The enviro-nazis at Greenpeace are bragging about the fact they were able to hand signs on a reactor containment building in France. They claim this demonstrates a weakness of national security and, of course, demonstrates the dangers of nuclear power. Let’s take a look at what they actually accomplished:
Greenpeace activists secretly entered a French nuclear site before dawn and draped a banner reading “Coucou” and “Facile”, (meaning “Hey” and “Easy”) on its reactor containment building, to expose the vulnerability of atomic sites in the country.
Police, whom the environmental activist group immediately told of the publicity stunt, took several hours to round up nine intruders who had broken into the power plant in Nogent-sur-Seine, about 95km southeast of Paris, on Monday.
[…]
Activists who tried to enter three other French nuclear sites, in a co-ordinated action on the same day, were prevented from doing so, but Greenpeace said other invaders were still holed up inside other, unspecified, nuclear sites.
They had a 25% success rate, which isn’t terrible. Then again when you look at it all the activists accomplished was getting inside the fence surrounding the plant, they didn’t managed to enter the actual reactor containment building. Now the question is, what did they really accomplish? Not a heck of a lot honestly. Reactor containment buildings are heavily reinforced structures that are literally hardened against high explosives. You could probably stick 10 pounds of C4 onto a reactor containment building and accomplish little more than gouge the overly thick concrete that ensures a meltdown doesn’t end up being Chernobyl II (although if you do like the Japanese and try to prevent a properly melting down reactor form melting down containment will fail and you’ll have a radioactive mess on your hands).
Perhaps you could breech the containment building with a nuclear weapon but at that point I think the entire scenario is a giant moot point. Either way I doubt there is any man portable means of breeching containment of a reactor without gaining entry into the containment building so this entire stunt really proves nothing. If Greenpeace members could have gained entry into the reactor containment building then they would have a point to make.