Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

162Disasters Waiting to HappenRanges up to the best part of a mile would probably still cause a substantialrelease. At most reactor sites, a kiloton-range bomb could deliver twelvepound-per-square-inchoverpressure at standoff range from public highways.Even a fizzle–a tenth of a kiloton or less–may well suffice. Arbitrarily shortranges could probably be achieved in practice by simply driving a truck or vanup to the reactor. (Delivery vans which the guards are used to seeing are oftensimply waved through the gates.) The bomb would not even have to be thatclose: a thousand feet or less would probably suffice. For example, transmissionlines and some diesel air intakes fail at about four pounds per square inch, andthis dual failure, unrepaired, could cause a meltdown within hours. It is not realisticto expect prompt repairs, because even a fizzle–say a tenth of a kiloton–producesprompt radioaction of five hundred rem (sufficient to kill most of the peopleexposed to it) at about a thousand feet for gamma rays and fifteen hundredfeet for fast neutrons. The same dose would be obtained from an hour’s exposureto fallout within about a thousand to three thousand feet of the site of theexplosion. Thus within the range of moderate blast damage (three pounds persquare inch) from such a fizzle–about a thousand feet–nobody could survive or,having reentered, would want to linger to do repairs.Of course, major releases could be caused by means other than a nuclearbomb. Military fuel-air bombs can achieve overpressures of three hundred toa thousand pounds per square inch or more at ranges of hundreds of feet. 157Many munitions available to terrorists (Chapter Seven) could cause a majorrelease at standoff range. So could the more discriminating means of attack,overt or covert, discussed earlier.Radiological consequences of major releasesWhat could be the consequences of a major release of radioactivity causedby some of the foregoing techniques and resources? Most of the literature onmajor nuclear accidents may understate the possible results of successful sabotage.According to the General Accounting Office, 158 a classified SandiaNational Laboratory technical assessment of reactor sabotage, for example,found that the consequences could not exceed the maximum calculated in theRasmussen Report 159 for a major accident. Those effects would include:• thirty-three hundred prompt deaths,• fifteen hundred delayed cancer deaths per year for ten to forty years, a totalof up to sixty thousand, and• fourteen billion dollars’ property damage.The Rasmussen Report, however, did not present those figures as the