President cites Ukraine intelligence that Moscow has mined Zaporizhzhia nuclear station and sent away staff
Christ, I hope they’re giving out iodine pills.
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.
Even Ben Sensei the ALT knows this
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.
If Daiichi taught me anything, is that you can cause catastrophe by depriving a nuclear plant of auxiliary power.
It taught most of us here that the foreign engineer who told Japanese engineers not to rely on auto safety mechanisms but to manually override and sink the rods into the water was the true hero who didn’t wear a cape. The Japanese engineers were more trustying on the automatic systems but they built the reactors with back up power at a low level they new a 100 year tsunami could hit it, so they didn’t expect the tsunami, they couldn’t have expected it.
What does race have to do with it… sounds like an engineer told other engineers how to handle an incident…
Homeslice edited his comment to say foreign now which is a reasonable thing to say
What does race have to do with it… sounds like an engineer told other engineers how to handle an incident…
It’s got nothing to do with race, why introduce that? There were Japanese AND foreign engineers there at Fukushima trying to help.
If you would ha e said foreign I wouldn’t have commented you said white engineer and looks like you edited your comment so bravo good job
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 :)
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.
All they need to do is stop water from flowing without quenching the rods. Super easy if you know what you’re doing.
They could just dial a Japanese engineer who was there that day, in the Fukushima, and ask them. Valuable experience could be learnt.
Does have this have the potential to release a radioactive fallout cloud across western Europe?
No. But it will render the plant inoperable and a mess to clean up.
Why are you saying no? This seems naive and overly optimistic. Explosions at nuclear plants in that area could absolutely spread across Europe unless Russia is extremely careful, and probably even then.
And it’s Russia, so forget careful.
If they do so and the west doesn’t put boots in the ground, that will open the door for any nuclear states to do whatever they want.
Fallout on NATO territory would likely be considered article 5 worthy. At least that’s what I keep reading. Pentagon officials, members of Commons Defense Committee in the UK, …
Although, I suspect we’ll escalate with air power. No fly zone and/or air strikes.
Of course, if that happens, all bets are off and it’s likely it all cascades out of control.
Yay!
NATO has already declared it would trigger article 5.
It’s exhilarating and also terrible to be living through such history.
