November 3, 2007
A Pipe Bomb in a Nuke Plant (almost)
Question for anyone who drives a pickup truck. Would a pipe bomb in the back of your truck escape your attention as you drove to work? Overreaching for an explanation now, how if someone dropped it in while you were stopped at a red light?
The Palo Verde nuclear power plant, the largest in the United States, was sealed off for much of Friday after guards found a pipe bomb in a worker's truck as he tried to enter the facility, officials said. ...The pipe bomb was probably powerful enough to damage the vehicle but not the power plant, Sheriff Joe Arpaio said.
The engineer, identified as Roger Hurd, 61, of South Carolina, told investigators he was unaware the pipe bomb was in the bed of his pickup truck, the sheriff said.
"The mystery is how did it get in the truck and how he knew nothing about it. It's all very puzzling," Arpaio told Reuters, adding that a search of Hurd's Phoenix-area apartment turned up no clues. "There was nothing there that would connect him to the pipe bomb."
"The pipe bomb was probably powerful enough to damage the vehicle but not the power plant, Sheriff Joe Arpaio said."
No kidding. Containment vessels of US built reactors were originally designed to withstand an impact of a 707 diving at several hundred knots. You would need a real big pipe bomb..... Contra Russian RBMK designs, which dispensed with containment vessels altogether, as the glorious Soviet marched towards a bright and shining future.
Posted by: chuckR at November 4, 2007 8:23 PM