on August 14, 2024, 7:07 pm
- What other scenarios are possible if the plant is bombed? For example, if the plant is not hit but the machine room or transformers are?
— It should be noted that a nuclear power plant is a huge industrial facility and everything that is dangerous from a radiation point of view (reactor, spent-fuel pools, solid radioactive waste and liquid radioactive waste storage facilities) occupies a small part of its surface area, less than 5%. In the case of accidental strikes with munitions, it is unlikely that the damage will even lead to a shutdown of the plant, although, if the situation is prolonged, it is likely that, to reduce risk, a decision will be taken to shut down the units with reactor cooling. A hit on the turbine hall or the transformers would, of course, result in a man-made accident, possibly severe, but it would not end up in a release of radiation because the NPP is generally designed with staged protection of the reactor against overheating and loss of containment, which makes it possible to survive damage to other systems, even those that are important to the ongoing life of the plant.
— So, a repeat of the 1986 Chernobyl accident is impossible? I’m saying that because the reactors there were the same.
— Yes, this is impossible. The root cause of the accident at Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was design flaws in the RBMK-1000, which led to the rapid release of nuclear energy equivalent to hundreds of tonnes of TNT. These design flaws were corrected in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The reactors were extensively upgraded. Now it is impossible to reproduce the same explosion on the existing RBMKs by any external or internal impact. Even if we assume a rather unlikely scenario of a large-scale military attack leading to the opening of the reactor – the scale of the radiation accident will be much smaller than in the case of the Chernobyl accident.
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