[dctoedt]

> A missile hitting a coal power plant will also be pretty bad, and there's not a giant shield around it.

Probably not even the same order of magnitude. A blown-up nuclear reactor would be WAY worse in short- and long-term effects (and cleanup costs) than a blown-up coal power plant producing comparable MW.

(See: Fukushima and Chernobyl.)

[AnthonyMouse]

Coal is shockingly nasty. Combustion concentrates heavy radioactive elements that are present in the coal. Coal and nuclear plants can't be built too close together or the exhaust from the coal plant will set off the radiation alarm at the nuclear plant.

It also does the same thing to heavy metals in the coal like arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury. More than 90% of coal is carbon and therefore becomes CO2, but because of the huge difference in energy density, the coal plant has to burn millions of times more coal than nuclear reactors consume uranium, and thereby generates tens of thousands of times more toxic and radioactive coal ash than the nuclear plant generates nuclear waste.

Then they put the stuff into "wet surface impoundments" which is industry for dumping the toxic sludge into a lake. Those things frequently poison entire towns without any kind of terrorist attack.

[dctoedt]

Agreed — but we’re talking about a catastrophic missile strike, not longterm operations.

[AnthonyMouse]

What do you think happens if you send a missile to the "wet surface impoundment" that releases the contents of the lake into the town or the groundwater?

[dctoedt]

> What do you think happens if you send a missile to the "wet surface impoundment" that releases the contents of the lake into the town or the groundwater?

I can't speak to that. But nearly 50 years ago I did a deep dive into what would likely happen in the event of a nuclear "accident" (a term of art) in a Navy ship's reactor in port. This was when I was doing the Navy's prep course for the [chief] engineer exam after two years of sea duty running aircraft-carrier reactors. Current-design civilian reactors are much larger, so the effects of a missile-strike meltdown would be correspondingly worse. If I had to guess, it'd be far worse than even the missile strike you postulate.

Footnote: AFAIK there has never been a nuclear accident aboard a Navy ship, submarine or otherwise. That's something in which nukes take immense pride. It's largely because of the zero-defect, second-checking culture ferociously instilled by Admiral Hyman Rickover during his decades in charge of "The Program."

Back to non-missile dangers: Human error is what I've always worried about for nuclear power plants. From what's been made public, both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl could easily have been averted — had it not been for cascades of operator errors. Can we confidently say that such errors are less likely today? To be sure, many civilian nuclear plants in the U.S. are run by Navy veterans. But my guess is that working in such plants doesn't provide the same motivations and incentives as "the Fleet." (And a flock of suicide drones won't care either way.)

Relatedly: I was just reading an account of Air France Flight 447, which flew itself into the middle of the South Atlantic — killing all aboard — because of cascades of egregious pilot error that defeated all the autopilot systems.

[leonidasrup]

I think it's an error that International Atomic Energy Agency classified both Fukushima nuclear accident and Chernobyl nuclear accident on International Nuclear Event Scale Level 7 (major accident).

In both the amount of released radionuclides and health effects of the accidents, Chernobyl accident was much, much bigger than Fukushima.