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17 hours agoModern nuclear reactors won’t meltdown if shot
we hope. never having tested nearby strikes, there’s no way to know how resilient to catastrophe these things are, and even when over-engineered with an eye on safety in the worst conditions, fukushima illustrates that everything can go wrong in a cascade and still render them unsafe.
honestly, coastal nuclear power stations like diablo canyon and fukushima are going to be interacting with larger and more violent storms in the future, and tsunamis etc., perhaps there are better places for them.
it may be physically impossible but until we test them with catastrophic conditions we won’t know. that said, their long history of fail-safe fail states and the extremely reduced physical constraints (lower pressure, lower temps, lower amounts of fissile material, lower enrichment, etc.,) make me think you’re right, but it’s gonna be hard to prove because we’re having such difficulty getting the larger industry to test the shit much less deploy it in any reasonable amount of time.