| 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. |