Honestly withstanding airliner crash sounds like an impossible task. And crashing airliner into something is perfectly achievable by a terrorist or crazy pilot.
So I think that's a real danger.
https://interestingengineering.com/crashed-jet-nuclear-react...
Sure, rupturing that would release toxic materials out into the surrounding area. But how is that different from flying a plane into a chemical plant? If terrorists hijacked a plane, it'd probably kill an order of magnitude more people by flying it into a skyscraper than into dry waste caskets.
theres so many potential failure points, here is another: if they fly through the electric pylons and into the cooling tower, there is no place to dump the energy as the reactor can't be shut down immediately, and cooling will fail soon, ...
A dirty bomb is a device specifically designed to disperse radioactive material. Spent nuclear fuels is actually much less harmful than the isotopes that could be used in a dirty bomb, and it's potential for dispersal is much less in a ground collision than in an atmospheric detonation. Nuclear waste would get dispersed over a few hundred meters, and the top couple feet of dirt in these areas would be cleared away and replaced.
> theres so many potential failure points, here is another: if they fly through the electric pylons and into the cooling tower, there is no place to dump the energy as the reactor can't be shut down immediately, and cooling will fail soon, ...
Which is why most plants have more than one cooling tower (well, some don't have any cooling towers if they're cooled by ocean water). And even in the event that all cooling facilities are destroyed, plant operators would insert the cooling rods to shut down the reactors. There are backup diesel generators to power the control systems in the event that the plant's main electric generator fails.
These kinds of scenarios are borderline absurd. By, the way, what happens if someone flies a plane into a chemical plant manufacturing solar panels? Harmful chemicals could be released into the surrounding areas. Should we shut down solar plant manufacturing until this failure point is addressed? Of course not, such a complaint is as nonsensical about the ones you're trying to make towards nuclear.
What chemicals would you be talking about? silane gas is explosive, but burns to water and silicon dioxide...
> These kinds of scenarios are borderline absurd
So absurd, the US government gave the hijackers of Southern Airways Flight 49 $2 million ..., about as absurd as an earthquake and a tsunami flooding some emergency generators...
Good luck with Mohr's circle...
A: Nuclear is dangerous because bad things happen if a jumbo jet crashes onto it.
B: Is there anything that doesn't cause bad things when a jumbo jet crashes onto it?
A: Irrelevant, these things aren't as dangerous as nuclear.
I get that there are issues with nuclear. This isn't one.
its not just about things being bad when an airliner crashes, but about the additional risk incurred.
if I can choose between a nuclear power plant getting hit 10km from me, or some silane also 10km from me, I'd know what I'd dissaprove of most.
if I can choose between leaving for the next generations a location where surface storage was hit by an airliner, or where some silane gas was used being hit by an airliner, I'd know what I prefer to leave behind for them...
chemicals are easier to sort than isotopes
Nuclear waste is measured in the tens of thousands of tons. Solar waste is in the tens of millions of tons. Most of it just dumped in landfills.
If your concern is about wanting to minimize the amount of waste left to future generations, then there is absolutely no reason to choose solar over nuclear power. The energy density of nuclear power is such that it generates orders of magnitude less waste.
> End-of-life (EOL) solar panels may become a source of hazardous waste although there are enormous benefits globally from the growth in solar power generation.
It is good that people worry about this new waste stream, and argue incentivizing recycling of this waste stream.
That said, the harmfulness of different types of waste is not compared in kilograms...
Absolutely, the harm from solar panels dumped in landfills is vastly greater than uranium buried 300 meters deep in bedrock. Uranium's energy density is such that we can afford to spend money on tightly securing the little waste it produces. By comparison, most plans for renewable power generation involve covering 2-4% of the Earth's land in solar panels. This is a vast amount of waste to dispose of, and it's not remotely close to feasible to secure it like nuclear waste.
A terrorist is not likely to select a nuclear power plant's dry storage either. Again, a terrorist stands to kill far more people crashing a plane into a building than either dry cask storage or solar panel manufacturing planet.
> What chemicals would you be talking about? silane gas is explosive, but burns to water and silicon dioxide
Crashing a plane into inert concrete casks is too great a risk but crashing into a plant with explosives is fine? And depending on the type of solar panel being crated, manufacturing could involve cadmium and other materials that could easily pose a cancer risk on par with the uranium in the dry storage casks. And I doubt these materials are as well secured.
> So absurd, the US government gave the hijackers of Southern Airways Flight 49 $2 million
The plane itself is more expensive than the $2M. I doubt the authorities' decisions would have been different if the hijackers threatened to fly into the nearest skyscraper. And by the way, the hijackers threatened to crash into the reactor not the dry storage casks.
> about as absurd as an earthquake and a tsunami flooding some emergency generators
Earthquakes are real concerns, planes flying into dry storage casks are not. There's no Mohr's circle here, only increasingly bizarre scenarios about how someone might compromise dry storage casks (coupled with handwaving away the fact that there are far more dangerous things a person could do with a hijacked plane, like fly it into an occupied building).
For terrorists, body count isn't the goal it's one means to an ends indicated by the label.
I know of 0 incidents where terrorists did or threatened to attack a solar manufacturing plant with an aeroplane.
But we know of at least 1 incident of terrorists threatening to attack a nuclear facility with an aeroplane.
EDIT: watched. An aeroplane is not a train.
2) What's your point? You can kill way more people by flying an airplane into a building than any nuclear facility.
2) don't ask me what the point is, as long as some people can envision a point to it, it's irresponsible to not avoid such a situation. don't ask me what the point is, ask the hijackers of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Airways_Flight_49
Again, if you have a highjacked plane on hand you can cause way more damage by crashing it into a skyscraper than some nuclear waste storage - it's a somewhat different risk but not a greater one.
Check out these, with humans for comparison:
For comparison, Schwerer Gustav shells weighed about the same as A380 engine, were mostly hardened solid steel, arrived on target at about Mach 2 and could penetrate some 7 meters of concrete (including the explosive charge).
You can help yourself to a F-4 vs concrete test that doesn't really make a dent in about 1m of concrete.
So let's calculate the kinetic energy for the 3 things mentioned: the Phantom F4 II kinetic energy, the Schwerer Gustav shell kinetic energy (I don't know the energy in the explosive charge though) and the A380 kinetic energy:
E = 1/2 * m * v * v (not sure how to use caret in markdown)
Phantom F4 II: 1/2 18,824 kg (770 / 3.6 m / s) (770 / 3.6 m / s) = 430 MJ
Schwere Gustav shell: 1/2 7000 kg 343 m / s 343 m / s = 412 MJ EDIT: this should be 4 x 412 MJ = 1.6 GJ since I forgot to double the speed of sound.
A-380: 1/2 500000 kg ( 945 / 3.6 m / s ) ( 945 / 3.6 m / s ) = 17.226 GJ
where I used 500 tonnes instead of max takeoff weight of 575 tonnes, and V MO of 945 km/h
so thats 40 x more energy than the F4 test...
the F4 test resulted in a 6 cm deep scratch, so naively multiplying by 40 gives 2.4 m , i.e. substantially more than 70 cm (to see it's not that naive, just consider crashing 40 F4's sequentially, they'll dig deeper and deeper)
A-380 is not a shell, it's a soft sausage 70 meters long.
The fuselage collision would be stretched in time, greatly diminishing impact forces. It's large cross-section means it couldn't even focus on a single cask. The 40 F-4s analogy is incorrect again, as the tail of the plane wouldn't be hitting the target, it would be hitting the soft pile of crap from the nose and midsection.
The engine is the only dangerous part as far as collisions against concrete go, and even then not so dangerous.
Again, let's say we got unlucky and the 4 engines of an A-380 breached 4 casks. Would it be bad? Of course. Would it be as bad as 9/11? No way.
The fireball would lift some dust in the air and quickly dilute it. Nuclear fuel is essentially ceramic and doesn't melt until 2800C, way above what jet fuel can do (steel beam anyone?). Some fission products would be included in the cloud.
Local decontamination effort would be many orders of magnitude below that of Chernobyl (where health effects on cleanup workers proved impossible to measure) and probably on par with 9/11 cleanup.