Nuclear power stations are an easy target for Terrorists whether radicalised groups or state sponsored actors.

 

Nuclear power stations are an easy target for terrorists. As we know from the Ukraine, and from other accidents, all that has to happen to create a catastrophic event at a Nuclear Power plant is for the cooling water to be cut off.

 

This seemed to be a close run thing at Chernobyl as recently as May 2022, when the Russian army took over the defunct station and for a while power was lost to the cooling system. Was this an accident of war? Or, as some commentators have suggested, Russia flexing its muscles and saying "Look what we can do - watch out!"? 

 

After the attack on the Twin Towers in New York known as 9.11, the threat from the air from terrorists became a big issue. A few days after the event our local ITV station hired a small plane and saw just how easy it was to fly up the Severn Estuary, going repeatedly over Oldbury and Berkeley Nuclear power stations without challenge.

 

Cyber warfare. Frighteningly, it is not even necessary to physically attack a nuclear power station. Its electronic systems can be hacked into and the station crippled from thousands of miles away.

 

Consequences. The result of a terrorist attack could be devastating. We have seen how many hundreds of thousands of people had to be evacuated during the Fukushima disaster. If there were to be a serious terrorist attack on one of the new Oldbury nuclear power station's reactors the nuclear industry wishes to build there, it would mean the whole of Bristol, Newport, Gloucester and intervening areas would need to be evacuated, probably for decades.