Hi, Frank--

He would probably like to create a US Chernoble but I'm not sure how difficult that would be

Very. Believe me. Security at the plants is tight. The security teams are trained and heavily armed. Access points are limited and tightly controlled. The containment vessels around American reactors, which were expensive items the Soviets dispensed with as unnecessary, will withstand a direct impact with a commercial airliner, by design.

Besides that, Chernobyl's radioactive inferno resulted from multiple disregards for procedure and overriding of safety protocols by operators messing around to see how to adapt the plant in question, designed for commercial power production, to produce weapons-grade materials. It wasn't an incendiary incident, but a series of bad decisions that took literally hours to make. Chernobyl, moreover, was graphite-moderated. American reactors are either pressurized or boilers, moderated by good old dihydrogen monoxide. It's hard to set water on fire. ;)

The melt-down was bad enough, but it was the fire and accompanying radioactive smoke that made Chernobyl the horror that it was. And btw: hats off to the firemen again, Russian and Ukrainian ones this time. They sacrificed their lives -- knowingly -- to grotesque radiation deaths to save the lives of civilian populations.

Mary Anne