JoeSpareBedroom wrote:
"Jim Redelfs" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"JoeSpareBedroom" wrote:

I wonder about nuclear plant security as well.
You can stop wondering. You can probably even relax a bit.

There is a nuke operating perhaps 25 miles from where I am typing. It's
along
the Missouri river. Security there is ridiculously tight. Also, my
son-in-law is an engineer at a nuke perhaps 40 miles east of his home.
The
(generic) stories he tells about security are impressive.

Besides, any terrorist strike on a U.S. nuclear-powered, electricity
generating station will not be a ground-based assault. It will come from
the
air - and will be a dismal failure as core containment here is extremely
OVER
built. FWIW: There was NO containment structure at Chernobyl.
--

JR


If these features are present everywhere, I'll be happy. Actually, though,
security is pretty tight at the Ginna plant east of here (Rochester).
Fishing boats occasionally drift too close to the security zone, and it
raises holy hell. The containment structure is another issue - I have no
idea what it's like.

Those features _ARE_ present everywhere as it is a standard part of NRC
licensing rules.

As for containment, it'll stand anything up to a direct hit from a
bunker-buster or similar ordinance. If there were anywhere I'd choose
to be in an earthquake or such, inside containment would be one real
safe choice...

In reality, any external assault is extremely unlikely to do any damage
to anything other than secondary equipment outside containment such as
the turbine-generators or the switchyard. The most likely way for a
real incident to occur would be as an "inside job" where an employee
became a mole.

My other concern is whether it would be possible for a bunch of idiots to
plan another joke like the Shoreham plant (Long Island). It eventually died
an appropriate death because the evacuation plan was also conceived by
idiots who never bothered to look at a map of Long Island.

In reality, there would never be a need for a massive evacuation in a
panic mode--the requirement for one is simply a current licensing
stipulation inserted as a pacifier to the anti-nuke crowd. A LWR fuel
assembly simply is not highly enriched enough to make a nuclear
explosion--the worst that can happen is a core melt incident similar to
TMI which takes on the order of hours even if the operators make
essentially every possible wrong decision as they did there in the early
stages of the accident(*).

(*) If they had simply left the situation alone and let the HPI and RC
pump systems on, all would have been over within a couple hours and they
could have restarted in a few weeks at the outside after reworking the
HP relief valve on the pressurizer that stuck open after the reactor trip.

--