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

164Disasters Waiting to Happenexplosion at ground level of a one-megaton nuclear bomb. 164 (That is equivalentin explosive force–though its heat and radiation make it more damaging–to onemillion tons of TNT, or one million World War II blockbusters, or eighty timesthe twelve-and-a-half kilotons that flattened Hiroshima.) The radioactivity fromthe bomb is initially more than two thousand times that from the reactor. Butthe activity of the bomb debris decays far faster, so the two levels become equalafter a day. Within five years, the reactor release is a hundred times as radioactiveas the bomb debris; after twenty-five years, a thousand times more. Landcontamination is caused mainly by this long-lived radioactivity, especially fromcesium-137, which emits penetrating gamma rays and takes three centuries todecay to a thousandth of its original strength. For this reason, if the one-megatonbomb were to vaporize and disperse the reactor core, it would interdict tentimes as much land after one year as if the same bomb landed on a non-radioactivetarget. 165 The area seriously contaminated for centuries would be hundredsof square miles, or about forty times the area comparably contaminated by aone-megaton groundburst alone. 166 Taking full account of long-term, long-rangeconsequences makes the damage from a major reactor accident comparable tothat from a one-megaton bomb at ranges up to a few hundred miles and evenhigher beyond about six hundred miles: 167 the reactor can actually expose morepeople to more radiation than the bomb can.As noted above, however, hundreds of thousands of square miles couldalso be lastingly contaminated by breaching a reactor with a bomb “even ofrelatively small yield, such as a crude terrorist nuclear device.” 168 Such a bombcould release the reactor’s radioactivity just as effectively as a one-megatonbomb could–in fact, more so, since the weaker explosion would not carry thedebris so high into the stratosphere, where it would have more time to decaybefore the fallout returned to earth. Thus a terrorist with nuclear capabilitiesor a “determined or desperate combatant can, by waiting for the properweather conditions, devastate a substantial fraction of the industrial capacityof an opponent with a single nuclear weapon aimed on a reactor”. 169...the possibility of malicious as well as accidental destruction of a reactor core[returns again to]...the unfortunate links between nuclear power and expandedaccess to the raw materials of nuclear weaponry....For the staggering radiologicalconsequences of destruction of a nuclear reactor by a nuclear weapon...put the radiologicdamage potential of a fair-sized nuclear arsenal into the hands of any nationor terrorist group with a single, ten-kiloton bomb. 170As Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution noted, if nuclearpower “had...been in widespread use at the time of [World War II]..., it is likelythat some areas of central Europe would still be uninhabitable because of