You receive an emergency alert: "BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL." What do you do? How do you think your neighborhood will react? What memes be on Lemmy?
We were in this scenario last year, when NK launched a missile towards Hokkaido, and we were on the west coast, just next to a nuclear reactor.
After getting the altert, we put on clothes, went downstairs to the sturdiest room, stuck on the TV to the NHK news, and waited. The missle plopped into the ocean off the coast, and we had tempura for lunch.
There's really nothing you can do in these situations but stay calm and do the small, sensible things.
we hope. never having tested nearby strikes, there's no way to know how resilient to catastrophe these things are, and even when over-engineered with an eye on safety in the worst conditions, fukushima illustrates that everything can go wrong in a cascade and still render them unsafe.
honestly, coastal nuclear power stations like diablo canyon and fukushima are going to be interacting with larger and more violent storms in the future, and tsunamis etc., perhaps there are better places for them.
it may be physically impossible but until we test them with catastrophic conditions we won't know. that said, their long history of fail-safe fail states and the extremely reduced physical constraints (lower pressure, lower temps, lower amounts of fissile material, lower enrichment, etc.,) make me think you're right, but it's gonna be hard to prove because we're having such difficulty getting the larger industry to test the shit much less deploy it in any reasonable amount of time.
Not to make anyone nervous, but dropping a fuckass big missile on a pile of very secure and safe nuclear material will still scatter that material in a wide area, and wind will make it worse.
But no, making a modern nuclear suffer a meltdown is basically impossible
That's exactly what I'm saying... If you live near a nuclear power plant, you're a potential target. Cause the bomb doesn't destroy the plant, it destroys the city it's in and several towns around it.
The plant is a target because hitting the plant makes the power go out for the whole region, but your problem is the warhead. Meltdowns don't factor in at any point.
If they are built and maintained correctly. And meltdown isn't the only problem that could occur.
I don't have much faith in a corrupt, self-regulated industry, with strong yakuza ties, to do things 100% the correct way, especially given everything we know about the industry post 2011. Knowing how much local political power the company has, I know they could literally get away with murder, as no politician or police would want to be on their bad side.
Don't get me wrong, the missile was still the biggest threat, but I do believe the power plant isn't necessarily safe. An engineering and/or scientific understanding of a modern power plant doesn't mean shit if you don't consider the political and capitalist systems the that underpin their construction and maintenance.