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Drones, Nukes, and the Myth of Reactor Safety

The advent of drone warfare has taken the always-present danger of nuclear power plant catastrophe to a terrifying new level.

by Harvey Wasserman , January 29, 2025  https://progressive.org/latest/drones-nukes-and-the-myth-of-reactor-safety-wasserman-20250129/

Recent events on the Ukraine-Russia war front have drawn widespread attention to a terrifying new reality: According to a dispatch from C.J. Chivers published by The New York Times Magazine in December, remote drone operators can now overcome virtually any defensive barrier or evasive maneuver, fundamentally altering the nature of warfare between the two countries and raising new concerns about nuclear reactor safety in the region.

From safe bunkers that are sometimes as far as miles away, Ukrainian operators have begun sending small unmanned devices that cost as little as US $400 to destroy tanks and heavy artillery pieces worth millions. While militaries have traditionally relied on larger, “purpose-built” drones in the past, fighters in Ukraine have recently turned to small, relatively inexpensive hobbyist drones used around the world for everything from firefighting to aerial photography. Many of the drone operators are young and not extensively trained. But their work has allowed the vastly outnumbered Ukrainian fighters to overcome highly complex, sophisticated defensive barriers, and inflict brutal, lethal, and enormously expensive damage with shocking ease.

This new turn in weaponized drone use bears startling implications in relation to nuclear reactor safety. There are eight atomic power plants in the Russo-Ukrainian war zone—six at the Zaporizhzhia site in Ukraine, and two at Kursk in Russia—whose security is continually threatened by the ongoing conflict and by a lack of skilled, reliable operators in the area. If severely damaged, deprived of cooling water, or cut off from back-up power supplies, any one of these plants could melt or explode. Such an event could blanket large swaths of the planet and many of Europe and Asia’s largest cities with deadly radiation, inflicting tremendous human suffering as well as permanent ecological devastation. The damage could exceed that of the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl Unit Four, which contained significantly less core radiation than at Zaporizhzhia and Kursk, both of which have operated far longer.

Reactor containment domes are often constructed with thick, reinforced concrete. But they are far from invulnerable. The routes to major catastrophe—from loss of coolant and back-up power to operator error and structural defects—are too numerous to delineate or discount. A combination of these risks plagues each of the more than 400 nuclear power plants licensed worldwide, including the more than ninety in the United States.

Another recent Times report warns that weaponized drones have become part of a “hybrid” global conflict operating in an amorphous “Gray Zone.” The ability of these drones to wreak lethal and exorbitantly expensive havoc is virtually unlimited. With easily deployed drones like those now ravaging Eastern Europe, hostile nations, rogue armies, small terror groups, or even a lone psychopath could handily turn any number of commercial reactors into lethal engines of a radioactive apocalypse.

Atomic technology has been in civilian use since the 1957 opening of Pennsylvania’s Shippingport reactor. The U.S. Congress at the time promised the public that the “Peaceful Atom” would have comprehensive liability insurance within fifteen years. But nearly seven decades later, no commercial U.S. atomic power plant has blanket private accident insurance against a major catastrophe. Homeowners policies nationwide specifically exempt a nuclear disaster: When push comes to shove, homeowners will pay for their own irradiation. 

All atomic power plants cause environmental damage on both the local and global level. They emit radioactive Carbon-14, expand global CO2 levels in the mining and fuel fabrication process, burn at 540-plus degrees Fahrenheit that heats the atmosphere and nearby bodies of water, bathe their neighborhoods in “low level” radiation, and create unmanageable wastes. What’s more, they cost far more than renewables by factors of 2 to 400 percent, while producing inflexible “baseload” power that clogs the grid.  

Atomic power plants have always been vulnerable to explosion due to natural disasters such as the one at Fukushima in 2011, systemic mismanagement such as that at Chernobyl, or military and terror attacks. The advent of drone warfare in addition to all of this has raised the threat level to a terrifying new height. But in spite of this, Congress approved a forty-year extension of the original federal insurance exemption in 2024. This means that by the 2060s, the industry may have operated an entire century without ever obtaining the basic private insurance necessary to protect the public from a major radiation release.

A new level of terror is now being inflicted in the Ukraine-Russian war zone by drones once considered to be harmless, frivolous techno-gadgets. The nuclear industry’s insistence that we have nothing to fear from military or terror attacks on its uninsured fleet has lost any residual credibility. Given the horrific new reality of drone warfare, generating hyper-expensive radioactive power and waste from hot, dirty, decrepit reactors is less defensible than ever.

January 31, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, technology, weapons and war | Leave a comment