[mpyne]

Certainly we can invest in renewable, but you'd also have to invest in energy storage in that case.

However toxic nuclear waste may be in its most compact form, that is a political issue, not an engineering one.

And the plant itself is hardly a problem in the scope of a terrorist attack, flying a plane into a skyscraper or disabling the brakes on a petroleum-filled train parked on a hill would be greater risks to public health for a given group of terrorists.

Someday we may even finally upgrade from 1950s and 60s designs that can meltdown, but even the rickety old reactors have not been public health disasters on a par with coal or hydro.

[lostlogin]

Given how badly protected power stations are, they seem a soft target. this may in part explain the insane over reaction here https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7.

[mpyne]

Nuclear civilian power stations are fairly incredibly well-protected post-9/11. One of Canada's nuclear power facilities has continually swept the various S.W.A.T. competitions they hold in North America for at least a couple of years now, and other facilities are similarly well-guarded.

But even if you managed to break in, you can't destroy the containment building with just the explosives you can carry on your person (it is, after all, designed to contain something much worse). Likewise you wouldn't be able to make it near the reactor complex itself as the radiation would kill the terrorists before they could get close enough to damage something.

The best case (for the terrorists) is trying to impeded reactor cooling from the control stations, but that takes a long time for actual damage to occur (time enough to preclude the damage in the first place), and even if you somehow managed to hold out for a whole day and let the reactor try to melt itself (at a rickety old facility without passive safety), you'd just get something like Three Mile Island, not Fukushima.

Perhaps you might try to fly a plane into the containment? But even that wouldn't cause a nuclear yield or anything close, especially with U.S. style containments. Steel-reinforced concrete simply eats planes for breakfast.

The story you linked comes from a description of a nuclear weapons production facility, and even that security lapse was not inherently more severe than breaking into something like a chemical production facility.

There's no magic fairies that kill 10,000 people just because you touched something labeled 'nuclear' after all, so even breaching into the facility wouldn't be a public health risk by itself.