- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
Now as I was writing this post I realized I was making a large and likely wrong logical assumption, which is Western reactors, being in nice countries, are designed keep those nice areas from turning into radioactive moonscapes. This is Russia, and very likely Soviet, so no one gave a care about irradiating that piece of shit country.Not really a good idea. A nuclear reactor isn't something you can just turn on and off. Its always on even when its off. An offline reactor is less a sleeping cat and more a tiger that has been collared and is held in place by a bit string tied to a wooden stake in the ground. The reaction does not stop completely. Its just very tightly controlled and requires lots of external power to keep continuous amounts of coolant flowing. Its the one issue with nuclear power. Its more economical to keep the thing on all the time. The only time its "off" is when the reactor rods are completely depleted and need to be replaced. And even then they need to be put in a retaining pool with constant rotation of fresh coolant.
Setting a bunch of retards loose in the facility to "smash shit" is a good recipe for bad things™ to happen.
Anyway, while you don't want to send a squad of олівець eaters in start randomly smashing shit, if you have someone go in and drop the control rods you can go hog-wild on the control systems as long as you don't enter the reactor itself. The worst thing you could do, with a fully scrammed reactor, is shut off coolant pumps (and the back up pumps, and the emergency backup pumps) and let it boil dry such the mega hot uranium (even neutron shielded) is exposed to oxygen.... but while it might explode the reactor should be able to contain it without anything leaking out, even though the reactor itself is completely fucked.
Chernobyl got as bad as it did because they didn't fully offline the reactor. (also due to utter shit reactor design and russian incompetence and attempts to hide/deflect blame).
Edit: I just checked, Kursk is also the same reactor design as Chernobyl, but has had some safety retrofits since. LOL. Fucking LOL. Muscovites best be getting out their lead-lined undies. LOL.
Fukushima was as bad as it was because a)the reactor was automatically shut down but only barely before the tsunami fucked everything up further and b) the rector vessels were damaged in the earthquake and following tsunami. The sea water from said tsunami also got into places it wasn't supposed to be and got irradiated, which has hampered clean up.
Basically the towns near by at this point are about as dangerous to live in as Denver, but are kept evacuated because they are eventually going to need to clean up the spilled nuclear fuel and they still aren't 100% sure how bad it is - so even if you let people come back, they'd have to be evacuated again - best to keep them away.
Again, the REACTOR is completely and utterly turbo fucked, and while you wouldn't want to be downwind at the time it was happening its wouldn't be a Chernobyl or even a Fukushima. You know, assuming everything was built to spec. (lol)