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France Investigating Mysterious Drone Activity Over 7 Nuclear Power Plant Sites
thygate writes In France, an investigation has been launched into the appearance of "drones" on 7 different nuclear power plant sites across the country in the last month. Some of the plants involved are Creys-Malville en Bugey in the southeast, Blayais in the southwest, Cattenom en Chooz in the northeast, Gravelines in the north, and Nogent-sur-Seine, close to Paris. It is forbidden to fly over these sites on altitudes less than 1 km in a 5 km radius. According to a spokesman of the state electric company that runs the facilities (EDF), there was no danger to the security and production of the plants. However these incidents will likely bring nuclear safety concerns back into the spotlight.
Hurry up and surrender so we can go back to drinking wine and eating cheese.
They have a history of "direct action" against French nuclear plants.
They fired five RPG-7 rounds at the Superphenix when it was still under construction in 1982.
If someone were so morally bankrupt enough to create a drone army to infiltrate certain gaps and structural weaknesses in the plant and detonate significant payload to disrupt cooling/power/containment, surrounding area is going to be uninhabitable for a looong time.
Time for plants to consider netting, maybe? If it would help at all? Perhaps reinforce areas so that drones can't easily fly into them?
READY.
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If someone were so morally bankrupt enough to create a drone army to infiltrate certain gaps and structural weaknesses in the plant and detonate significant payload to disrupt cooling/power/containment, surrounding area is going to be uninhabitable for a looong time.
Time for plants to consider netting, maybe? If it would help at all? Perhaps reinforce areas so that drones can't easily fly into them?
I'd think, a combination of automatic RF and laser countermeasures. It might actually be fun to design.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Vive le Louisiana libre!
The swedish EMP cannon seems like a shoe in for this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bofors_HPM_Blackout
Just Americans with special new equipment that will allow them to spy on everybody.
After all, so many run around believing that.
Drones have a fairly low weight limit and are not hard to spot. In order to flood the area with enough drones to do significant damage you would absolutely know you were under attack.
If you could stage an attack of 100 remotely operator drones with enough HE to do serious damage you could probably do a lot more damage putting the same effort into a battery of mortars.
My first thought is it is probably some anti-nuclear group hoping to get scary pictures and data to skew horribly to terrorise the public. They probably had some cheap and nasty Geiger counter on them and we will get something like - DID YOU KNOW THE AIR ABOVE A NUCLEAR POWERPLANT IS 10,000,000,000,000,00000000 TIMES MORE RADIOACTIVE THEN NORMAL?!?!?! YOU ARE BREATHING THIS IN!!!!!!!!!
Why would you worry about this? We have it on good authority from the last 13 years of countless posters and moderators pushing those views and punishing dissent that there are no terrorists, only "terrorists".... maybe. And they're all FBI plants. And this is probably just a false flag so the bureaucrats in Brussels can get more power. And if any attack were to happen it would be an inside job.
Besides, even if something actually happened, wouldn't another Chernobyl in Western Europe be just a big "teachable moment" for everybody?
I'm not worried.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
If someone were so morally bankrupt enough to create a drone army to infiltrate certain gaps and structural weaknesses in the plant and detonate significant payload to disrupt cooling/power/containment, surrounding area is going to be uninhabitable for a looong time.
That's not even remotely true.
A couple well placed hand grenades can take out most Tier-4 data centers. You need a bit more than that for a (nuclear) power plant, but a 2kg payload can do some real damage.
That said, the time to repair is minimal for anything I can think of, although you might be able to degrade the long-term service life.
A couple well placed hand grenades can take out most Tier-4 data centers. You need a bit more than that for a (nuclear) power plant, but a 2kg payload can do some real damage.
That said, the time to repair is minimal for anything I can think of, although you might be able to degrade the long-term service life.
Actually, no, you can provoke a meltdown.
NRC convened a panel of Industry makers and operators of Nuclear power plants to make recommendations to protect plants against sabotage. It is possible however I think it would be irresponsible to discus how. And before you start looking, the report is not on the net anymore either.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
If you take out the stepup transformers the plant goes down for months.
That doesn't sound remotely true. Most of the important equipment (HVAC, Power, Connectivity) is made of iron and steel and sits behind concrete walls (or underground in the case of fiber), separated either by large distances or placed at opposite ends of the same buildings. So unless you have full building access to walk around and stick explosives inside conduits, raceways, fuel tanks, and generator housings (which you won't if it's a Tier 4 datacenter), there's no way lobbing a few grenades from the parking lot will do anything but force a controlled shutdown of some systems for emergency repairs.
Fun fact, even a datacenter in the middle of a desert can cool every piece of equipment inside via a process known as evaporative cooling; using a heat exchanger connected to an underground water tank or adequate commercial supply, the differential in humidity inside causes heat to be evaporated in the desert sun.
US correctional facilities use automatic rubber ball AA inplacments to stop drones from dropping in cell phones drugs and wepons
They most likely aren't talking about reapers. Just some dumbass with 1200 bucks who doesn't really understand what kind of shit storm this causes for people who are trying to fly similar aircraft in a legitimate manner.
Bah, it's just the reflection of Venus off of a weather balloon.
Table-ized A.I.
If someone were so morally bankrupt enough to create a drone army to infiltrate certain gaps and structural weaknesses in the plant and detonate significant payload to disrupt cooling/power/containment, surrounding area is going to be uninhabitable for a looong time.
Time for plants to consider netting, maybe? If it would help at all? Perhaps reinforce areas so that drones can't easily fly into them?
How about a high energy laser grid powered by the reactor that would melt anything coming into the airspace around the plant?
Do you really believe such gaps exist? I mean, birds and other critters would have already infiltrated them.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Even more fun: drain the Sheik of Qatar's bank account by feeding his drones carefully concocted false information, say that a particular exploitable "access port" through the containment vessel exists. Applaud as the local ISIS sleeper cell strike team vainly slams into solid concrete.
Drones have a fairly low weight limit
The US Reaper drones have a 680kg payload capacity. That's enough to upset most people who find themselves under it.
Just like your mom!
Tell that to the people who used to live around Fukushima.
Chillers and other outdoor heat-discharging HVAC equipment is generally not designed to withstand intentional malicious acts. Any enclosure for such equipment cannot be too restrictive either, otherwise it will not allow enough airflow to function effectively. That means that the coils, fans, piping, pressure gauges, valves, and other parts are fairly exposed and can be disabled without much effort.
Fragmented shrapnel could easily puncture multiple coils, could easily break-off pressure gauges, could destroy fan motors or blades. Even if the HVAC units have the ability to disconnect from discharged coils, if enough coils lose pressure and vent then the unit won't be able to keep up with its needs.
The compressor/chiller units at my work are located about 3' off of the ground, behind a fairly high wall with locked gates, up near the building. It would not be impossible to fly a drone with something nefarious in and under the units, and if they're off, the server room heats up in minutes. The units are redundant, but I don't doubt that with planning, both units could be disabled with a single stroke.
If the grounds of a power plant are supposed to be considered secure, then I doubt that many secondary or tertiary systems are hardened on those grounds. Taking out enough of those systems will force the plant to shut down.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
...to prevent development of nuclear power in western europe. Can't have USSR export market for natural gas destroyed, you know!
I don't know about France, but in the US nuclear plant containment domes are designed to withstand the impact of a fully loaded 747 and nothing outside the dome contains significant radioactive material.
I know they're French, but give them some credit.
Even a 747 fully loaded with fuel (9/11 style attack) wouldn't be enough to destroy the secondary (outer) and primary (inner) containment of a water cooled reactor.
Plus both Chernobyl and Fukushima mandatory evacuation have been questioned if they shouldn't right now be optional instead.
Nuclear experts continue to affirm there is a greater cancer risk of living in downtown Tokyo (from pollution) than in the Fukushima evac zone, yet, Tokyo isn't being evacuated.
There is so much anti nuclear non sense in the absurd lies environmentalists say about nuclear power. Go educate yourself and know better.
The world has places with over 10x the radiation level around Fukushima crawling with people. Without any measurable increase in Cancer levels over national average.
Search radiation hormesis versus linear no threshold.
Tell that to the people who used to live around Fukushima.
Wow! a 9.0 earthquake followed by a 30 ft tsunami! That must have been a big ass drone.
How does it feel to be the worlds biggest knob?
But you have to get close with a hand grenade. You can probably do a lot of damage with a hand gun if you can get into the right place. Or even a crow bar.
However there tends to be a pretty big fence around these sorts of places and has the kind of people who wouldn't take too kindly to you trying to lob a grenade from a carpark.
Working on the premise that you can only get access to light munitions (ie a predator drone with a load off hellfires is off the cards) you are probably looking at commercial quad rotor type drones. You may be able to get 2kgs of c4 into a kind of close location but it won't be shaped and you will be very unlikely to be able to have it effectively placed. (these things are hard as hell to fly close to solid objects)
So you would likely get surface blasting with limited compression to cause structural damage. You might, if you were particularly lucky, manage to get it into a cooling tower and fracture the concrete but much more than that is unlikely. You could take out the grid ties fairly easily, and maybe get key personnel. but I would suggest melt down risk is basically zero.
Compare that to a crew with an m224 mortar system. A well trained crew (3 people) can launch 20 shells per minute of 60mm HE shells from up to 3+ kms away.
If that doesn't pack enough punch the m252 pushes you out to 5km away and lands 81mm shells. You can't fire as quick but you would have some serious penetration power before they were able to triangulate your position and come get you. 5 minutes with that and you are looking at 30 - 50 rounds on the target, could the super structure withstand that?
Overall I think the risk of a drone attack is almost zero as there are much cheaper, easier and more effective options.
Every Tier-4 I've ever seen could be take down by a single grenade. One "fatal flaw" is the lack of diverse power. Redundant, yes, but I've seen 3-UPSs in a single UPS room, each for a different feed. In "normal" operation, that would give more nines than you need, but place a single grenade in the middle of the room, and you'd take out the feed for the whole place. I've never seen one with power rooms on separate sides, insulated and isolated from each other. They have separate feeds in, but they go to the same room, then out from there. They are built to withstand an "attack" from the outside pretty well, but not deliberate sabotage. Usually, the "attack" designed against are the natural ones.
There are plenty of places a single grenade would do damage in a nuke plant. I'd go into a cooling tunnel (one of the long walkable tunnels with pipes along the wall/ceiling). Drop a grenade anywhere in there, and you'd likely cause a mess that would leave it offline for a while.
Learn to love Alaska
If fukushima taught us anything, it's that you need to cut the power coming in (the plants require mains power from the grid to operate), and disable the generator. Those two things, and nearly all designs of plants will melt down. Only one of those things is on site. The other is "easy" to take down (drive a pickup truck into a nearby power line support). They don't even have to be simultaneous if you disable the generator in a way that isn't discovered. Find out who supplies it with diesel. Infiltrate them. At some point, they'll do a top-up of fuel. Spoil it. Then you have from then to the next generator test to take out mains power coming into the plant. Though a portable generator might be brought in, apparently nobody thought of that at fukushima, or it happened too fast.
Learn to love Alaska
Odd, the ones I've been in had large battery rooms. Relatively open and easy to access, as batteries need regular maintenance (even if only every few years). And the diverse power coming in comes to one room because the battery room can fill with H2 gas and explode (rare, but possible with lead-acid batteries), so the handling of that is concentrated, for cost, size, and safety reasons. One grenade in one room could take it down. Though getting to that room may be hard.
Learn to love Alaska
Upon secret executive orders from Obama, the NSA is tasked with providing The Executive, contingency plans for the eradication of all French citizens. A splendid method is to bomb French nuclear reactor facilities. The radioactive fallout spread by near-surface winds would decimate the French population within about 17 days given estimates of toxicity and factors particular to the French infrastructure and society.
Jolly Good I'd Say.
Loss of grid power and disabling the generators caused a meltdown. That wouldn't be too hard to do in a targeted attack.
Learn to love Alaska
Sadly, reality is not a James Bond flick.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Another fun fact: deserts rarely have water mains or a native surplus of water.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I'd think, a combination of automatic RF and laser countermeasures. It might actually be fun to design.
That is what drone users want, the drone is expendable, the user isn't.
If you want to fight drones you find who is controlling it and beat the crap out of him.
Could be worth thinking about when the military is using drones against other nations, the response won't be to shoot down the drone since that is pointless. Rather they will go after whatever they can find that actually matters, civilians if necessary.
Or perhaps there was this MASSIVE fucking Tsunami that killed 10,000+ people and a massive earthquake.
I think you might have forgotten about having a massive amount of sea water pouring into the facility. Roads into and out of the area destroyed. Emergency services essentially crippled. You take out the generators and the grid tie and even IF that could melt down the facility (note it would be unlikely as you would have to have the same era and plant design as Fukushima) there would be 100 generators and people on site within hours in any other circumstance outside of a massive earthquake and a killer Tsunami.
(note it would be unlikely as you would have to have the same era and plant design as Fukushima)
It was noted at the time that it was a common design, and the earlier and later ones would have had the same effect from cutting outside power and disabling the generators.
It was the loss of outside power (and backup) that caused the meltdown. Not the earthquake, nor the tsunami. Those may have caused the loss of power, but did not cause the meltdown directly.
Learn to love Alaska
Wow, they actually have Duke Nukem 3D's Earth Defense Forces producing electricity for them...
Or perhaps there was this MASSIVE fucking Tsunami that killed 10,000+ people and a massive earthquake.
I think you might have forgotten about having a massive amount of sea water pouring into the facility. Roads into and out of the area destroyed. Emergency services essentially crippled.
None of which affect a reactor installation operated properly with suitable systems to mitigate basis design issues. Everything you have pointed out was covered by the official report into the disaster and the findings were that it was a "Man Made" disaster.
You take out the generators and the grid tie and even IF that could melt down the facility (note it would be unlikely as you would have to have the same era and plant design as Fukushima) there would be 100 generators and people on site within hours in any other circumstance outside of a massive earthquake and a killer Tsunami.
No, it has nothing to do with the generation of reactor, but the type of basis design issues and unfortunately generators don't counter the NRC scenarios for intentional sabotage.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
There are 81 BWR plants in operation around the world. Of a total of 434 plants. Of those 81 over half are Gen 3 or later designs which do not have the same failure method as the Gen 2 Fukushima design.
That does not however change the fact that the Tsunami and earth quake destroyed the emergency response capability. Remove those issues and taking out the generator and outside power will not cause the plant to meltdown because the plant isn't operating inside a bubble. A new generator will arrive on the back of a truck in a couple of hours and that is it.
Don't forget these plants also have battery backup. This covers an extended period of time for a replacement generator to be brought to site.
If fukushima taught us anything, it's that you need to cut the power coming in (the plants require mains power from the grid to operate), and disable the generator. Those two things, and nearly all designs of plants will melt down.
Except for ones with passive cooling. Guess which ones we should be building.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Many modern plants have passive cooling that doesn't require mains power. Every plant I'm aware of has multiple generators and multiple redundant grid links. Disabling them all is not as trivial as you make it sound.
That aside, the compounding problem at Fukishima was that the surrounding infrastructure was totally wrecked because of the Tsunami. Most places in the world they'd just truck in a back up generator before anything untoward happened.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
And without the chaos & disruption caused by the earthquake & tsunami the power loss would have been too short to cause a problem.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And if it hadn't been for the fucking massive earthquake and tsunami, generators would have arrived on site after a relatively short while and the situation calmly controlled.
The batteries only run the lights and electronics. The pumps need generators the size of diesel locomotives.
Rather then carrying explosives I would expect that the drones perform reconnaissance. They are perfect for that.
No "Western" nuclear power plant operates with a single backup generator. In case of Fukushima, the backup generators were exposed to the flood resulting from the tsunami, this was their major SPOF.
They did bring in portable generators at Fukushima. They had battery powered generators, and they also had external pumps (fire engines) that were trying to push cooling water into the reactors. Neither worked because the plumbing for the emergency cooling system was damaged, and due to a lack of power for monitoring equipment they didn't know that some of the valves were in the wrong position. Basically they had the means to avert disaster but confusion on the ground and (at the time unknown) damage from the earthquake scuppered them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Tell that to the people who used to live around Fukushima.
Here's the Oklahoma city bombing:
http://img.timeinc.net/time/ph...
It took a Semi truck filled with Ammonium nitrate, parked a few feet from the building to do that. Concrete is a heck of a building material. Attackers would have much better luck storming the building with rifles and planting much smaller devices inside the reactor itself. You can't do this job with drones.
I read somewhere that the world's region with the highest level of natural radiation is somewhere in Iran.
Two things I remembered about it:
1> It will never be eligible as a location for a nuclear power plant, because the natural radiation level exceeds the maximum deemed permissible in a nuclear plant.
2> Besides the highest radiation level on earth, the region also boasts one of the LOWEST number of cancer cases (per number of inhabitants, of course).
But that aside, most people here are talking about drone attacks. I don't see that having much effect, but drones are perfect for reconnaissance before an actual attack is launched with 'heavier' means, and that is what worries me here.
Looking for gaps is ridiculous of course, the outer containment of a reactor building is airtight to an inside pressure of (1.2 IIRC) bars, enough to withstand the pressure if all the coolant water in the reactor boils out. That's something I remember from my education as a nuclear engineer, 35 years ago - and just for honesty's sake: I haven't worked in that industry in the last 30 years, so my memory *has* gone a bit sketchy about the exact details.
Odd, the ones I've been in had large battery rooms.
Which last just long enough to start the diesel backup generators.
Those in turn run just long enough on a full tank for a tanker truck to get there with the next fill.
And that's why always *two* trucks will be on their way, straight from the refinery at a distance of 200 km instead of from a local supplier, taking different routes in case one of them gets stuck at the wrong side of a collapsed bridge or so.
That's the story they told me at the data center where we have our servers.
If Fukushima told us anything, it is that you don't install the diesel backup generators in a basement that will be flooded with water just when the incoming power lines are being washed away by a tsunami.
They would have to be the same type of active cooling as the Fukushima one, and as far as i can tell msot if not all reactor in france are 3rd generation one.
An access port? Perhaps an exhaust vent might be more believable. Stick it at the end of some sort of culvert or ravine, possibly with a few watch towers along side to make it appear a more likely target. You could even "lose" some blueprints showing this vulnerability that these rebellious terrorists could smuggle out to their hidden base. The only way to destroy the reactor would be to fly the drones down the gully and loose their payloads against the vent, setting up a chain-reaction that (they believe) would cause a cataclysmic explosion. But of course, it will all be a trap, the attempt would fail and the government would be able to successfully capture all the plotters without any real harm being done. It's a foolproof plan.
Unless, of course, the son of the guy who manages the reactor is involved in the attack. Then things might turn out differently. Gotta watch out for those familial relations.
You might be right, but I think the point is, the first step is to take out the drone to protect your assets. And it seems to me that drones are particularly vulnerable to electronic countermeasures.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Using water for cooling in a desert climate is more irresponsible than using coal-powered electricity IMHO. In a desert climate they should be using solar power.
Let them be attacked. France which is 77% nuclear has the highest electricity rates in Europe. You can thank the Communists, who control the unions that were handed control of the nuclear industry decades ago. Best thing of all would be to close down all the nuke plants and go Black as in the Dark Ages.
FUD, it tastes sooo sweet.
What is your point? The best inference you can make as to the probability of a successful sabotage event causing a meltdown is severely constrained by the historical record. In the maximum, the probability of a knowledgeable person, with access, even attempting such sabotage, much less causing core damage, is three times lower than the realized historical CDF. While it is feasible, it is not reasonable to assert that such a hazard carries much risk, relative to the significant contributors to overall CDF. I'd say the is already lower than 1/14,500 per reactor year. That's significantly lower than the standard assumptions for double-ended LBLOCA, by an order of magnitude.
I'd appreciate it if you would give a report number for this, I'd like to ask NRC for it.
This makes the nuclear installation sound like the Death Star. Which would make the terrorists Luke Skywalker.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Obviously the work of the NSA, thanks Obama.
The harm is all in surveillance data. If you blind the drone's camera, or knock the drone out of the air, no surveillance data is obtained, and no harm done.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The exhaust vent makes a "whooshing" sound when operational to make it easier to locate.
How about a few hawks?
Is that alpha, beta or gamma radiation? Is the radiation source ingestible? Is it breathable? Radiation from rocks generally isn't as harmful as dust from nuclear facilities, as the particles once ingested can stay in the same place, causing continuous, repeated, long-term harm to the same area.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I don't care WHICH one of you it is.
Tossing Hellfire missiles at nuclear power plants is NOT "Crime Prevention", nor is it "Pre-Emptive Action", nor is it "Protecting American Interests", nor is it "fighting terrorism".
I don't give a damn whether you plan to false-flag this crap or not. Just stop it with the "... KILL THEM!" cartoony evil plans and waste your budget on too damn many paperclips like you were always meant to do.
Yes the interuption of the pumps for the coolong systems for basically any reactor in the world for longer than several hours, except perhaps for a molten salt reactor where the fissile material is already molten, will lead to a meltdown. However a core meltdown does not automatically equate to a containment breech. In the case of the fukishima BWR reactor design the evaporation of the water coolant when the pumps were no longer running uncovered the reactor core rapidly. The uranium in the reactor is in the form of pucks in a zirconium tube, because the zirconium is practically transparent to neutrons. At high temperatures you have the highly exothermique reaction
Zr + 2 H2O -> ZRO2 + 2 H2
Which incidentally is the source of the hydrogen that cause the explosion of the reactor buildings at Fukishima. The energy added by this exothermique reaction together with the residual energy of the reactor core after insertion of the control rods is responsable for the breech of the containment.
Although there is no easy repalcement for zirconium in existing reactors (a steel alloy has been tried), not all reactors meltdowns would result in a containment breech. For example in the case of pressurized reactors, the conversion of the water to steam and the uncovering of the reactor core is harder and so the exothermique reaction of the zirconium is significantly delayed, giving the residual energy of the rector core time to fall.
So although total loss of power to a reactor will be economically catastrophic for the plant operator as the plant will no longer be usable, no it doesn't immediately mean the reactor containment will be breeched.
D.
Don't you love how they never once use the word "ant" to describe those giant ants?
shoot the damn things down. you will hear from the owners soon enough. if it's nation-states, at the UN. if it's big kids and big toys, the courts.
it's the ones that don't bring any compaints that you had to worry about.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It was the loss of outside power (and backup) and the relative inaccessibility of the plant due to environmental conditions that caused the meltdown.
FTFY. That's all Harlequin was saying. Yes, the tsunami and earthquake didn't cause the meltdown, but they made human mobility in the area a nightmare.
Cutting the generator and power alone won't stop humans from performing workarounds to avoid a meltdown. Catastrophic environmental conditions combined with cutting power will (or at least could).
I refuse to sign
Let's form squadrons of pilots who will fly their own drones equipped with weapons to take down the unauthorized drones.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
"It was the loss of outside power (and backup) that caused the meltdown. Not the earthquake, nor the tsunami. Those may have caused the loss of power, but did not cause the meltdown directly."
You need to become familiar with the concept of 'proximate cause'.
If you want to get overly technical, it wasn't the loss of power that caused the meltdown, it was the extreme heat build up inside the reactor.
Of course, *that* was caused by the loss of the cooling system.
Which, in part, was caused by the loss of power (and backup)?.
But what caused the loss of outside power (and backup)?
Oh, yes. The earthquake and tsunami.
The root cause of the Fukishima meltdowns wasn't "the loss of outside power (and backup)". It was the earthquake, and the resulting tsunami.
Do the plants require grid power really? When the earthquake hit, the reactors automatically shut down, disrupting local power generation. It seems likely that that would be enough to continue operations. If the plan is to poison the diesel fuel, ram the power line pole with a truck (which seems awfully ambitious when I look at high-voltage towers), and cause a major earthquake, it might be difficult to execute the steps all at the same time.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Anything that caused a loss of power would necessarily cause a meltdown. That is the "cause" and that cause could be replicated elsewhere.
Learn to love Alaska
Do the plants require grid power really?
At the age of 8, I toured my first nuclear power plant and asked the same thing. It was true then, and it's true now. Kill grid power (and the backups), and all (currently operational) nuclear power plants will melt down.
There's enough waste heat from a near-meltdown to power a colling system, but doing so is costly and complex. And obviously never needed.
If the plan is to poison the diesel fuel, ram the power line pole with a truck (which seems awfully ambitious when I look at high-voltage towers),
The large power line towers are surprisingly fragile. The weight of the lines pulls them into the ground. If you don't like the idea of ramming them with a truck, then cut them with a torch. Oh, and you don't have to poison the fuel at the same time as you take down a power tower. Just poison the fuel once, and you have until the next test cycle to take down the tower.
and cause a major earthquake,
No earthquake needed.
Learn to love Alaska
Guarapari-ES has very high radioactivity levels from Thorium rich monazite sands. So is has alpha, beta and gamma radiation (the Thorium decay chain).
The "Areia Preta" beach (black sand, from Barium that results from Thorium decay) has high enough radiation that a nuclear worker would be forbidden from being exposed to that much radiation more than a few days per year. Yet hundreds of thousands of people sunbathe right on those sands, without any measurable increase in cancer levels on the population.
I'm 42 and over my lifetime I spent 24 months in various monazite beaches (with sand black enough as evidence of Barium from Thorium decay), like me I know thousands of people that did the same, and we don't have abnormal cancer levels.
Thorium has half live of over 10 billion years, so its ultra low radioactivity, but there is so much of it.
Well, watch Pandora's Promise, they go to that same beach, show a geiger counter pegged and then show that Fukushima has 5% that radiation level (and since its been around 24 months since Pandora's Promise was produced, the radiation level is significantly lower in Fukushima).
Of course there are tiny hot spots in Fukushima with slightly higher radiation, but it doesn't justify forbidding people from living there, it could however justify prevent people from raising kids and teens in the area, but the largest death rate was from elevated stress levels on the elderly, exactly those that are at lowest risk of contracting cancer.
At the core of the issue is the Linear No Threshold radiation (LNT) vs the Hormesis hypothesis. There is ample evidence the LNT model was favored due to extreme anti nuclear bias rather than strict medical/biology science.
Data from Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima seriously contradict LNT and tend towards Hormesis, but nuclear regulatory authorities insist on ignoring Hormesis cause it would reduce their importance (budget, power, political clout). It's big govt feeding itself at its worst. And the largely ignorant population goes for that crap.
Nobody questions that ultra high radiation levels kills and high radiation levels cause high cancer incidence, but even the highest levels of radiation found in Fukushima (and in Chernobyl right now) is at the range that even with LNT would cause something like just 10-20% more cancers than normal.
They should have followed the US rules on that. No restriction over nuclear power plants. Not needed. They only hurt normally law abiding citizens. As for the drone - yawn.
There are 81 BWR plants in operation around the world. Of a total of 434 plants. Of those 81 over half are Gen 3 or later designs which do not have the same failure method as the Gen 2 Fukushima design.
Fukashima was a Gen 1 derived from a GE design. Two reactors were GE, one Hitachi and another was Toshiba(iirc).
That does not however change the fact that the Tsunami and earth quake destroyed the emergency response capability.
But not of the USS Ronald Reagan, who was stationed to respond to and monitor the incident. The sailors of which are now suffering because of their exposure to the fallout. A frustratingly unnecessarily sacrifice considering the dogmatic pride of TEPCO and the Japanese government was what allowed this completely avoidable disaster to unfold.
Remove those issues and taking out the generator and outside power will not cause the plant to meltdown because the plant isn't operating inside a bubble.
You may not be aware that your statement contradicts the guidelines for operating the reactors under these conditions. Specifically 'S' and 'B' class facilities (Reactor core and primary cooling loop are 2 major S class facilities) have to be *constantly* powered because if they are not the reactor, especially one in a SCRAMed condition, will melt down due to the residual operating heat in the core of the reactor.
Don't forget these plants also have battery backup. This covers an extended period of time for a replacement generator to be brought to site.
I really think you should consider the infrastructure concerns related to what is needed to cool a 600Mw reactor core. That is why the USS Reagan was stationed where it was.
I think you should read the official report as some of the misconceptions you have about what was actually possible are answered there.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
But nothing you are saying there contradicts what I was saying. That getting some spiked fuel into the onsite generator and cutting the grid tie would cause the reactor to melt down.
From what I understand the reactors do not meltdown the second the pumps are offline. In fact that even with the system offline and now pumping occurring the convection currents alone will keep the reactor in a safe zone for quite some time. More than enough time to bring new pumps / generators or power supply to site.
What happened at Fukashima was unfortunate. But the situation was made bad first by a large earthquake and second by a highly damaging tsumani. The argument that you can cause a nuclear meltdown of an otherwise perfectly happy plant, in the middle of a highly developed country, just by taking out the generator and grid tie is I think a bit far fetched. You would have either the grid tie fixed, or a new generator in place well within safety margins.
Also as I understand is BWR-3s, BWR-4s and BWR-5s were 2nd generation systems. Fukushima had 1 three, 4 fours and a 5 with mk II containment.
There are norms that dictate required redundancy for a given purpose. Where I live, the norms require 6-fold redundancy where human health or life is at stake (e.g. lifts). I'm convinced there is no "just long|strong enough" anywhere in construction.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
But nothing you are saying there contradicts what I was saying. That getting some spiked fuel into the onsite generator and cutting the grid tie would cause the reactor to melt down.
You said a few things and deliberate sabotage, indeed anything, that exposes a BDI introduces the possibility of a meltdown. Add more exposures and you increase the possibility.
From what I understand the reactors do not meltdown the second the pumps are offline.
What you need to understand is a meltdown is not the only threat to a reactor. Fukushima exploded first and then melted down. The second the pumps are offline the reactor starts producing hydrogen.
In fact that even with the system offline and now pumping occurring the convection currents alone will keep the reactor in a safe zone for quite some time. More than enough time to bring new pumps / generators or power supply to site.
No, it will not keep it in a 'safe zone' for long enough to install a new generator. It may give you enough time to restart or repair an existing one at best.
What happened at Fukashima was unfortunate.
What happened at Fukushima was criminal negligence and should be treated as such.
But the situation was made bad first by a large earthquake and second by a highly damaging tsumani.
Even the earthquake and tsunami should not have been a threat to the reactor. The situation was made bad first by the operators assumption that the plant was safe which created the mindset that they didn't need to protect the generators or raise the seawall - all of this is covered in the report.
The situation was made worse by the quake and tsunami.
The argument that you can cause a nuclear meltdown of an otherwise perfectly happy plant, in the middle of a highly developed country, just by taking out the generator and grid tie is I think a bit far fetched. You would have either the grid tie fixed, or a new generator in place well within safety margins.
It's not what I am talking about but educating anyone on how to do such a thing, as I said, would be irresponsible. I'm glad the information is not online.
Also as I understand is BWR-3s, BWR-4s and BWR-5s were 2nd generation systems. Fukushima had 1 three, 4 fours and a 5 with mk II containment.
Thanks for pointing that detail out. It is indeed a Gen II, GE Mark I reactor design.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.