South Korea’s Nuclear Power Plants Highly Vulnerable to Ballistic Missile Attack
Could you imagine what would happen to South Korea if their nuclear reactors were struck by North Korean ballistic missiles causing multiple Fukushima like disasters across the country?:
South Korea’s nuclear power reactors have not been designed to deal with military attacks, a report submitted to a lawmaker by the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. (KHNP) showed Sunday.
The evaluation sent to Rep. Kim Jong-hoon of the conservative Liberty Korea Party revealed that the outer protective wall of local reactors were never meant to withstand a missile strike or other forms of concerted attacks.
The reinforced concrete walls are the last barrier built around reactors that can contain radioactive materials from being leaked into the surrounding area in the event of a serious accident.
“They have been designed from the outset only to remain standing in the face of typhoons, earthquakes and other forms of natural disasters,” the lawmaker said. He pointed out that the casing can deflect the blast of explosions and debris from the inside, although not from external strikes or even the kind of terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. [Korea Times]
You can read the rest at the link, but this just goes to show the importance of missile defense which certain people in South Korea actually want to handicap and leave critical infrastructure like this with less protection.
So the world is basically screwed if there’s a war in Korea and South Korean nuclear plants are attacked. That would send the plume of radiation cloud all over Asia, then onto beyond to other continents.
The article is pro-Nork agitprop.
Does the SOURCE of the article make its content inaccurate? Didn’t think so.
Suddenly worrying about an enemy with whom you’ve been at war for nearly 70 years is about the same thing the same thing as cowardice; but dishonest.
South Korea has been making poor political choices a lot lately. They have been, as Kipling put it, been “paying the Danegeld”.
The rest of the world is no longer amused by this. Several American Presidents have fed the sickness; but the world cannot tolerate madmen with nuclear weapons.
It should be up to South Korea to win over their neighbors; but they chose to be a client state and let others pay for their defense. Now that the bill is due, they want someone else to pay.
Too bad.
As we have seen in Fukushima, total destruction of an uncontained nuclear reactor is not an extinction-level event.
…more of a slow financial and cancer train wreck.
On a good note, with a CEP measured in kilometers, the safest place to be in a North Korean missile attack is at the target area.
Destroying those power plants might be a case of fratricide, that is, (1) the winds blow north as well as south; (2) if invasion is the aim, you’ve just made large swaths of the territory you want to take over essentially worthless for generations; (3) any such attacks would be a war-starter, with potential regime change at the top of the agenda for the opposing side. So I doubt a rational actor would ever launch such an attack. Seems to me that Setnaffa has it right: this is bs from the anti-nuclear power lobby. It looks a lot like the various arguments against the THAAD deployment, that is, half-truths stacked one on top of the other.
Saw a very interesting show on PBSs NOVA about a month ago on why nuclear power would be our salvation, re: global warming. Did you know that there are a whole bunch of reactor designs that create almost zero waste? Sodium reactors, for example? I didn’t, but the show kind of reinforced my feeling that, supposing the waste problem could be solved, nuclear is the way to go if you want to reduce global warming.
“nuclear is the way to go if you want to reduce global warming.”
Not me. I’m PRO global warming.