Anything with a serious gradient of energy can catastrophically fail. That's the thermodynamic nature of the things.
You can't have a completely safe power plant, period. You certainly can have one where you don't know a certain failure mode exists. For example RBMK prior to 1986, or a pebble bed reactor prior to THTR-300 incident.
And my war zone remark wasn't about fuel theft, but more likely things. Like dropping a buster bomb onto a live reactor.
I will need to research this, so if you can point me to the resource that made you have this opinion please share it with me, Thanks
I would imagine you can design a system that would have a fail safe, like when temperature gets to high it would melt a specific component and kickstarting a physical process that you could not stop.
>buster bombs
Those can also be dropped on chemical plants, water dams, fuel depos , it is not like the nuclear power plant would explode from a conventional bomb, I am not a physicist but I think it needs tons of neutrons to get critical so you would need maybe to drop a nuclear bomb on a nuclear plant so it is silly IMO, but if I am wrong link me reliable material.
I think the point is that operating power reactors have high inventories of dangerously radioactive fission products in the core. Under normal circumstances that is safe because containment is designed for normal operation and foreseeable natural disasters, so the fission products don't get into the biosphere. But nuclear reactor containments are not designed to survive attack with heavy weapons. Deliberate attack could cause catastrophic release of dangerously radioactive materials.
It's true that large hydroelectric dams have the same problem. If some party decides to commit a war crime and destroy the dam you live downriver of, it could be catastrophic. The same consideration doesn't apply with large fossil fueled or wind/solar facilities because they have a much smaller danger radius if destroyed by heavy weapons.
People fighting against the Syrian government blew up a large natural gas facility during the civil war. If Syria generated power from nuclear reactors instead of gas, would the rebels have declined to destroy a reactor? It would certainly have been a war crime. But the Syrian civil war already saw many war crimes.
I don't think that any organized military would deliberately destroy live reactors. There's always a chance for accidents. "Pilot visually confirmed the target, mistaking the nuclear cooling towers for the designated coal plant's cooling towers."
I don't mean that people should eschew nuclear power because of what might happen in extraordinary wartime circumstances. But it is possible to release large quantities of dangerous fission products from a reactor facility just by attacking it with conventional high explosive weapons.
>I don't think that any organized military would deliberately destroy live reactors.
I am not sure about that, US dropped actual nuclear bombs and even today there are many that excuse this so I think that in a war US would bomb not only bridges,factories,coal plants but they would also bomb nuclear plants and there will be no significant criticism.
You can't have a completely safe power plant, period. You certainly can have one where you don't know a certain failure mode exists. For example RBMK prior to 1986, or a pebble bed reactor prior to THTR-300 incident.
And my war zone remark wasn't about fuel theft, but more likely things. Like dropping a buster bomb onto a live reactor.