The dignity of work, the terror of nuclear war, the artifices of dating, the terror of nearly dying, the sublimity of the cosmos, plus Cthulhu, very old fantasy and very new, and some science fiction.
I agree the 'plot' she painted was a bit contrived. Her motives, though, were to explore a full out nuclear war so in some sense her 'characters' had to be doomed from the start in order to illustrate the whole picture for us. The crux where this was a problem was when the US decided to launch many missiles at North Korea in response, which put Russia in the awkward position of having to 'trust us' as they watched hundreds of dots coming over the north pole at them.
I feel a President would likely decide to use only submarine and non-ICBMs for now least we cause Russia to do a mass launch. On the other hand, the urgency to hit everything and anything in North Korea to stop additional launches (remember they have theirs on trucks so we might need a lot of bombs) could put massive pressure on a President to hit every possible place mobile launchers could be hiding. Even for a small nation like NK, that would require a lot of nukes.
I don't think she was that wrong about hitting a nuclear power plant. Let's keep in mind:
1. We know not only is Chernobyl still radioactive, it's still dangerous. Russian troops reported got radiation sickness after digging ditches near the 'no-go' zone. The bulk of Chernobyl's radioactive material, though, was never released. It's contained in a massive structure where it will probably not be a problem for ages, that is unless someone does something stupid like hit it with a nuke.
2. So if you were going to hit the US with a single nuke or two, does it make sense to hit LA or the plant? Well it really depends on the motivation. If you want to kill a lot of people very fast, LA is a good target. If you want to leave 'your mark' for centuries. Well the canyon will probably do the trick. You can say that isn't rational but then neither is simply wanting to kill the most possible. That leads us to...
3. The fall of the liberal order on an international scale is not causing it to be replaced with a different order but a type of nihilism. One cannot trust nuclear plants won't be targeted either by 'gentlemen's agreement' or the rationality of regimes. The presumption must be norms and rules will not work as reliably as before.
The downstream consequence of this is that this is another knock on nuclear power. It was always a risk with nuclear but the assumption in the Cold War was that nuclear war could not be limited and if you have a full scale nuclear war we're all dead regardless, or at least the global north is close enough to dead. But now the consideration should be that a limited outbreak is something that could happen, and if it happens once it could happen many times. Not only is that bad for nuclear in developed nations, it should cause us to be less eager to encourage nuclear in developing nations.
You use Chernobyl as your evidence for leaving a mark for centuries. Even though there have been plenty of reports that the Chernobyl exclusion zone have become a haven for wildlife.
And it's only been a few decades. To say nothing of a few centuries. Additionally you offer up a single anecdote from the fog of war as the main bit of evidence.
Beyond that the reactors in question are totally different from those operating at Chernobyl. I was discussing it on another forum and someone knowledge had this to say about it:
"A PWR reactor core can only split uranium for a couple of years before needing refueling, and the presence of water as a moderator is required to keep the fission happening coolant-is-moderator is why runaway criticality isn't possible the way it was at Chernobyl. A meltdown can happen but it is a mostly local and short-lived affair (the heat flux from reactions decreases, but it starts high and there's no cooling coming in). After a few weeks at most the generated heat is in equilibrium with convection/conduction to the environment. The only thing that might last thousands of years is the measurable radiation of the molten core slag itself, but this is basically diluted nuclear waste. Just stay at least 5m away or pour concrete on it once its cool and you're fine.
Now in theory, you don't need a moderator to make the uranium react. Prompt fission is a thing and is used in three-stage thermonuclear weapons, where the ample flux of neutrons from the fusion reaction is used to split a lot of uranium atoms. Maybe in theory you could increase your nuclear yield if someone had left a bunch of solid pure PWR fuel in outside by placing your nuclear weapon right next to it.
But the fuel isn't just laying down on the ground in pure form, it is shaped into rods with spacing, inside a pressure vessel made of steel designed to contain water at around 150 atmospheres of pressure, wrapped inside a biological shield of 1-2m of concrete, which is itself inside a containment vessel designed to keep a leak of steam from the reactor from spreading radiation, and whose outside wall will stop a full-speed jet with hardly any damage. Your nuclear warhead isn't making it all the way to the fuel rods. A bunker-buster might make it through, but 1. they're usually dropped from a plane due to their high mass and 2. they're extremely narrow, making most nuclear weapons impractical. Maybe the B61-11 is up to the job in theory. Even then I give the resulting neutron flux a low chance of actually doing anything to the fuel."
(He could be talking out of his ass, but everything I've looked into checks out.)
Who are you relying on for your claims? Is there some book I should be reading? Some study I should peruse? Please, do tell!
For my part I've been reading the Jack Devanney/Gordian Knot News substack (https://jackdevanney.substack.com/) and as unconcerned as I was about nuclear before then. I'm at least 2x less concerned now.
Bottom line, the danger of being struck by a nuclear weapon is not a good reason to not build more nuclear.
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.
I agree the 'plot' she painted was a bit contrived. Her motives, though, were to explore a full out nuclear war so in some sense her 'characters' had to be doomed from the start in order to illustrate the whole picture for us. The crux where this was a problem was when the US decided to launch many missiles at North Korea in response, which put Russia in the awkward position of having to 'trust us' as they watched hundreds of dots coming over the north pole at them.
I feel a President would likely decide to use only submarine and non-ICBMs for now least we cause Russia to do a mass launch. On the other hand, the urgency to hit everything and anything in North Korea to stop additional launches (remember they have theirs on trucks so we might need a lot of bombs) could put massive pressure on a President to hit every possible place mobile launchers could be hiding. Even for a small nation like NK, that would require a lot of nukes.
I don't think she was that wrong about hitting a nuclear power plant. Let's keep in mind:
1. We know not only is Chernobyl still radioactive, it's still dangerous. Russian troops reported got radiation sickness after digging ditches near the 'no-go' zone. The bulk of Chernobyl's radioactive material, though, was never released. It's contained in a massive structure where it will probably not be a problem for ages, that is unless someone does something stupid like hit it with a nuke.
2. So if you were going to hit the US with a single nuke or two, does it make sense to hit LA or the plant? Well it really depends on the motivation. If you want to kill a lot of people very fast, LA is a good target. If you want to leave 'your mark' for centuries. Well the canyon will probably do the trick. You can say that isn't rational but then neither is simply wanting to kill the most possible. That leads us to...
3. The fall of the liberal order on an international scale is not causing it to be replaced with a different order but a type of nihilism. One cannot trust nuclear plants won't be targeted either by 'gentlemen's agreement' or the rationality of regimes. The presumption must be norms and rules will not work as reliably as before.
The downstream consequence of this is that this is another knock on nuclear power. It was always a risk with nuclear but the assumption in the Cold War was that nuclear war could not be limited and if you have a full scale nuclear war we're all dead regardless, or at least the global north is close enough to dead. But now the consideration should be that a limited outbreak is something that could happen, and if it happens once it could happen many times. Not only is that bad for nuclear in developed nations, it should cause us to be less eager to encourage nuclear in developing nations.
You use Chernobyl as your evidence for leaving a mark for centuries. Even though there have been plenty of reports that the Chernobyl exclusion zone have become a haven for wildlife.
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2022/scientists-cant-agree-about-chernobyls-impact-wildlife
And it's only been a few decades. To say nothing of a few centuries. Additionally you offer up a single anecdote from the fog of war as the main bit of evidence.
Beyond that the reactors in question are totally different from those operating at Chernobyl. I was discussing it on another forum and someone knowledge had this to say about it:
"A PWR reactor core can only split uranium for a couple of years before needing refueling, and the presence of water as a moderator is required to keep the fission happening coolant-is-moderator is why runaway criticality isn't possible the way it was at Chernobyl. A meltdown can happen but it is a mostly local and short-lived affair (the heat flux from reactions decreases, but it starts high and there's no cooling coming in). After a few weeks at most the generated heat is in equilibrium with convection/conduction to the environment. The only thing that might last thousands of years is the measurable radiation of the molten core slag itself, but this is basically diluted nuclear waste. Just stay at least 5m away or pour concrete on it once its cool and you're fine.
Now in theory, you don't need a moderator to make the uranium react. Prompt fission is a thing and is used in three-stage thermonuclear weapons, where the ample flux of neutrons from the fusion reaction is used to split a lot of uranium atoms. Maybe in theory you could increase your nuclear yield if someone had left a bunch of solid pure PWR fuel in outside by placing your nuclear weapon right next to it.
But the fuel isn't just laying down on the ground in pure form, it is shaped into rods with spacing, inside a pressure vessel made of steel designed to contain water at around 150 atmospheres of pressure, wrapped inside a biological shield of 1-2m of concrete, which is itself inside a containment vessel designed to keep a leak of steam from the reactor from spreading radiation, and whose outside wall will stop a full-speed jet with hardly any damage. Your nuclear warhead isn't making it all the way to the fuel rods. A bunker-buster might make it through, but 1. they're usually dropped from a plane due to their high mass and 2. they're extremely narrow, making most nuclear weapons impractical. Maybe the B61-11 is up to the job in theory. Even then I give the resulting neutron flux a low chance of actually doing anything to the fuel."
(He could be talking out of his ass, but everything I've looked into checks out.)
Who are you relying on for your claims? Is there some book I should be reading? Some study I should peruse? Please, do tell!
For my part I've been reading the Jack Devanney/Gordian Knot News substack (https://jackdevanney.substack.com/) and as unconcerned as I was about nuclear before then. I'm at least 2x less concerned now.
Bottom line, the danger of being struck by a nuclear weapon is not a good reason to not build more nuclear.
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.