On Tue, 24 Dec 2002, Marc de Piolenc wrote: > Matthew X wrote: > > I don't recall a lot of scientific scoffing of the China Syndrome movie > > when it came out.
You obviously didn't read Nuclear News. It was taken as a major joke because it didn't have one thing right in it. > When it first came out, it was considered a plausible scenario. Later, Not by anyone in the nuclear industry. > DOE ran some accident simulations at an instrumented test reactor in > Idaho to induce a core meltdown. They got pretty much what later > happened at Three Mile Island - significant damage inside containment, > nothing outside. And that's a big O(nothing) too. It was barely measurable. > Nobody is saying that nuclear reactors are invulnerable - only that a > NUCLEAR catastrophe cannot be triggered by an airplane. As somebody has > correctly pointed out, the powerhouse and spent fuel pools (the latter > the result of antinuke campaigns against reprocessing) are vulnerable. > It certainly is possible to put a reactor out of action by destroying > everything outside containment. And the mess would be pretty well contained. Spent fuel isn't in a bomb proof container. But it is surrounded by many tons of water, which happens to be a good radiation absorber. Once you drain the water, it really becomes a mess because you can't get close to it. All containments are built into the ground tho, so worst case is two bombs - one to crack the vessels to spill the water and a second one an hour later to attempt to spread the fuel around. I'd think military defenses would make the second strike harder, but given the US track record, OBL could pull it off. The reactor itself doesn't play any part in this, other than the lack of electricity makes everyone's day crummy. Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
