A recent documentary concerning the Chernobyl disaster prompted me to do some more research concerning the relationship between commercial nuclear power stations and the production of fissile materials for use in nuclear weapons. It is claimed that the Chernobyl RBMK-1000 (Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosty Kanalny, or High-Power Channel Reactor) reactors were of a type specifically designed to produce weapons grade material and that this was one of the disclosure issues which contributed to the culture of secrecy that led to the disaster, the Western propaganda bias always ensuring that blame for the disaster be laid squarely at the door of the soviet state and not at that of the nuclear industry in general, a highly contentious viewpoint.
Whilst it is true that many nuclear reactors do not produce the kind of weapons grade material commonly used by states whose weapons programs are well established the fuel rods from these reactors can and very often are used to to produce weapons grade material in other facilities.
Quote; "The materials, technology, and expertise needed for enrichment can be used to both generate nuclear power and develop nuclear weapons. Once a country is capable of enriching uranium for nuclear purposes, even peaceful ones, it usually can produce enough material for a nuclear weapon*. For that reason, monitoring proliferation is exceptionally difficult.”...“Enriching uranium in its natural state to between 3 and 5 percent U-235, the LEU enrichment level used in most nuclear power plants, takes a lot of time and resources. It's relatively easier and quicker to then enrich LEU to 90 percent needed for weapons-grade uranium. Once a country can enrich uranium at all, its breakout time is often just months*."..."Depending Depending on the level of the isotope Pu-239, plutonium can be differentiated into
reactor-grade plutonium, containing between 55 and 70 percent Pu-239, which is extracted from spent fuel that has been irradiated, or exposed to radiation, for years in a nuclear reactor; and
weapons-grade plutonium, containing at least 90 percent Pu-239, which is extracted from spent fuel that’s been transferred to a special plutonium production reactor. That special reactor only needs weeks or months to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
Although the two kinds are created by different methods, both come from spent uranium fuel in reactors.on the level of the isotope Pu-239, plutonium can be differentiated into
reactor-grade plutonium, containing between 55 and 70 percent Pu-239, which is extracted from spent fuel that has been irradiated, or exposed to radiation, for years in a nuclear reactor; and
weapons-grade plutonium, containing at least 90 percent Pu-239, which is extracted from spent fuel that’s been transferred to a special plutonium production reactor. That special reactor only needs weeks or months to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
Although the two kinds are created by different methods, both come from spent uranium fuel in reactors.": https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/how-do-countries-create-nuclear-weapons
*Italics mine.
Thus the nature of the murky relationship between the (so-called) "commercial" nuclear industry and nuclear weapons production becomes more apparent; "Oh we employ nuclear power for peaceful purposes! Nothing to see here, move along!"
According to "Fissile Material.Org", quote; "Production of military fissile materials continues in India, which is producing plutonium for weapons and HEU for naval propulsion, Pakistan, which produces plutonium and HEU for weapons, Israel, which is believed to produce plutonium. North Korea has the capability to produce weapon-grade plutonium and highly-enriched uranium.
France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, and India operate civilian reprocessing facilities that separate plutonium from spent fuel of power reactors. China is operating a pilot civilian reprocessing facility.
Fourteen countries - Russia, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands (all three are in the URENCO consortium), China, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran* - operate uranium enrichment facilities.": https://fissilematerials.org/
*According to fm.org April 28th 2025.
It is, therefore, asinine to claim that commercial nuclear power stations are not (and would not be in the event of a nuclear exchange), legitimate targets. For the most part the industry and its associated institutions (both civil and military), avoid making such claims (and inviting challenge), by simply ignoring the reactor vulnerability issue completely. This despite the fact that at various times (and depending on the wind direction), efforts have been made by the nuclear armed states to quantify the scale of the devastation and the long-term effects of various nuclear exchange scenarios ranging from "limited" to "total". It is, however, blindingly obvious when one peruses the official estimates which are available that such are partial in many ways, so much so in-fact that since the end of the 70s there has clearly been a policy of almost total non-disclosure.
Quote; "With rare exceptions, nuclear casualty estimates from the 1980s or later years are unavailable. Indeed, in some instances, the Defense Department has refused to declassify estimates in reports from the 1960s and 1970s*. While NGOs have produced approximations, the degree to which official estimating continued into the post-Cold War period is unclear. That the U.S. under President Obama began to apply new international rules of war criteria (such as proportionality or civilian-military target distinctions) may have led to estimates of losses under restrictive targeting options, but that is also unclear.": https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2022-07-14/long-classified-us-estimates-nuclear-war-casualties-during
*Italics mine.
Quote; "The original purpose of this paper was to assess the systemic effects of a limited nuclear war and offer some thoughts regarding the potential health care complications that might result. As work progressed, it became increasingly apparent that research into the direct and immediate impact of war has been, and continues to be, the subject of considerable effort. However, a review of the literature on the consequences of nuclear war revealed few references to social science research. The citations that were uncovered appeared to be confined almost entirely to the application of economic theory to problems of reconstruction. Much of the work was performed in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s and is therefore dated. To our knowledge, little has been done on such subjects as social response to a warning of nuclear attack; willingness of health care organizations to administer aid under postattack conditions; ability of a moneyless economy to rebuild without the aid of other nations and without a heavy reliance on fuel oils. There is, on the other hand, no shortage of assumptions regarding the nation's institutions, individual behavior, and the likelihood of social change, none of which have been seriously questioned. As a result, published projections that implicitly adopt current economic and social arrangements should be questioned": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219185/
The Obvious Child
It may be the stating of the obvious to observe that it has never been in the interest of the military-industrial complex to reveal the true nature of the dangerous game we have been playing since we first decided to exploit atomic physics yet as seems invariable in such cases the finest tool that can be employed to control a frightened population is to keep them uninformed whilst simply ignoring the elephant in the room. Thus the marginalisation of the effects of nuclear war (esp. with regard to the consequences of nuclear strikes against nuclear power plants), has been a necessary underpinning of an increasingly totalitarian global system.
The 2025 report on the safety of nuclear reactors from the World Nuclear Association is grimly humorous in this regard as it lists most (if not all), of the possible scenarios concerned with the vulnerability of commercial nuclear sites without ever mentioning the possibility of a nuclear strike.
Quote; "See also information page on Nuclear Security of Nuclear Facilities and Material.
Since the World Trade Centre attacks in New York in 2001 there has been increased concern about the consequences of a large aircraft being used to attack a nuclear facility with the purpose of releasing radioactive materials. Various studies have looked at similar attacks on nuclear power plants. They show that nuclear reactors would be more resistant to such attacks than virtually any other civil installations – see Appendix. A thorough study was undertaken by the US Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) using specialist consultants and paid for by the US Dept. of Energy. It concludes that US reactor structures "are robust and (would) protect the fuel from impacts of large commercial aircraft".
The analyses used a fully-fuelled Boeing 767-400 of over 200 tonnes as the basis, at 560 km/h – the maximum speed for precision flying near the ground. The wingspan is greater than the diameter of reactor containment buildings and the 4.3 tonne engines are 15 metres apart. Hence analyses focused on single engine direct impact on the centreline – since this would be the most penetrating missile – and on the impact of the entire aircraft if the fuselage hit the centreline (in which case the engines would ricochet off the sides). In each case no part of the aircraft or its fuel would penetrate the containment. Other studies have confirmed these findings.
Penetrating (even relatively weak) reinforced concrete requires multiple hits by high speed artillery shells or specially-designed "bunker busting" ordnance – both of which are well beyond what terrorists are likely to deploy. Thin-walled, slow-moving, hollow aluminium aircraft, hitting containment-grade heavily-reinforced concrete disintegrate, with negligible penetration. But further (see Sept 2002 Science paper and Jan 2003 Response & Comments), realistic assessments from decades of analyses, lab work and testing, find that the consequence of even the worst realistic scenarios – core melting and containment failure – can cause few if any deaths to the public, regardless of the scenario that led to the core melt and containment failure. This conclusion was documented in a 1981 EPRI study, reported and widely circulated in many languages, by Levenson and Rahn in Nuclear Technology.
In 1988 Sandia National Laboratories in USA demonstrated the unequal distribution of energy absorption that occurs when an aircraft impacts a massive, hardened target. The test involved a rocket-propelled F4 Phantom jet (about 27 tonnes, with both engines close together in the fuselage) hitting a 3.7m thick slab of concrete at 765 km/h. This was to see whether a proposed Japanese nuclear power plant could withstand the impact of a heavy aircraft. It showed how most of the collision energy goes into the destruction of the aircraft itself – about 96% of the aircraft's kinetic energy went into the its destruction and some penetration of the concrete – while the remaining 4% was dissipated in accelerating the 700-tonne slab. The maximum penetration of the concrete in this experiment was 60 mm, but comparison with fixed reactor containment needs to take account of the 4% of energy transmitted to the slab. See also video clip.
As long ago as the late 1970s, the UK Central Electricity Generating Board considered the possibility of a fully-laden and fully-fuelled large passenger aircraft being hijacked and deliberately crashed into a nuclear reactor. The main conclusions were that an airliner would tend to break up as it hit various buildings such as the reactor hall, and that those pieces would have little effect on the concrete biological shield surrounding the reactor. Any kerosene fire would also have little effect on that shield. In the 1980s in the USA, at least some plants were designed to take a hit from a fully-laden large military transport aircraft and still be able to achieve and maintain cold shutdown.
The study of a 1970s US power plant in a highly-populated area is assessing the possible effects of a successful terrorist attack which causes both meltdown of the core and a large breach in the containment structure – both extremely unlikely. It shows that a large fraction of the most hazardous radioactive isotopes, like those of iodine and tellurium, would never leave the site.
Much of the radioactive material would stick to surfaces inside the containment or becomes soluble salts that remain in the damaged containment building. Some radioactive material would nonetheless enter the environment some hours after the attack in this extreme scenario and affect areas up to several kilometres away. The extent and timing of this means that with walking-pace evacuation inside this radius it would not be a major health risk. However it could leave areas contaminated and hence displace people in the same way as a natural disaster, giving rise to economic rather than health consequences.
Looking at spent fuel storage pools, similar analyses showed no breach. Dry storage and transport casks retained their integrity. "There would be no release of radionuclides to the environment".
Similarly, the massive structures mean that any terrorist attack even inside a plant (which are well defended) and causing loss of cooling, core melting and breach of containment would not result in any significant radioactive releases.
However, while the main structures are robust, the 2001 attacks did lead to increased security requirements and plants were required by NRC to install barriers, bulletproof security stations and other physical modifications which in the USA are estimated by the industry association to have cost some $2 billion across the country.
See also Science magazine article 2002 and Appendix.
Switzerland's Nuclear Safety Inspectorate studied a similar scenario and reported in 2003 that the danger of any radiation release from such a crash would be low for the older plants and extremely low for the newer ones.
The conservative design criteria which caused most power reactors to be shrouded by massive containment structures with biological shield has provided peace of mind in a suicide terrorist context. Ironically and as noted earlier, with better understanding of what happens in a core melt accident inside, they are now seen to be not nearly as necessary in that accident mitigation role as was originally assumed.": https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/safety-of-nuclear-power-reactors
I highly recommend that you follow the link to: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/security/security-of-nuclear-facilities-and-material for you will discover that whilst conventional strikes against nuclear power plants are at least mentioned (although hardly discussed at any length), there is still no mention made of nuclear attacks.
Those of us who have studied these issues are, I'm afraid, very far from surprised though, in-fact there is an aphorism within the anti-nuclear community that informs one that; "You can rely on the nuclear industry for one thing and one thing only lies!"
Thankfully The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), that represents one of the very few organisations with anything like a decent public profile, does feel able to tell it like it is, quote; "The blast and heat impacts of even a small nuclear weapon (e.g. 10kT) would blow apart a nuclear reactor, and any containment buildings in the vicinity. The radioactive components within the reactor and stored fuel rods would be highly fragmented, and in some cases vaporised, and would contribute additional radioactive particles to the smoke and debris transported downwind from the blast centre. It is estimated that 100% of the Cesium-137 contained in reactor cores and spent fuel pools would be released into the environment following a nuclear attack on a nuclear power plant*. The combined impact could release tens of millions of curies of Cesium-137, and it is estimated that 2,000 square kilometres are rendered uninhabitable by every million curies released.": https://www.icanw.org/what_about_attacks_on_nuclear_facilities?__cf_chl_tk=9uZAVxYnpGm6_hY3x4aJVTW4o9_PnvCeqXDUtcWcoXQ-1771404556-1.0.1.1-XjBVGlm3NctNeT9b239OGfR34M8FtMKQdjRE8jhj8nc
Lets also not forget that all sizeable energy, manufacturing and resource extraction facilities would in any case be targeted during a major exchange regardless of their immediate military significance.
*Italics mine. Also see The Ninth Circle Pt.1 #ColdWarDiaries #PTSD #shellshock #truama #socialscience #coldcollationagain #comeGabrielblowyourhorn, quote; "although a worse betrayal has been (in my opinion), perpetrated by those "liberals" who failed to see-the-wood-for-the-trees because they were too timid to fully embrace a non-nuclear future and have been happy to live a lie, to this very day of publication, entangled in an indulgent web of such wish-fulfillments": https://www.arafel.co.uk/2026/02/the-ninth-circle-coldwardiaries-ptsd.html
https://www.channel5.com/show/the-chernobyl-disaster/season-1/the-chernobyl-disaster-meltdown
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