[estro0182]

I would argue that this is a near equivalence of nuclear war with Ukraine. A well-/mis-placed Russian artillery shell could cause a loss of reactor integrity and meltdown, no?

EDIT: according to child comments, a meltdown is unlikely/impossible, but spread of radioactive particles due to a direct strike is possible.

[throwanem]

Potentially. I'd worry more about coolant and power (to run the coolant pumps if the plant has to shut down) than about direct hits on a containment structure, but it's not like that won't eventually also cause problems if they keep doing it.

This is, so far as I know, the first time anyone has carried out a military attack on an operating nuclear plant. Nobody knows yet how that really plays out. But it looks like we all get to find out.

[_dain_]

>This is, so far as I know, the first time anyone has carried out a military attack on a nuclear plant

The Israelis bombed an Iraqi plant in the 80s I think.

[nickff]

You're talking about Operation Opera, which was an attack on the unfinished Osirak reactor in Iraq.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera

[throwanem]

Still a fair callout. Edited my original comment to clarify.

[michaelmrose]

The bombed an unfinished plant that they believed would have been critical in paving the way for a belligerent dictator to obtain nuclear weapons courtesy of short sighted idiots in Europe.

Both the Iranians and the Israelis actually bombed the site one different operations in different years. Thereafter Saddam is now known to have said.

"Once Iraq walks out victorious [over Iran], there will not be any Israel"

It was both justified and didn't represent the risk that attacking this reactor represents.

[lupire]

We know what happened in Japan when an earthquake attacked a nuclear plant.

[adastra22]

It’s not comparable because the type of damage is totally different.

[hinkley]

The type of damage at Fukushima was anticipated to be survivable as well, was it not? And yet here we are.

[throwanem]

Fukushima was explicitly a beyond-design-basis accident. (The design basis was insufficient, granted.)

On the other hand, I don't know whether the VVER design contemplates shelling, either.

[Gare]

Technically, it was tsunami that caused trouble.

[kart23]

I'd classify stuxnet as a military attack.

[throwanem]

So would I. But that was targeted at fuel production, not power generation, and also to my admittedly imperfect knowledge involved no artillery fire.

[jessriedel]

No. It is many orders of magnitude less dangerous. It would potentially cause thousands of deaths, not hundreds of millions. This is true even if a melt down was caused, like Chernobyl, which others have already explained is quite improbable.

Chernobyl caused between ~100 and ~16,000 deaths, depending sensitively on how one models the effects of small (sub-natural-background) radiation increases over a large population.

[hinkley]

Still, maybe we should be amending the list of war crimes to include certain types of sabotage of nuclear power plants.

In a war situation, shutting off highways and disabling power plants or oil refineries are all strategic targets that affect both the military and civilians. But shutting down a refinery is different than dumping all of the chemical tanks into the water supply, setting oil fields on fire, or making the nuclear plant blow up.

[jessriedel]

Yes, I agree. Its plausible to me nuclear power plants should have special protection during time of war.

The chief issue is that, unlike something like cultural artifacts, power plants have significant strategic military importance. Perhaps a rule that (a) fighting be confined outside a certain perimeter and (b) plant workers have special protected status like medics, and are required to obey shutdown orders if the invading military takes control of the perimeter (so that the invaders don't have incentive to physically destroy the plant).

[estro0182]

I am using nuclear war in a literal sense, but I do see how my wording seems sensationalist given historical context.

[jessriedel]

It's not equivalent to nuclear war with Ukraine in either the sense of relative risk (for the reasons I gave) nor in the sense in which the term "nuclear weapons" is actually used. Russia intelligence agents poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium, but this was not called a nuclear attack because that's not what the term means.

One could argue, at most, that this would be equivalent to a radiological weapon ("dirty bomb"). But even then it wouldn't be correct because of the important difference between purposeful radiological dispersal and radiological dispersal as a side-effect of a legitimate military action.

[adastra22]

It is war, and it involves nuclear things. That’s what he meant by “literal sense,” I think.

[renewiltord]

Ah, behold, my fist is an atomic weapon because ultimately the damage it inflicts is because of the Coulomb repulsion force of the fist atoms with other atoms.

[frabbit]

No. Your fist is a biological weapon.

[_dain_]

There is a distinction between nuclear warfare and radiological warfare, which is what this would (arguably) be.

[andbberger]

A single nuke would be more like 100k deaths, still several orders of magnitude safer. But yes, the actual danger posed by radiation is far less than what it is imagined to be

[jessriedel]

Sure, but this is neither a nuclear weapon (it would be, at most, a radiological weapon) nor risk-similar to one.

[andbberger]

OP argued this is risk-equivalent to nuclear war. it's not even close

[csee]

Nuclear war can be many things. There are small nukes not designed to level cities.

[veganhouseDJ]

Some people are really talking insanity.

These insane people I think need to watch the Tsar bomba go off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwlNPhn64TA

We aren't talking about fatman and little boy. Talking about thousands of H bombs and literally the apocalypse for the human race.

[hollerith]

Person you are replying to is writing about a meltdown at a nuclear power plant

[maxerickson]

A few artillery shells probably won't breach the containment. Missile shielding is part of the plant design (I don't know what level of shielding; US plants are designed to withstand a strike by an airliner).

Not saying that the attack is thus acceptable, just saying that it will take a concerted effort to breach the containment.

[throwanem]

How old's the plant? To what design is it built? I feel like the CFIT design basis is already a little optimistic, but we also don't know that that was the design basis in this case.

[Zandikar]

completed in 1989, with a 6th reactor added in 1995.

For what it's worth, the russian convoy is firing on the administrative building, not the power units themselves, but I don't know specifically what is in said admin bldg or what the ramifications for operation/shutdown of the power units/cooling systems works if the admin building burns down and/or gets shot up.

[adastra22]

Soviet era plants don’t have containment shells. I don’t know about this one though.

[maxerickson]

I'm certainly no expert, but I read a little bit about it before I commented. The reactors here do have a building intended to serve as containment. I didn't really see much assessment of how robust it is.

This is from last week and discusses the practical impacts of war around the plant being a major issue even if the plant isn't involved:

https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/02/24/most-immediate-nucl...

That article briefly mentions this page, where the CEO of Ukraine's nuclear operator states that they are protected:

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/A-guide-Nuclear-...

"In addition, Ukrainian power units are ready even for an aircraft crash, because the containment and the reactor vessel designed to withstand corresponding risks."

Russia doesn't need to control the immediate areas around nuclear plants in the initial phases of their invasion, it's lunacy that they aren't carefully avoiding them.

[mulmen]

> Russia doesn't need to control the immediate areas around nuclear plants in the initial phases of their invasion, it's lunacy that they aren't carefully avoiding them.

We are over a week in, I think this is beyond the initial invasion timeframe. Russia has faced fierce resistance so I can understand a desire to weaken that defense.

It’s a lot harder to stage a defense when you have no electricity. Strategically it makes a lot of sense for Russia to overtake or shut down the power grid. If they do that with physical damage then there’s no need to control the immediate vicinity.

[adastra22]

Why not just cut the transmission lines?

[mulmen]

Because they would have to occupy the area where the lines were cut to prevent repairs? I don't know. I'm not justifying what Russia is doing, but it isn't surprising.

[Symmetry]

This one has a smaller core than a RBMK so it was cheap enough to have a containment shell that the Soviets were willing to pay for one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Safety_barriers

[andbberger]

You'd think that nuclear energy would be pretty compelling economically if other power generation methods had to be designed to withstand a strike from an airliner

[caslon]

If an unprotected solar farm gets hit by a plane, some property damage happens. If an unprotected nuclear reactor were to get hit, we all know what would happen.

[andbberger]

the danger of radiation has been greatly exaggerated and pales in comparison the existential risk of climate change. even accounting for black swan events like getting hit by an airliner, coal plants emit drastically more radiation than nuclear.

it's not a rational risk assessment.

making nuclear energy economically unfeasible by mandating that things be drastically overbuilt has doomed us all to climate catastrophe

[caslon]

I don't disagree that nuclear energy is good; I'm pointing out that you're strawmanning. A solar farm doesn't have to be protected from missiles, because if it gets hit with missiles, only it is destroyed. It harms nothing around it, if it gets destroyed or fails in some fashion.

If you want to represent nuclear, do it honestly; there are a million reasons why it's a good thing, a weak strawman doesn't help your case.

[andbberger]

it's not a strawman. designing to requirements driven by fear and not rational risk assessment can make feasible technology infeasible.

if we designed airliners with a safety factor in line with people's fear of flying and not the actual risk of failure, they would never be able to get off the ground.

yet we require that nuclear power plants tolerate any conceivable failure mode, no matter how unlikely, or dangerous.

that's not rational.

[hinkley]

That may be true for the number of actual plants we have, but public sentiment against nuclear is why we don't have 10, even 100 times as many plants as we do now. If you start shifting decimal points two positions to the right, and diminishing the distance between plants, between plants and critical habitat, by an order of magnitude (separation is square root of density per area), those numbers aren't quite as rosy.

100 might sound like hyperbole, but if, somehow, nuclear was guilt-free power, we'd be using at least twice as much power as we currently do. Eventually that much waste heat becomes its own problem (requiring more cooling to 'deal with')

[andbberger]

Earth is _very_ big, safety numbers are given per kWh, waste heat is insignificant compared to total insolation and all other generation methods generate the same amount of waste heat (that’s the law). Solar wind and hydro kind of cheat with the accounting though.

[photochemsyn]

Well, recall that the Fukushima meltdowns were due to loss of emergency power, resulting in the inability to circulate coolant through the reactor core. Any kind of damage to the power plant that results in such power loss or damage to the coolant system could plausibly result in a meltdown / hydrogen explosion in the reactor core.

[joshuajill]

Loss of coolant can have effects on the reactor and/or the spent fuel pool or container if there is such in the facilities. Any of these could go critical very quickly and ignite/explode.

But based on what happened in Fukushima, critical electrical/cooling systems and backups would have to be damaged in order to pose catastrophic risk.

While this is unlikely I'll probably lose some hours of sleep on this.

I very much doubt the Russians would do this on purpose (fallout would risk the whole operation and possibly Russian territory too) although the fighting around there is incredibly stupid.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Apparently current prevailing winds would spread fallout through Russian-held areas in Donbas and Crimea.

Not exactly a brilliant strategy - unless you're deranged and really don't care about your people.

[shadowgovt]

Probably not. Reactors generally can't melt down the way Chernobyl did anymore. The most significant risk is a breach of the reactor chamber fragmenting the fuel rofs and spreading radioactive particles around, or a hit to the spent fuel stores doing the same.

Neither are good, but they wouldn't be nearly as bad as Chernobyl or a nuclear weapon strike.

[throwanem]

Nobody builds RBMK-style uncontained graphite piles any longer, but that's a long way from saying meltdowns are no longer possible.

[throwawayboise]

There are 8 RBMK reactors still operating, though all are in Russia.

[nl]

> Reactors generally can't melt down the way Chernobyl did anymore.

a) "the way Chernobyl did" is technically correct (the VVER reactor that Zaporizhzhia is uses a difference containment strategy), but a distinction without meaning - a meltdown is a meltdown.

b) "anymore" - Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant was built between 1980 and 1996.

It's true that it is a safer design than Chernobyl, but yes it absolutely can still meltdown.

> The most significant risk is a breach of the reactor chamber fragmenting the fuel rods and spreading radioactive particles around

Note that this "spreading radioactive particles around" is probably more dangerous to health than a meltdown.

[pdpi]

> Note that this "spreading radioactive particles around" is probably more dangerous to health than a meltdown.

Put in different terms: We're basically talking about the equivalent of a dirty bomb.

[akiselev]

A dirty bomb with as much as 30,000 kg of radioactive fuel and waste.

[marcosdumay]

> a meltdown is a meltdown

I'd say that how much radioactive waste gets expelled or leaked and how much energy goes into it makes all the difference in the world and each meltdown is probably unique.

[mdanger007]

nuclear scientist @CherylRofer is worried about the ongoing fighting around the administrative building. some highly trained people keep that place from melting down and now they've got bullets whizzing by their head and fires breaking out in their offices.

[estro0182]

Ok this is good to know, thanks for clarifying. While not nearly as bad as the two scenarios listed, spreading radioactive particles near a population center of civilians could be grounds to consider this a nuclear war, intentional or not. Not on the same scale as a deliberate nuclear attack of course.

[sabujp]

if it can be bad as fukushima then it's bad

[ffhhj]

> near equivalence of nuclear war

If radiation escapes it would be a "dirty bomb" equivalent event, it will speed up sanctions and nations will urge Russia to allow experts to inspect the damage.

A meltdown/explosion is possible if they damage safety systems/shielding. Still won't be seen serious as a "nuke detonation" event, but countries that receive fallout will be pissed off.

If Russia continues causing more nuclear pollution that affects it neighbors, yes, it could mean war scalation.