[tanknetter]

When they say “explosion”, do they mean a true nuclear blast? Or a scattering of radioactive crap.

Chernobyl-style explosion where rapid and sustained buildup of pressure blows up the reactor vessel and scatters radioactive crap.

Nuclear reactors don't have the ability to go critical at the level necessary to achieve a nuclear blast. Nuclear explosions, in their simplest form, require weapons-grade material (uranium or plutonium) to be almost instantly compressed to the point of critical mass. In single-stage weapons (for the sake of brevity I'm not going to go into two-stage/multiple stage thermonuclear weapons aka hydrogen bombs) this happens either gun style (one piece of enriched material is shot into another piece at a very high velocity - as with the Hiroshima/Little Boy bomb) or compression (a core of enriched material is surrounded by shaped charge explosives that are detonated to compress the core into critical mass - as with the Nagasaki/Fat Man bomb).

In nuclear reactors enriched material is brought into close enough proximity to other enriched material to create energy (heat) that is then used to boil water into steam. In a nuclear event the material gets too close/for too long or even touches, causing massive amounts of energy/heat that boils off the water too fast (causing pressure to build for a steam explosion that hauls radioactive material up into the steam cloud that results) and starts melting everything around it.

[jungleboy]

SCRAM

[Uri’el-2012]

Chernobyl-style explosion where rapid and sustained buildup of pressure blows up the reactor vessel and scatters radioactive crap.

That is my understanding as well !

[octex]

I appreciate your posting #9. It was clear enough for those of us not familiar with the subject to understand.

[DesertRhino]

Ok, that was my understanding of it too. That it couldn’t happen the way the paper said. That even in a gun bomb if the two parts are brought together at too low a velocity, that it fizzles. A plant has no hope of doing it.
But the article said a “blast that could kill millions”.
Even something like Chernobyl didnt kill that kind of people.
Just wanted to make sure i understood what was happening here. Sounds like the paper was being overly dramatic. A meltdown or steam blast is nasty. But it’s a little much to say it would kill millions. (unless you are counting the cancers, decades away, game)

I still think the best approach would be to hit Iran’s production plant with a planted nuke, made from nothing traceable to us. Then convince the world it was a terrible accident. Plan it carefully, Stick to the story forever. Here’s a cool part. WE gave the NORKS their fissile materials. If any materials are traced to us, we blame them for sharing what we gave them and stopped letting us inspect!