Worst Possible Nuclear Accident

Dorozhand

Banned
What is the worst possible scenario, barring war, for a nuclear disaster that could feasibly have happened, in terms of loss of life, future birth defects, destruction and abandonment, and environmental damage?
 
Maybe fukushima causing Tokyo to be abandoned. I remember trading that the Japanese government had it on the table if the disaster were to get wise than it did. Let's just say making 40 million people move and abandon one of the most powerful cities in the world would have negative consequences.
 
A worst case scenario involves not merely a severe accident and release of materials but also that the accident be in close proximity to very heavily populated and economically valuable land and that the wind and rain carry and deposit the fission products heavily there. For example, an accident would be most severe if it would contaminate a major capital city with political importance like Mowcow or Paris or an economically important area like the Detroit or the Ruhr.

Now the worst case scenario for the plant's accident itself would have to involve, like Chernobyl, the worst of the worst possible situations: an open air fuel fire. The radioactivity released would rapidly cause panic in a nearby city and though there would probably be only a few thousand deaths directly from radiation poisoning, the area would be abandoned or left in a state of depression for over a century.

One possible worst case scenario I have considered is one in which a plant is built next to a volcano which turns out to be active and smothers the crew in a pyroclastic flow. The backup generators are destroyed by clogged air intakes, the water pumps jam as they fill up with abrasive volcanic dust and electronics are melted by the superheated gases from the eruption. The ash buries the roads and the plant itself so badly that an emergency response crew cannot reach the facility in time to prevent a disaster.
 
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I have to agree, Chernobyl itself was already approach ASB levels of plausibility, Fukishima is probably about the worst level of accident that's reasonable. That said, if you're looking at worst physically possible it probably is along the lines of Chernobyl, near a major urban center, followed by the secondary steam explosion that was feared and a cover up that leads to a lack of evacuation. You could, in a scenario like this probably also get some pretty severe secondary releases from explosions damaging adjoining reactors.

In terms of most vulnerable facilities I'll stick local and suggest that Pickering is one of the 'worst' sited plants in the world in terms of the area that could be affected, though even there there is the saving grace that prevailing winds are away from Toronto. You've also got the obvious problem of the Candu being just about the hardest large scale reactor imaginable to create a significant accident with.
 
Would the crash of a nuclear armed bomber in a heavily populated area work too?
Palomares in Manhattan?
 
Would the crash of a nuclear armed bomber in a heavily populated area work too?
Palomares in Manhattan?
Palomares could hardly compare to a nuclear power plant. It would release only Polutonium which, despite its fearsome reputation, is not as hard to remove nor as dangerous as many of the isotopes that would be encountered from a working reactor.
 
The likely non nuclear detonation, and quite possibly the fire associated with the bomber itself, would be more dangerous than the release from the bombs associated with that kind of crash. 9/11 aside take a look at the kind of damage airliners do when they hit a populated area.
 
Could it be possible that Three Mile Island goes as big as Chernobyl and causes problems in Eastern and Central PA and maybe even Maryland and DC and Baltimore without going ASB?
 
And the containment building at Three Mile Island is strong enough to contain an explosion on the scale of the one that blew the top off Chernobyl's reactor.
 
Additionally, the Three Mile Island reactors are pressurized water reactors, unlike the Chernobyl reactors, which were of the RBMK type. RBMK reactors are notoriously unsafe, and shouldn't have been operating in the 1950s, let alone 1986.
 
Could it be possible that Three Mile Island goes as big as Chernobyl and causes problems in Eastern and Central PA and maybe even Maryland and DC and Baltimore without going ASB?

It's pretty much ASB for any American power plant to go as big as Chernobyl period.
 

Delta Force

Banned
How about an alternate 1980s in which the Cascadia subduction zone experiences a massive earthquake (9.0 is actually not out of the question for the region), resulting in widespread damage and a tsunami along the West Coast. The construction errors and fault line underneath the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant are not discovered in this timeline, so the reactor experiences major core damage. Mt. St. Helens erupts a few days afterwards, releasing ash throughout the region and further stressing the infrastructure of predominately rural Oregon and Washington and complicating relief efforts along the coastline (I don't know about Washington, but coastal Oregon has poor road infrastructure with the rest of the state and no major airports or seaports). The regional fallout may devastate the Northwestern United States and Western Canada, as the fallout may come down in a much more concentrated area due to the massive amounts of volcanic dust in the atmosphere. Also, as discussed earlier, no one really knows how the United States would be able to contain a major nuclear meltdown since the authoritarian methods the Soviets used would be impossible to implement in the United States. Any regional aftershocks would also complicate containment efforts since Trojan was actually built on a faultline, unlike Fukushima.
 
A worst case scenario involves not merely a severe accident and release of materials but also that the accident be in close proximity to very heavily populated and economically valuable land and that the wind and rain carry and deposit the fission products heavily there. For example, an accident would be most severe if it would contaminate a major capital city with political importance like Mowcow or Paris or an economically important area like the Detroit or the Ruhr.
Fermi Unit 1 had a near meltdown in the 1960's.
 
The Busheir nuclear plant in Iran getting destroyed by an earthquake and the resulting contamination spreading out over the oil and gas handling facilities in the Gulf would be 'not good'.....
 
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