So, I listened to a conversation between a nuclear engineer and a few other engineers and some soldiers the other night on twitter spaces.
The thing the nuclear engineer kept hammering home is that the biggest risk realistically is damage to the equipment, as in it would suck to lose the reactor but no one's going to get hurt if no one's on site.
The type of shelling that was going on, just fundamentally wasn't the kind to cause a serious event.
Worst case scenario, if Russia is actively trying to cause an incident, is they drop a large bomb on it.
This would still be nothing at all like Chernobyl.
Because of the fundamental differences in design, this would be an event on the scale of Three Mile Island.
They didn't even stop using the other reactor at Three Mile Island.
Honestly the biggest thing, even, is that if the Ukranians were to shut down the reactors, the potential for this immediately drops.
Dropping the control rods immediately 'poisons' the material. It takes weeks to get the reactor back to full power.
The thing the nuclear engineer kept hammering home is that the biggest risk realistically is damage to the equipment, as in it would suck to lose the reactor but no one's going to get hurt if no one's on site.
The type of shelling that was going on, just fundamentally wasn't the kind to cause a serious event.
Worst case scenario, if Russia is actively trying to cause an incident, is they drop a large bomb on it.
This would still be nothing at all like Chernobyl.
Because of the fundamental differences in design, this would be an event on the scale of Three Mile Island.
They didn't even stop using the other reactor at Three Mile Island.
Honestly the biggest thing, even, is that if the Ukranians were to shut down the reactors, the potential for this immediately drops.
Dropping the control rods immediately 'poisons' the material. It takes weeks to get the reactor back to full power.