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Comment by cedws | Hacker News Reader

Why is war never a factor in the nuclear power debate? Like nuclear is great, until you have missiles dropping on your territory. You can ask Ukraine about that. Zaporizhia has been held hostage since the early days of the war. Should the Russians have a manic moment they can make a Chernobyl volume 2 with conventional explosives.

Nuclear is a great peacetime technology, Europe is no longer in peacetime.

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The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam flooded over 500 square kilometres and carried a significant death toll, caused major damage to the surrounding area and impacted over a million people.

Besides maybe solar, there is always the potential for harm during war times. Heck, even with solar, cutting off electricity supply to a major urban area can tragically carry a death toll that goes beyond even the few severe power plant disasters we as a species have ever encountered.

Fission is not an outlier here and designing any power plant for resilience is a necessary step, whether in war or peacetimes, whether in a tectonically stable or seismically active area.

A nuclear strike on a larger fission reactor could create an awful result unlike any other power plant. There were some studies during the cold war (something about the effects in West Germanyin the early 1980s, IIRC).

As opposed to a nuclear strike directly on a populated civilian area with no nuclear power plant nearby which also creates an awful result?

The main difference in nuking a fission plant over any other area would be creating longer-term fallout.

If the attacker is at all rational, unlikely to be desired because it makes the area hard to inaccessible for troops on either side.

If the attacker is horrificaly irrational and just wants to cause pure, long term, irreparable harm, unfortunately salted nukes would be a feasible option, independent of having a fission plant anywhere near the drop zone...

Nuclear disarmament, international cooperation and reliable defence alliances can (hopefully) be used to protect against this, along with resilient fission designs within reason. Not having a fission plant by itself unfortunately and targically wouldn't prevent an utterly irrational attacker willing to cause as much long term damage as possible.

Very aware of that harsh fact, living in a country that has a section in our constitution making nuclear power illegal (yes, very stupid) and is not part of any defensive alliance (while expecting the countries around us to defend us anyways), if someone wanted to "salt the earth" around Salzburg, Vienna or Graz, they could do it, even if we have no plants.

Scale of fallout would be huge. People were kind of shocked by the analysis (trying to remember what came out then... Fetter, early 1980s, Scientific American?).

I’m going to assume shelling solar and batteries isn’t environmentally friendly in a war either.

There's not much point to it, you achieve incremental damage because they're so spread out.

Not the battery backup system. And batteries are incredibly explosive and will explode sympathetically. Its much like hitting a refinery in that regard. NPPs have been hit during this war with bombs, they survived just fine because they are built in much the same way as a hardened military structure. They can withstand a fully loaded 747 hitting them directly at the speed of sound. That's more boom than all but the largest ordinance.

Nuclear ICBMs generally make this a moot point. An advanced enemy can explode a "nuclear reactor" anywhere in your country at any time.

Regarding drones, most reactors are built relatively hardened. For example, they're protected against a 747 flying into it at full speed. So even a drone attack would take an advanced enemy, and they might as well drop a bomb on you.

The threat of damaging a nuclear reactor is grey zone, it’s unlikely to elicit the same response as a nuclear ICBM detonation.

The probability of an attack on a UK nuclear facility outside WW3 scenario is almost 0.

If we come to that state of things, then almost anything we do isn't safe.

It was a great peacetime technology during the cold war

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