Well the thing to remember is Chernobyl was almost entirely contained. Immediately after the accident, a massive response started to happen that included firefighters putting their lives at risk to stop the fire and shovel as much material as possible back into the reactor core. I don't have a source at the moment but I think you would a…
Well the thing to remember is Chernobyl was almost entirely contained. Immediately after the accident, a massive response started to happen that included firefighters putting their lives at risk to stop the fire and shovel as much material as possible back into the reactor core. I don't have a source at the moment but I think you would agree the bulk of material in Chernobyl is still inside the building as opposed to dispersed into the environment without control.
That being the case, the area today is basically not safe (see the discussion on https://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation-levels/). It's safe in the sense that you can visit it and likely not experience harm if you take basic precautions. But it isn't to simply move back there in any real way. Perhaps we won't know for sure if the Russian troops really got sick by being forced to dig and camp there, but 'nature flourishing' is not a good metric. Nature is perfectly happy to fill a niche with life that would die around age 40 in human terms. It should give us a bit of pause that we've taken a large region of land on earth 'out of commission' for quite a while, even if it turns out a century will reduce that rather than a millennium.
The question then is what happens if a plant gets hit by a nuclear weapon? Well right off the bat I agree there's a lot of ways that can be less of a problem than one might think. An airburst, for example, like Hiroshima, will kill a lot of people but a lot of the reinforced material could survive it.
To be a bit vulgar, if one was going to bomb a nuclear plant, doing it like that would be less of a "dick move". But someone nuking a nuclear plant is probably pretty high on the spectrum so we might as well they will be as much of one as possible.
The overpressure from a 1 megaton bomb at 350 feet above is around 100,000 psi (see page 6 of https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2007/R425.pdf). 1 atmosphere is only about 14.7 psi so that will go far beyond the 150 atmospheres of pressure the water tanks are designed to handle (leave aside it's one thing for a steel tank to have pressure from steam inside it pushing out versus pressure smashing down on it, also leave aside the container would be subject to a whole bunch of other things like sharp metal propelled into it, the heat from the blast as well as radiation). Needless to say it probably doesn't get better if the enemy sets the warhead to detonate closer or dials it a bit higher than 1 meg...or simply has two or three warheads explode in the same area spread out by 10 minutes or so to give the previous explosions a chance to clear up a bit.
I think this leads us still with:
1. If Chernobyl happened to have been hit with a bomb from an ICBM a moment before its meltdown (not a happy airplane dropped bomb but also not the most advanced of bunker buster nukes), the bulk of material that either never left the reactor or was put back in the reactor as part of the response would be widely dispersed into the environment.
2. Obviously the mitigation efforts that were made after the meltdown that probably did a lot to make a bad situation less bad would not happen after a nuclear strike. Even if the strike was from a limited exchange leaving the rest of the country unharmed and able to respond.
So let's say we can be pretty sure if a nuclear plant is hit by a nuclear bomb that is not an amateur level affair (i.e. your suitcase nuke or Hiroshima type blast perhaps done by a terrorist in a u-haul parked in the visitor's lot) but perhaps not the absolute most advanced device a major power could pull off, you are likely to end up with a century exclusion zone or perhaps less of an exclusion zone as most of the radioactive material will be dispersed into the atmosphere.
I agree you can dramatically cut down on this by doing a lot of concrete. Thick containment buildings that are hundreds of feet above the reactor could mean no megaton warhead could detonate directly on it and detonations above it will just compact the reactor down with more and more debris. We could also not store spent fuel at nuclear plants or out in the open where they could be targets as well. Perhaps then if it did happen a week or two later the material would still be mostly contained and response crews could follow a Chernobyl approach of creating a more permanent containment structure rather than ad hoc rubble.
But then even Cheyenne Mountain, which is under 600m of granite, could not survive a direct hit by a 25mg bomb (https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-military-or-any-other-facility-that-can-withstand-a-direct-Hit-nuclear-strike). Perhaps that doesn't matter since we're just trying to assure ourselves that the reactor is not dispersed into the air, we aren't trying to keep the workers alive. But again consider the mindset of someone who isn't just trying to take a power plant offline because it is a military asset in war but someone who wants to make the biggest possible problem with a limited amount of weapons.
But then the flip side of this is if we do go on a kick to renormalize nuclear power we will implicitly see many nations do the same and many of them may be open to cutting corners. Given regulatory capture, even we might wind up doing the same. An attack on a single plant would then remain a concern and produce a problem that would impact future generations but still be localized. A war where there are a lot of nuclear plants and all of them end up as targets would have to create a multi-generation radiation issue.
Let's keep it simple, imagine a nuclear war in a world filled with nuclear plants and a nuclear world where almost all power is coming from wind, solar, storage and geothermal. In both cases the war will be very bad but can you really imagine 200 years later the first world isn't still trying to cope with that in ways the second isn't?
The previous calculation of risks here was based on a rather binary state of affairs. The nuclear powers were dominated by actors that were seen as stable and rational so either there would be zero nuclear war or so many nukes going off radiation from power plants would be academic. The limited nuclear exchange got rejected soon after WWII because wargames would endlessly veer towards a total exchange.
But we now live in a world that is clearly a bit more non-binary, as the kids say.
Well the thing to remember is Chernobyl was almost entirely contained. Immediately after the accident, a massive response started to happen that included firefighters putting their lives at risk to stop the fire and shovel as much material as possible back into the reactor core. I don't have a source at the moment but I think you would agree the bulk of material in Chernobyl is still inside the building as opposed to dispersed into the environment without control.
That being the case, the area today is basically not safe (see the discussion on https://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation-levels/). It's safe in the sense that you can visit it and likely not experience harm if you take basic precautions. But it isn't to simply move back there in any real way. Perhaps we won't know for sure if the Russian troops really got sick by being forced to dig and camp there, but 'nature flourishing' is not a good metric. Nature is perfectly happy to fill a niche with life that would die around age 40 in human terms. It should give us a bit of pause that we've taken a large region of land on earth 'out of commission' for quite a while, even if it turns out a century will reduce that rather than a millennium.
The question then is what happens if a plant gets hit by a nuclear weapon? Well right off the bat I agree there's a lot of ways that can be less of a problem than one might think. An airburst, for example, like Hiroshima, will kill a lot of people but a lot of the reinforced material could survive it.
To be a bit vulgar, if one was going to bomb a nuclear plant, doing it like that would be less of a "dick move". But someone nuking a nuclear plant is probably pretty high on the spectrum so we might as well they will be as much of one as possible.
The overpressure from a 1 megaton bomb at 350 feet above is around 100,000 psi (see page 6 of https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2007/R425.pdf). 1 atmosphere is only about 14.7 psi so that will go far beyond the 150 atmospheres of pressure the water tanks are designed to handle (leave aside it's one thing for a steel tank to have pressure from steam inside it pushing out versus pressure smashing down on it, also leave aside the container would be subject to a whole bunch of other things like sharp metal propelled into it, the heat from the blast as well as radiation). Needless to say it probably doesn't get better if the enemy sets the warhead to detonate closer or dials it a bit higher than 1 meg...or simply has two or three warheads explode in the same area spread out by 10 minutes or so to give the previous explosions a chance to clear up a bit.
I think this leads us still with:
1. If Chernobyl happened to have been hit with a bomb from an ICBM a moment before its meltdown (not a happy airplane dropped bomb but also not the most advanced of bunker buster nukes), the bulk of material that either never left the reactor or was put back in the reactor as part of the response would be widely dispersed into the environment.
2. Obviously the mitigation efforts that were made after the meltdown that probably did a lot to make a bad situation less bad would not happen after a nuclear strike. Even if the strike was from a limited exchange leaving the rest of the country unharmed and able to respond.
3. Ground burst nukes do produce long lasting radiation. (see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8728188/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shagan_(lake)#History...the lake was created by only a 140 kt device. Granted it had the benefit of being buried but still we have a radiation issue even though the detonation was over half a century ago.
So let's say we can be pretty sure if a nuclear plant is hit by a nuclear bomb that is not an amateur level affair (i.e. your suitcase nuke or Hiroshima type blast perhaps done by a terrorist in a u-haul parked in the visitor's lot) but perhaps not the absolute most advanced device a major power could pull off, you are likely to end up with a century exclusion zone or perhaps less of an exclusion zone as most of the radioactive material will be dispersed into the atmosphere.
I agree you can dramatically cut down on this by doing a lot of concrete. Thick containment buildings that are hundreds of feet above the reactor could mean no megaton warhead could detonate directly on it and detonations above it will just compact the reactor down with more and more debris. We could also not store spent fuel at nuclear plants or out in the open where they could be targets as well. Perhaps then if it did happen a week or two later the material would still be mostly contained and response crews could follow a Chernobyl approach of creating a more permanent containment structure rather than ad hoc rubble.
But then even Cheyenne Mountain, which is under 600m of granite, could not survive a direct hit by a 25mg bomb (https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-military-or-any-other-facility-that-can-withstand-a-direct-Hit-nuclear-strike). Perhaps that doesn't matter since we're just trying to assure ourselves that the reactor is not dispersed into the air, we aren't trying to keep the workers alive. But again consider the mindset of someone who isn't just trying to take a power plant offline because it is a military asset in war but someone who wants to make the biggest possible problem with a limited amount of weapons.
But then the flip side of this is if we do go on a kick to renormalize nuclear power we will implicitly see many nations do the same and many of them may be open to cutting corners. Given regulatory capture, even we might wind up doing the same. An attack on a single plant would then remain a concern and produce a problem that would impact future generations but still be localized. A war where there are a lot of nuclear plants and all of them end up as targets would have to create a multi-generation radiation issue.
Let's keep it simple, imagine a nuclear war in a world filled with nuclear plants and a nuclear world where almost all power is coming from wind, solar, storage and geothermal. In both cases the war will be very bad but can you really imagine 200 years later the first world isn't still trying to cope with that in ways the second isn't?
The previous calculation of risks here was based on a rather binary state of affairs. The nuclear powers were dominated by actors that were seen as stable and rational so either there would be zero nuclear war or so many nukes going off radiation from power plants would be academic. The limited nuclear exchange got rejected soon after WWII because wargames would endlessly veer towards a total exchange.
But we now live in a world that is clearly a bit more non-binary, as the kids say.