3 ms·
It's the secondary effects that would likely cause this. Having read a good deal about the Chernobyl (Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly) and Fukushima disasters, basic
by photochemsyn 5y ago
It's the secondary effects that would likely cause this. Having read a good deal about the Chernobyl (Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly) and Fukushima disasters, basically it's the loss of coolant in the reactor cores and the evaporation of water from the cooling ponds for the 'spent' (i.e. too hot to handle) reactor fuel that lead to a runaway meltdown event and associated fire.
So, a 500kt blast over a reactor site will destroy all the surrounding infrastructure, evaporate the water from the cooling ponds, and while perhaps the steel reactor containment shell itself might not be completely obliterated/vaporized at once (or it might), the whole zone is going to be unapproachable, and the kind of heroic efforts employed at Chernobyl (notably a graphite core reactor that burned, Fukushima having no flammable graphite) and Fukushima are not going to happen. So, total meltdown of reactor core, hydrogen explosion, venting to atmosphere, some fraction of the core liquifies the rest vaporizes. The spent fuel in the ponds, all the water flashes to steam, they burn / melt. Nobody comes rushing in to manage the situation, it's full-on runaway.
So Chernobyl IIRC lost about 1% of one of its reactor mass to the atmosphere, and that was one of four reactors at the site. This resulted in significant fallout across Europe and a 30-km radius long-term exclusion zone. Now let's say instead oh, at least 50% of each reactor mass + spent fuel goes into the atmosphere, the rest melts into the ground... I don't know how this would scale. A 300-km radius exclusion zone perhaps at minimum? To get accurate estimates you then have to do a bunch of modeling, atmospheric fluid dynamics, etc.
I can't imagine there aren't top-secret studies in some military branch or other on how this would all pan out, but they've never been publicly released to my knowledge.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aerostable_slug 5y agoThere's a fellow on Reddit who has been doing some interesting work modeling a notional RISOP — basically, what the Russians would do to us in various counterforce & countervalue scenarios. He cannot comment on SIOP planning as he used to work on it (civil engineer by training), but he can conjecture a RISOP based on open sources. This person makes a point of targeting American dry cask nuclear waste storage sites. It takes out the power plant they're next to and ruptures the casks, resulting in Prolonged Suck downwind of the site. He also targets dams in a cascading manner, so even if we did "win the war", certain major cities would have been underwater for a sustained period of time. FWIW, when asked where he'd go to hide out he said he wouldn't, that the loss of food supplies, medicine, etc. would be catastrophic no matter where you ended up in CONUS. Re: food, even if the grain fields of the midwest were intact, you've got no transportation, no power to process the grain into food products, no antibiotics to take care of that scratch you got from the combine, no fuel for the combine, etc. Many would survive but it wouldn't be fun. He lives in San Francisco, FWIW.
- WalterBright 5y agoThe pandemic disruptions to the supply chain showed us how vulnerable we all are. Since we don't really have general purpose family farms anymore, I expect a global catastrophe that cut the supply chains would kill 90% of the population from starvation. How many of us can butcher a hog? know when to plant? how to make soap? Even if we did, we'd die anyway because the world food supply depends on fertilizer.
- 323 5y agoSounds like we should bury deep those casks. But we can't because of NIMBYs.
- jwithington 5y agoWhat guy on Reddit? Would love to follow his work!
- aerostable_slug 5y agohttps://www.reddit.com/user/dmteter/ https://www.reddit.com/user/dmteter/
- robocat 5y agoAre you just hypothesising, or do you have some reliable sources to base your narrative on?
- photochemsyn 5y agoHere you go, see references within as well. Apparently the DOE did some studies about the effects of nuclear weapons on reactors and oil refineries in the early 1970s: > "...the staggering radiological consequences of destruction of a nuclear reactor by a nuclear weapon...put the radiologic damage potential of a fair-sized nuclear arsenal into the hands of any nation or terrorist group with a single, ten-kiloton bomb (170)" https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/RMI_Brittle_Power_Energy_Strategy_Natl_Security_1982.pdf https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/RMI_Brittle_Power...
- robocat 5y agoThank you. The relevant section starts at page 161. The book suggests the worst case scenarios: 1. vaporisation of the core* by a small highly targeted terrorist nuclear bomb (most relevant to reactors near large population centres). 2. vaporisation of the core* by a larger nuclear bomb. A standard meltdown (a la Fukushima or 3 Mile Island) would likely not be a problem (relative to the explosion of the nuclear missile itself). Can a nuclear missile from a sub cause vaporisation of the core or stored spent rods? I am sure the military wonks have the answer, but it is a hard question to answer as a civilian. The book you referenced doesn’t answer that question (it hypothesises some worst case scenarios, and it does not investigate what could be realistic scenarios based on realistic limitations). * or stored spent rods I presume.