Originally Posted by
rickair7777
Neither would likely hurt it much. The concrete containment building would stop the worst of it, and there wouldn't be enough left to harm the steel reactor pressure vessel.
You'd need a bunker buster designed to penetrate multiple hardened layers at precise intervals. The fuzing would probably need to be custom optimized for the distance between the containment roof and the top of the reactor vessel. Could it be done, sure. But likely not with stock inventory munitions.
Putting holes in the containment building wouldn't hurt anything on a normal day, but it wouldn't play well in the media.
No it would not. Knew a guy once - a viper pilot - who had hung ordnance after a range mission. Not REAL ordnance, just a 25# blue bomb, a BDU-33. But he overflew a nuclear power reactor on the RTB. The bomb didn’t fall off or anything, but just the fact that he had overflown the facility got him dressed down at squadron and wing level, and some pointed amendments to the wing aircrew aid cards.
But it isn’t just the reactor itself, it’s the spent fuel rod storage areas, the personnel that run the place, and all the other potential softer targets. I cannot believe that any conceivable ROE would permit ordnance to be fired within a mile or two of a nuclear power station, even if they parked a missile battery there.