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Originally posted by Undertoad
There wouldn't be a plume though. A nuclear plant can't act like a nuclear bomb; I forget why. But the worst case is the meltdown, where the rods that control chain reactions can't be inserted back into the core.
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Fission plants aren't designed in a way that makes it at all feasible to bring the fissile material together fast enough to cause a nuclear explosion. Fissile material tends to resist being packed densely enough to explode by getting hot and losing density due to the expansion of vapor and gas. The rate of the nuclear reaction and the level of released energy is dependant on the density of the reacting materials. That's why a nuclear bomb is basically constructed by setting up the fissile material in two or more pieces and arranging to bring them together rapidly with an chemical implosion.
So a "meltdown".--which is slang for uncontrollable runaway fission--is probably the nastiest thing that can happen with just a reactor. The "down" part of the term evokes an image of creating a pile of hot slag, in the "China Syndrome" type of scenario. But when such an event breaches the containment. it can also result in the release of radioactive steam and smoke, which certainly can result in a plume.
Enough conventional explosives close to a reactor could concievably scatter radioactive debris in an even nastier way, and if the reactor vessel *was* breached maybe even the fuel itself. It's not a fission explosion as such, but it's certainly still nothing you'd wanna be downwind of.
I recall an article on the topic of using nuke plants to amplify the destructive power of conventional weapons in Scientific American some years ago.