Plan foiled: terrorsits strike at nuclear target in Belgium

Dagblad Trouw ^ | Augustus 30 2002 | Kustaw Bessems

[Phillip Augustus]

Mohammedeans should be deported from Belgium, en masse, immediately.

[OldFriend]

I was referring to the hysterical folks here in the USA who are insisting that the names of all our suspects in custody MUST be named. Following 9/11 many 'person's of interest' were taken into custody. Their names have not been released and there has been a hue and cry from those who no doubt think they are supporting the constitution, who insist the names be released.

IMHO it would be much better for their cohorts to wonder and worry but not KNOW if they are going to be next on the agenda for being taken into custody.

[Travis McGee]

No, thanks for the ping.

[chimera]

We've talked a lot on FR about the improbability of significant contamination resulting from an attack on a power plant that has a shield and containment structure like those used in the West for LWR systems. Unless the reactor doesn't have that, you're not going to do much except destroy your airplane. The only ones I know of that don't have containment are the old RBMK (Chornobil) design the Soviets used to build, which aren't built in the West, or anywhere these days.

A nuclear weapons storage dump would also be a poor target. Aside from the fact that its a small target, even if weapons were stored there they would be done so in "safe" mode. They aren't normally placed in combat mode until a short time before they are intended to be used. Only if they are placed in combat configuration is there a chance they can be cooked off by a conventional blast and fire, and even that is unlikely, since you need to actuate the detonation pulse exactly as you would have if you were deliberately setting it off. Just burning up the implosive charge won't cause a nuclear explosion. That would be similar to a "safe" detonation, wherein you destroy the weapon (deliberately) without it making a big boom (sometimes called single-point safe, because you start the implosion charge detonation from a single position, rather than multiple points, and that just blows up the core, rather than imploding it).

There have been instances of those occurring during the atmospheric testing program in the 1950s and early 1960s. The launch complex at Johnston Island had some plutonium contamination from a couple of launch failures during the high-altitude detonation testing program. The launch vehicle carrying the warhead either failed or went off course, and the safety officer destroyed the warhead and rocket (rather than having an intact nuke come down and possibly lie around somewhere unrecovered). Some of the fragmented plutonium core fell back down on the island. It was no big deal, they cleaned it up (unshielded plutonium particles are easy to find with and alpha-sensitive survey meter) and kept on with the tests.