Beyond Nuclear - Security

University of Chicago Professor Kathleen Belew, on C-SPAN's "Q&A," warns that far right, white supremacist extremists have threatened in the past to attack nuclear power plants in order to unleash catastrophic mass casualty events.

See the C-SPAN "Q&A" interview, here.

(Belew is referring to the domestic terrorist group, Atomwaffen Division. Atomwaffen means nuclear weapons in German. See the PBS Frontline special "Documenting Hate: New American Nazis," that aired on Nov. 20, 2018. It documents an apparently disrupted Atomwaffen Division plot to attack the Turkey Point nuclear power plant in southern Florida.)

To see how catastrophic such a domestic terrorist attack, causing an atomic reactor meltdown could be, in terms of casualties and property damage, see the CRAC-II chart, here.

It compiles the conclusions on casualties (peak early fatalities, or acute radiation poisoning deaths; peak radiation injuries; peak cancer deaths, or latent cancer fatalities), as well as property damage, as reported in CRAC-II.

CRAC-II is a 1982 report commissioned by NRC, and conducted by Sandia National Laboratory. CRAC-II is short for Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences. It is also known as the Sandia Siting Study, or as NUREG/CR-2239.

As horrific as the CRAC-II figures are, Associated Press investigative journalist Jeff Donn warned in his 2011 series "Aging Nukes" after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan had begun, that populations have soared around nuclear power plants lsince 1982, so casualties would be significantly higher today.

And adjusting for inflation alone, but not even accounting for the significant economic development in the downwind areas since 1982, property damage would now be significantly worse, when expressed as current year dollar figures.

And, as Fukushima has shown, domino effect meltdowns are possible at multi-reactor sites. That is, a successful domestic terrorist attack on a single reactor could lead to multiple meltdowns at the same site.

Irradiated nuclear fuel, whether stored in indoor wet storage pools, or even in dry cask arranged like bowling pins out in the open air/plain view, could also unleash radiological catastrohe, if successfully attacked.