Drones, Nukes and the Myth of Reactor Safety
Terrifying reports from the Ukraine-Russia front underscore an inescapable new nuclear reality: in the age of drone warfare, the alleged safety of atomic reactors has leapt to a whole new level of myth.
No matter how thick the containment domes, or how vehement the industry denials, a quantum leap in the killing power of weaponized drones has completely blown past official atomic safety assurances.
The unwelcome new reality has been brought home by two recent features in the New York Times.
A devastating, Pulitzer-level dispatch from C.J. Chivers in the New York Times Magazine covering the Ukrainian killing fields seems to announce a total transformation in trench warfare.
In excruciating detail, Chivers documents the new-found ability of remote drone operators to overcome with lethal force virtually any defensive barrier or evasive maneuver.
From safe bunkers sometimes miles away, Ukrainian operators now send small un-manned devices worth as little as $400 to destroy tanks and heavy artillery pieces worth multi-millions. They’re also killing terrified Russian soldiers in open fields or dense underbrush even as they desperately try to escape. The Ukrainians are even flying their drones deep into buried bunkers, obliterating whoever’s in there.
Amidst a campaign to deploy a million drones per year, the vastly outnumbered Ukrainians have been able to overcome with astonishing ease highly complex, sophisticated defensive barriers as well as frenzied, desperate attempts at evasion.
Many of the operators are young and lightly trained. Their weapons are essentially cheap household toys.
The Russian adversaries they target often know the drones are coming. Yet the Ukrainians inflict brutal, lethal, hugely expensive damage with shocking ease.
There are eight atomic power plants in the Russo-Ukrainian war zone: six at Zaporizhzhia, two at Kursk. A wide range of hostile acts and basic incompetence continually threaten their security.
If severely damaged, or deprived of cooling water, or cut off from back-up power supplies, any one of them could melt or explode. Each could blanket large swaths of the Earth and many of Europe and Asia’s largest cities with deadly radiation, inflicting enormous human and permanent ecological devastation.
Such a horror could far exceed what followed the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl Unit Four, which contained significantly less core radiation than at Kursk and Zaporizhzhia, which have operated far longer.
Reactor containment domes are often constructed with thick, reinforced concrete. But they’re very far from invulnerable. The routes to major catastrophe are far too numerous to delineate or discount. They plague in various forms all the 400+ nuclear power plants licensed worldwide, including the 90+ in the United States.
A second Times piece warns that weaponized drones have become part of a “hybrid” global conflict operating in an amorphous “Gray Zone. The ability to wreck lethal, unimaginably costly havoc is virtually unlimited.
With easily deployed drones like those now ravaging Eastern Europe… hostile nations, rogue armies, tiny terror groups or even a lone psychopath could handily turn any number of commercial reactors into lethal engines of a radioactive apocalypse.
Atomic technology has been in civilian use since the 1957 opening of Pennsylvania’s Shippingport reactor. The US Congress at the time promised the public that the “Peaceful Atom” would have comprehensive liability insurance within fifteen years.
But nearly seven decades later, no commercial US atomic power plant has blanket private accident insurance against a major catastrophe. Homeowners policies nationwide specifically exempt a nuclear disaster. When push comes to shove, you will pay for your own irradiation.
All atomic power plants emit radioactive Carbon 14, expand global CO2 levels in the mining and fuel fabrication process, burn at 540+ degrees Fahrenheit, bathe their neighborhoods in “low level” radiation, create unmanageable wastes, cost far more than renewables by factors of 2-400% and more while producing inflexible “baseload” power that clogs the grid.
They have always been vulnerable to explosion due to natural disasters (as at Fukushima), mismanagement (Chernobyl) or military/terror attacks.
The advent of drone warfare has taken all that to a terrifying, uninsurable new level.
Yet in servitude to a new generation of nukes, Congress has approved a 40-year extension of the original Federal insurance exemption. Thus by the 2060s the industry could have operated an entire century while unable to obtain the basic private insurance necessary to protect the public from a major radiation release.
A whole new level of terror is now being inflicted in the Ukraine-Russian war zone by drones barely beyond neighborhood toys.
The nuke industry’s insistence that we have nothing to fear from military or terror attacks on its un-insured fleet has lost any residual credibility.
Given the horrific new reality of drone warfare, generating hyper-expensive radioactive power and waste from hot, dirty, decrepit reactors is more insane than ever.
