@ ben vidgen:
I wasn’t aware Uranium was safer?

@ Rob Mullen:
They don’t have fail safes if unmanned. Look it up.

Such optimism. I work at a reactor. Feel free to google safety manuals. There is NO backup plan for unmanned reactors. All backup plans assume the reactors will be manned and within a few hours of running on emergency backup generators things can be brought under control. So if any catastrophic event struck the globe or even say the US or China or France or Russia it is essentially game over. An extinction level event. Reactors automatically scram if any temperature of pressure fluctuation is detected. The insertion of control rods stops the reaction, but and it’s a huge BUT, reactors take months if not years to cool down. After the back up diesel runs out out (24hrs to 3 days) the core becomes exposed and meltdown commences. Breach of containment follows and a massive release of radiation. That’s the good news. HLW cooling ponds contain spent fuel rods. They in cooling pools because they are still very hot undergoing what’s called decay heat. There is 225,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel currently in cooling pools. They have no containment facilities and when the backup cooling systems fail, meltdown. In effect we are extinct already. Just waiting for some catastrophe to strike. EMP, pandemic, Super volcano, economic collapse. So you see there can never be a full scale nuclear war. Even if the opposing side did not retaliate eg. Russia you would still be committing suicide as all their reactors and cooling pools would go into melt down. There are 99 reactors in the US. 58 in France. 451 in total. That excludes the cooling pools. Getting the picture….

@ MrPete:
I’m sorry. Rubbish. US regulations require 7 days worth of diesel. After that the water stops and boil off will occur and core exposure within a few hours. Once that happens core meltdown and containment breach. If people really new how dangerous this stuff was. OMG!

What a strange article “I don’t know, I guess…” Why write if you don’t know?
Unmanned reactor: The reactor would scram if left unmanned (auto shut down). However because of decay heat it must be cooled. Cooling systems would run for a week maybe two before the diesel ran out. Core exposure within a few hours. Meltdown. Possible hydrogen explosion depending on the variables. Either way containment breach within 2 weeks followed by massive release of radiation. There are ~ 500 nuclear reactors around the world. Many of them old and dilapidated.

The other elephant in the room no one talks about is the HLW cooling ponds. Possibly because it’s even bigger than the first elephant? A reactor contains a few hundred tons of fuel. Cooling ponds can contain thousands of tons of highly radioactive hot spent fuel and there are many more of them. Within a week the cooling ponds would go into meltdown as the generators fail. Within a few months all human life will cease to exist. That part I can live with. What I can’t handle is how bunch of dumb schmucks managed to destroy this beautiful planet and no one knew. Very depressing.

Our immediate best case scenario: A really bad nuclear accident. Something that wipes out an entire country or a few States. Why? Because that is the only thing that will get the A holes in charge to wake up and see the monster they have created and put a stop to it while we still can!

A reply to the picture of the glowing ghoul

– Actually radiation can produce what seems like a glow when a radioactive substance or radioactive material, or something that has absorbed radiation is surrounded by water. “This is called Cherenkov radiation. This happens when the radiation from the radioactive material goes into a material such as glass or water. Because the speed of light in this material is relatively slow (compared to the maximum speed of light in a vacuum), the radiation is actually traveling faster than light can travel in that material, and so it gives off light as it slows down. But to actually see this glow, it usually takes something which is very radioactive, such as the internal parts of a nuclear reactor. Weak Cherenkov light can be made from smaller amounts of radioactivity. Usually, sensitive devices have to be used to detect it.”

Know that we know what Cherenkov radiation is, let’s take the focus elsewhere. Zombies, as we know, zombies are dead human beings where the virus or parasite or whatever uses the body as a host, now, a human body consists of 60 – 70 percent water. And as stated above, Cherenkov radiation can only glow if there is water present, surrounding the radioactive material/substance. So therefore we can conclude that if a radioactive zombie, or a ghoul from the Fallout universe has absorbed so much radiation, that it has enough radioactive tissue, bones, blood or whatever to send of a glow. We also know that biological cells die if exposed to, too much radiation so therefore the cells in the creature need to be resistant to or absorbing of radiation so that it won’t die. And also that the skin is thin enough to actually be able to see the visible glow, and as stated on the Fallout wikia:

“The distinctive luminescence that is the trademark of the glowing one can be best attributed to an unusually high amount of radioactive material that builds up in the bloodstream and muscle tissue of a typical ghoul. Sometimes, upon the transformation into a feral ghoul, the neurological systems of the body cease filtering these particles from the blood and tissue, instead causing them to build a distinctive bio-luminescence that is a characteristic of the “glowing ones”. In daylight they simply appear to be incredibly pale feral ghouls, but in darkness they glow with a vivid yellow-green hue, their opaque skeletons clearly visible as in an X-ray. Approaching a deceased glowing one can cause minor exposure to radiation”

Or another theory could be:

“Simply defined, bioluminescence is “light produced by a chemical reaction” that “originates in an organism” (Haddock et al. 2006). The term bioluminescence originates from the Greek bios for “living” and the Latin lumen for “light.”

In bacteria, the expression of genes related to bioluminescence is controlled by an operon (key nucleotide sequence) called the Lux operon”

So here you have it, with reference to the Fallout ghoul “glowing one” and a possible explanation of glowing zombies, whether radioactive or not.

@ Richard Schwarz:
You guys miss one important thing. NPP are defended by armed troops(and quite large and well armed one, its composition are state secret, but there is enough troops to repel attack of couple of hundreds terrorists). They are far from large population habs(nearby city would be 25-30 thousands most probably). All routes out of NPP and the nearby city are designed to be easy blocked in case of emergency. In case of Zombie invasion it would be one of the safest place. At least in Russia it is so.

It’s not so much the reactors them selves you need to worry about, as people have said, they have fail safe systems built in, it’s the reprocessing facilities that deal with the old fuels from reactors, as they deal with extremely concentrated highly radioactive substances, usually in a liquid form, and and generally just stored in bulk awaiting conditioning and storage, if one these facilities were to fail, you are talking about fallout radii of 100’s or even 1000’s of miles depending upon the stocks at the time of failure, the most likely failure being upon a loss of air recirculating leading to radiolytic hydrogen building up and eventually the entrained heat from the radioactive materials igniting the hydrogen rich atmosphere, and boom, there’s 1000’s of Sv of radioactive particulates in the atmosphere to be blown around and rained down wherever the wind sees fit to blow.

To bad if the reactor is plutonium based and gets nailed by a tsunami quake etc – because then were all toast.

But what about all the dangerous chemicals and toxin in protective storage that be released into the environment once power shut down.

Oh and fact as most develop nation remove lead from petrol most petrol would break down in about month or two meaning good bye automobile transport.

Richard and those predicting massive meltdowns and cataclysmic disaster are incorrect. Modern nuclear power plant design in the US would make such an outcome extremely unlikely. There are multiple safety and fail safe mechanisms in place to deactivate and wind down a NPP in the event that humans can not do so manually. There are even mechanical safeties in place in the event of total electrical loss (in a hypothetical EMP scenario.)