So, yeah, you need the military to protect your nuclear waste from other militaries, but that's about it. And in that respect protecting nuclear infrastructure is like protecting any other infrastructure. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
couldn't that be hijacked and used as a weapon?
if this fear, oops, concern is scientifically impossible, maybe someone here will let me know.
i don't visualise some jewel thief ala david niven stuffing some into a bag!
as for the fine line between 'other militaries' and bog-standard 'terrorists', it's getting damn hard to discern.
regarding protecting it (them) from attack, like it was just another munitions warehouse, look what happened to pearl harbour in very short time.
from what i'm learning here, it's less likely that a terrorist would fly a plane into a nuke plant and achieve anything major, but if the plants are dependent on so much external power to keep them running cool, what happens if that's attacked, or the supply lines for the fuel to run that? ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Or open. You can drop the canisters from planes or hit them with freight trains without them opening. The Americans managed to blow one open with an anti-tank missile, but the contamination was limited to a few square metres around the breach, and it was easily cleaned up.
What if external power is lost? Well, that is a bitch. First there is usually several off site power lines. But they might all be lost. Then you have the reserve diesels. They should not all be destroyed, as they are usually located at several places, usually two or four.
If they are all lost, you have about two hours to get power back online until you get fuel damage. That means that the water in the reactor tank is turned into steam and the fuel is uncovered and starts breaking apart and melting.
(The nuclear chain reaction stops after 1-2 seconds after the plane impact, but there is still heat left and this is the problem)
If no power is back within eight hours, the molten fuel breaches the bottom of the reactor tank and contaminates the inside of the containment. This is a nuclear meltdown.
The increased heat and pressure is a hazard to the structural integrity of the containment, so you need to remove heat. You do this by venting the (possibly) radioactive gases inside the containment to the atmosphere. This is sounds a lot worse than it really is.
It was done at Three Mile Island, and the radiation relase was positively tiny and did not hurt anyone whatsoever. After that incident, plants installed filters which catch 99,9 % of the radiation. So the result if a modern reactor melts down is zero divided by one thousand, hurt or killed.
Pretty much no one is aware that this most basic myth of nuclear power is false: that if everyhting is okay nuclear is very clean, while if something goes wrong ot becomes very dirty indeed. Well, it doesn't. But the plant is destroyed. $3-4 billion down the drain, which is a pretty strong motivation for private plant managers to maintain safety.
By the way, the new Westinghouse AP1000 reactor will have passive cooling systems, making a meltdown impossible in the first place. This seems to be the most popular reactor design in the American nuclear renaissance. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
