Anyway I don't think the concern is that they would target or otherwise intentionally sabotage the reactors -- but that nonetheless they would allow something bad (potentially seriously bad) to happen by pure neglect. Kind of like the way they managed to blow up Reactor 4 in the first place back in 1986.
And of course you can wait until the wind is blowing in the right direction.
Yes, there would be consequences. But there are also consequences for going on a random shooter spree, and they don't stop random shooters.
If you attack that infrastructure, the core will melt down without suffering a direct attack.
IIRC, that's what happened at Fukushima: a tsunami took out the backup generators, which shut down the core cooling system, which then led to the core overheating and melting down.
And as for loss of habitability, the dose rates around Chernobyl are elevated but not incompatible with life. Around Fukushima, I'd join Elon Musk in eating any locally grown food. Better to avoid airplanes if you're concerned about those levels of radiation, below the threshold known to cause the smallest measurable increase in cancer (100 mSv acute, 300 mSv annual). Good read here: [2]
[1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1
[2] https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...
For example, CA uses about 25 GW-day of electricity per day. To make that much on a perfectly calm CA winter day, you need to have about 100 GW of solar capacity standing by. Then, you need to also build energy storage/shifting systems that can shift the energy from the noontime peak to the night, where baseload demand never falls below 20 GWe.
Now consider that there are often 15-day wind lulls in huge regional areas, and sometimes these coincide with big cloudy areas.
The oft quoted "low" costs of wind and solar in levelized $/kWh completely ignore and hide the fact that you have to overbuild at this magnitude and include the storage. The overbuild also implies a massive over-taxing of earth's land and mineral resources to build and rebuild the collectors and storage system.
Saying solar is the cheapest form of energy is like saying kids tents in the yard are the cheapest form of housing, and just pretending the indoor plumbing and heating and pantry of the parent's house cost nothing.
Systems costs are what matter. LCOE must stop driving policy.
Building 30 GW of load-following nuclear would be cheaper and have far lower impact on the environment.
The alternate less cooperative answer is no. 'Renewables' as a concept are not the answer. Biofuel is renewable but causes climate change and air pollution while nuclear is low carbon and low pollution but not considered renewable.
Furthermore, nuclear fuel on earth can power 100% of our primary energy for 4 billion years using the known and demonstrated technology of breeder reactors. This is just as long as the nuclear fusion fuel that powers solar, wind, hydro, bio will last, and so nuclear is just as renewable as those.
LCOE is pertinent because the very low total cost of electricity generated by renewables spares money, enabling investments needed to compensate intermittency (over-provisionning, storage...).
Not a single industrial breeder reactor works satisfactorily (after many decades of R&D backed by huge investments in nations).
World population is likely to steeply decline, and globalization plus high living standards will most probably go away. We just won't consume as much energy or make and trade as much stuff in the future.
So, rewording that: a bunch of people will die, enough to reduce the global population, the ones who are left are going to be miserable.
And all of that makes you _less_ worried?
In Japan, TEPCO demonstrated a long-running, stunning disregard for safety that led to the Fukashima disaster (and it was not Japan's first nuclear power plant disaster, either): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#Pri...
And as a reminder, Chernobyl happened because a bunch of engineers were basically engaged in a dick-measuring contest, likely to satisfy some apparatchik.
I'd say the world's nuclear power programs have demonstrated extensively that humans as a whole can't handle the responsibilities, and now we have numerous, much safer alternatives.
It's an absolute miracle we haven't had an accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon near a population center given bombs have even been released from planes, in some cases with multiple safety systems satisfied - and that the permissive action link system was almost completely bypassed by petulant air force commanders who had weapons set to (I wish I were making this up) codes of all zeros.
With the energy usage of non-western countries exploding quickly this could be a major hinderance to stopping climate change if all prosperous nations go all-in on nuclear and discourage other countries from doing so because of the risk.
A non realistic scenario tbh, it's very unlikely that e.g. germany will construct new nuclear power plants and a lot of not-very-stable countries already use nuclear power as we're seeing right now.
Russia has used its reactors to produce materials to conduct political assassinations on foreign soil, which have ended up injuring and contaminating many innocent people.