Looking into the eyes of pure evil
For the last week or so, the Ukrainians have been shelling the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant (that has been taken by the Russians at the very onset of the war and not part of any military action). The Russians have arrested two Ukrainian agents inside the plant, who have been providing the Ukrainian military with the coordinates guiding artillery fire.
The danger isn’t from them hitting the reactors; nothing short of a nuclear bomb could penetrate the reactor dome. The main problem is the interruption to the power supply to the water circulation pumps in the reactors, which is what triggered the Fukushima Daiichi incident, because this is the weak point of the solid fuel fission reactors; if you either cut the cooling, or the moderator rods get stuck on the outside position, you get a meltdown. You can guard against this by initiating a complete reactor shutdown.
The second problem is the spent fuel rods pool, which is nowhere near as well protected as the reactors. However, in my opinion this can cause only a localized incident, since you need a reactor meltdown for shit to really hit the fan, because it is then that the superheated steam carries the vast amount of highly radioactive particles high into the atmosphere, from where they spread globally, which took place in Chernobyl. In my opinion, threat to the reactor coolant circulation pump power supply is the greatest danger in any solid fuel fission power plant.
