Yeah, any neutrons that got interrupted as they passed through your body, would rip up genetic material quite easily. People would wake up in the afterlife wondering what in the hell hit them.

There's no such thing as perfect shielding. When I dealt with these matters, a generation back,the idea was how much mass it took to cut the flux by 50%. If this sort of thing really interests you, there were books and articles published in the 1950s and 1960s which discussed what thickenss of dirt, and what thickness of concrete reduced radiation by specific percentages, to be used in calculating designs of bomb shelters.

To supplement You: Basically a given mass between you and the radioactive source cuts the radiation getting through the mass with a fixed percentage. That is why you prefer lead between you and the bomb, but even air has a halving thickness, which is responsible for the coincidence of destructive radii of smaller nukes, while the large nuclear weapons derive their destructive power mainly from the blast effects. In other words: Smaller nukes (among them neuron bombs) will either kill you or won't irrespective of the TYPE of protection: The AMOUNT of protection will increase your retirement prospects, though. A Large nuke will kill you by haeping a building on top of you, if you are so close, that radiation should be a factor, your death would be a case of what the forensic science call: Competing causes of death. Now Nuking a nuclear power plant: My guess is that the blast probably will trigger the safety precautions, dumping moderators into the reactor and so on, before cracking the shell - anyway: radiationwise the reactor problem is the smallest of your worries, because a bomb hitting a nuclear power plant with enough destructive power to destroy it would more or less by necessity be a surfaceburst with the accompaning radioactive fall-out. If You only kill the staff with radiation, the plant will probably shut itself down quitely, I for one would design the safety system, so it needs regular human input to STAY in operation - like the button in locomotives.

Thomas, Apart from shielding, there's also a dilution effect, as a fixed amount of flux is spread over an increasing volume, as you move further and further from the source of the radiation.

Warhammer said: "If the reactor just melts down into the mantle, that is a problem..." The "China Syndrome" as the old Jane Fonda film was called, is about as true as radiation producing 60 foot tall tarantulas. The claim by the anti-nuke people (yes, it was a political movie) was that the core of the reactor would melt and burn through the earth's crust into the mantle, somehow destroying the earth. What molten metal does as it melts its way through things is it gets diluted and cooled. This tends to disperse the radioactive material and snuff the reaction. There are features at Chernobal that are made up of the remains of the molten core that cooled and solidified even before leaving the confines of the building. They're so radioactive that to look directly upon them means almost immediate death, but they didn't go to the mantle. They didn't even make bedrock. Shape and configuration is very important to the performance of the reactor (and nuclear bombs for that matter). Some reactor containment domes had conical floors surrounded with a moat so if the core melted, the molten metal would be dispersed over the floor and cooled in the moat. The result would be a radioactive hell, but no nuclear explosion would result.

The China Syndrome was released March 16, 1979. The near disaster at 3mile island began March 28, 1979 - which made the film seem very, very precient and gave it more credibility than it deserved. It was this unfortunate coincidence which served to miseducate the american people, stir popular resentment of nuclear power, and its legacy remains with us today.

typical NIMBY attitude: they want us to free ourselves from foreign oil dependence, but they don't want to drill in Alaska for it. they want cheap power, but they feel hydro dams cause too much eco damage and windmill farms are too visually unattractive. And they won't trust nuclear power. Maybe if we can find a way to effectively harness eveybody's hot air for power....

I recently finished "The Hydrogen Economy" by Rifkin, and am now reading "The End of Oil" by Someone Else, and am concerned about the state of energy production, rate of growth, and fuel. There has been renewed interest in the tar sands in alberta, canada, as a souce of reliable oil, but the resources involved to get at it are tremendous, and really, really dirty. There has been some work on pebble bed nuclear reactors which I find fascinating, as do some South Africans who are installing one near joberg, but the word in between bed and reactor many americans find distasteful.

I can not tell you much about the reactor side but on the generator side a nuclear blast will have some of the following effects. EM pulse and blast will take the grid off line. If the EMP is large enough and the resulting voltage spike is of high enough frequency it will get through the generator primary protection relays before they can trip off the generator. over current in the generator will probabley cause rotor damage to at least one pole of the generator. If you are lucky you will not have an overspeed on the turbine generator set. you will now have two of the three power sorces for the unit unavalable and the reactor goes into automatic shut down. this will require that the back up generators on site start. They could be damaged by the EMP also. Main steam valves to the turbine have closed and main steam safety valves have gone open. this is the isolated steam path that is not contaminated or radioactive if they do not have cracks in the steam generators. Any electronics that are not shielded will be damaged by EMP and all staff have taken enough radiation from the weapon that if they survive they will never be allowed to work in a nuke plant as they have taken the max dose allowed. My guess is that you will have chemistry problems in the secondary steam system as steam is vented from the safeties and cooling starts to become a problem on the steam generators. If there are any deposits on the tube side of the steam generators hydrogen damage or caustic embridalment of the tubes will occur. long and the short of it 24 to 48 months and a huge amount of cash to get the unit back on line. This does not have anything to do with the reactor side, I have no idea about that stuff.

Thank you for good posts. Bsl: Funny You should mention it: I was once asked about the interaction between the dilution and the reduction effect, so i got down to a little theoretical pencil work. What I ended up with was a function you cannot integrate - I did not venture beyond that into polynomic approximations. In fact in air the dilution effect is the most significant as the mass of air is 1/800th of water, but given enough of it it will have some bearing. Others: As far as I know (and I have been a chief financial officer of a power and water company) the real problem with nuclear power is not radiation, but cost. The cost of 1 kWh generated is, depending on the oil price primarely, cheaper with nuclear power, but as a nuclear power plant is so expensive to build and run, it has to be very large. This means the distribution network has not only to be large, but also upgraded - at least near the plant - and that is expensive. Waterpower is by far the best option, once build it more or less takes care of itself. The problem is that it is often located in a remote area - this gives expensive high-power lines. The easiest solution is a couple of large diesels or turbines - and then use the cooling water for district heating - that gives a very fine efficiency rate. Al the enviromental argument: In this enlighted forum: Forget them! They are more or less convincing babble to direct ex-communist idiots in right direction, as there is always an enviromental argument to service every solution. The real issue in Europe is NOT the enviroment, but the large dependence on IMPORTED oil in European economies. The USA dependence on oil-imports could be wiped out, if the US took the measures Europe takes. The Kyoto agreement is nonsense, and to the extend it has any purpose, it is to take the market away from the Arabs and Russia. The USA and president Bush oil-lobby obviously think there are other methods.