Didn't mean to cause such a digression, but you guys misunderstood my post. My words weren't meant to advocate ignorance of measures taken to secure these facilities, but rather, to convey the idea that said measures fail to eliminate the principle danger that this technology represents.
I realize both that it's unrealistic to abandon our reliance on nuclear power, and that living in a society so rapidly advancing comes with its growing pains. But, at the same time, it's disingenuous to sell this false sense of security as though the "myriad of safeguards" are sufficient. Certainly, they are anything but "fail safe."
The inevitability of our reliance obliges us not to blow out of proportion the safety of our reality.
Take Fukushima, for example, which happened just five years ago. Those facilities were designed to resist natural disasters. Namely, earthquakes and tsunamis, common occurrences in the Pacific Ocean. My choice of diction in "WMD" and "detonation" were too strong and misleading, I concede this, but in the end, TEPCO and the Japanese government promised its people that the walls they'd established would block out any water and that, for reasons you guys mentioned above, earthquakes couldn't pose a threat; then what happened? Who's to say an identical scenario couldn't happen to our plants on the West Coast? Who's to say hijackers of a domestic passenger flight couldn't crash it into a reactor complex (this actually almost happened in Tennessee in 1972, lol, except the ransom demands were met 1.5 mile before impact)? The message I hoped to deliver was that, however unlikely, there in fact exists a cause for concern regarding such risks.
I'm actually happy to see that everyone seems to view our dependence of nuclear energy as hunky dory since, ultimately, the benefits overwhelmingly outweigh the demerits, and, most likely, nothing like Fukushima would ever actually occur over here. But claiming that internal meltdowns, shifting the means of operations from humans to artificial intelligence, incidents of natural disasters, and so on couldn't result in something bad is mendacious.
