, which is surrounded by a 3-meter thick, lead impregnated concrete wall.
What it will do is render the plant inoperable, meaning that there will be no power, and there will be a long, expensive cleanup of the plant itself.
There’s a lot of sensitive shit that can easily be broken. Turbines, cooling lines, that reactor casing itself, the inside of the reactor if anyone is brave or stupid enough to put a bomb there, and all sorts of other places that would render the building into a scrap heap.
As a note, a bomb inside the reactor itself would be bad, but not necessarily “cause a meltdown” bad, not unless the people planting the bomb knew exactly how to set things up.
That said, trashing the inside of the reactor would make things incredibly difficult to recover from. Like, do a full cleanup, tear the plant down to the ground and rebuild it from there. (because of that steel pressure chamber and massive concrete block).
Anyway, the tldr; this is bad, but not regionally bad unless you live in the region and get electricity from this plant. It will also suck balls to clean up.
I’m aware it’s not a bomb. I was in the radiation affected area in Japan when the power plant melted down. It doesn’t need to be a bomb to release radiation.
Yea, isn’t a nuclear power plant fucked, when they destroy the means to cool it down? I just think there are a lot of ways to fuck with a power plant. pls correct me if I’m wrong :)
No, there are a lot of ways to fuck shit up, but the main point of how these things are built is to make sure that the radiation stays inside.
A modern plant can have a full meltdown and not release anything outside the plant.
Three Mile Island comes to mind. It was a full melt down of one of the reactors (there were several reactors in the plant) and no radiation escaped the building.
The absolute worst case here would take actual knowledge of the plant’s systems to bomb things at the right times in the right order to create a half-assed dirty bomb.
The more likely is another Three Mile Island style meltdown, but with added radiation hazards inside the plant itself.
Don’t perpetuate the fear-mongering bullshit. Educate yourself. There is no reason to fear nuclear power. The entire world should be running on nuclear power right now.
Yes, which is why Tokyo is the most rad city on earth. The mayor wanted Tokyo to evacuate but it would cause too much panic about Japan and loss of face. So people just breathed.
If Daiichi taught me anything, is that you can cause catastrophe by depriving a nuclear plant of auxiliary power.
You should do some more research, because it’s nowhere close to being that simple.
Chernobyl wasn’t a bomb either.
Apparently Zaporizhzhia’s different and safer than Chernobyl, but the IAEA have reportedly warned of the potential for a catastrophic nuclear disaster. Fallout across Europe.
I don’t think any of us are experts in soviet era nuclear power plants, but given Russia almost certainly blew up Kakhovka dam, I don’t think you need to be an expert on Russia to know what they’re capable of.
All they need to do is stop water from flowing without quenching the rods. Super easy if you know what you’re doing.
Even Ben Sensei the ALT knows this