Good thing San Diego State sucks
A University of Utah student was arrested Wednesday after she allegedly threatened to detonate a nuclear reactor on campus if the Utes football team had lost to San Diego State over the weekend, according to radio station KSL in Utah.
According to the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office, the 21-year-old student is accused of making a threat of terrorism. She was booked and released Wednesday.
The woman allegedly posted on social media that, if the Utes lost Saturday's game, she would "detonate the nuclear reactor that is located in the University of Utah causing a mass destruction," according to a police affidavit obtained by KSL. Police said in the affidavit that the woman had information about the reactor and had attended classes in the same building it is located.
Utah defeated San Diego State 35-7 on Saturday, as quarterback Cam Rising threw for 224 yards and four touchdown passes.
Bit of a pet-peeve of mine. People don't know jack squat about nuclear power plants. I see more and more evidence to that fact almost every day.
1) The University of Utah reactor is an extremely small one. It is more of a test reactor for teaching purposes. There is literally no containment vessel around it because it can never get hot enough to actually boil water. I'm not even certain you could do anything that would cause something catastrophic.
2) Even if it was a full scale sized plant, you can not "detonate" a nuclear power plant. There is no condition that you can set in a nuclear power plant to that will ever result in the mushroom cloud explosion of a nuclear bomb. The worst you can possibly hope to achieve is for a nuclear meltdown, which means that the control rods system has failed to the point where the uranium fuel rods have increased above the temperature of their melting point. If the water that the uranium fuel rods are heating create enough steam pressure to burst the containment vessel, then you can achieve the worst case scenario (ie, Chernobyl) where that radioactive material can be launched outward.
3) There is not a button in the nuclear power plant that you push that has the words "initiate meltdown" written on it. It takes a very specific set of steps in order to achieve a meltdown (especially here in the US) and they involve bypassing DOZENS of safety systems that are there to specifically prevent it. We are talking about a combination of steps including bypassing circuits in the control room, manually locking water valves, and sabotaging piping (aka breaking them) in order to achieve this. I'm not sure it's even possible to do as a single person. I'm pretty sure you would need one person in the control room while the other goes around sabotaging valves / pipes.
Also, as a note. Most nuclear power plants (though admittedly probably not the one in Utah), have an armed SWAT team on standby on site. Even if you do manage to breach security enough to get access to the control room, you've got about two minutes before you are ventilated. Good luck with that.
