A 66-year-old Arkansas man has been arrested after he allegedly rammed his car through security gates at a South Carolina nuclear power plant and tried to hit security guards.
You know, I work with a LOT of extremely mentally ill patients, and the vast majority of them manage not to commit any terrorist actions.
You know why? Because they're not fucking terrorists.
Mental illness doesn't inherently make one violent and it doesn't instantly render you completely incapable of self control. Any mental illness that might be present is not an excuse for doing terrorist things.
You're being downvoted, but it really did seem like it was some sort of domestic issue to me. Maybe someone who works there was banging his old lady, etc.
these facilities were already hard-core protected, long before 9/11. i grew up next to one, the security described that stopped this guy existed, and was in use 40+ years ago
post 9/11 actions didnt do shit to help anyone, anywhere... it was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Yep security and structural integrity at a nuke plant was a thing decades before 9/11. I grew up about 30 miles away from Salem 1&2, and Hope Creek in Southern NJ. My dad was an electrician that worked there while they built them.
They were hardened as they were built in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. They all pretty much have 30 foot thick concrete walls in the containment building that houses the reactor(s). The Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn't want something like Chernobyl to happen, which had no containment building, just a normal structure. Even if a US reactor goes supercritical and melts down, there is about a <1% chance of any radiation leaking out. If the reactor exploded the building would withstand the explosion and vent the pressure into the atmosphere, which may contain small amounts of radioactive alpha and beta particles. The only nuclear accident we've ever had was Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and that was because the safety valve in the containment building got stuck open after venting the pressure after one of the reactors went critical.
Even three mile island wasn't as bad as most people seem to think. It was used as an Anti-nuclear propoganda piece, but it wasn't that bad. The other reactors there continued operating for several decades after, though I think they're now all shut down.
(This is true for Chernobyl too though, so I guess it really doesn't say a whole lot about severity.)
Three Mile Island isn't the only incident, just the only accident, we have had. The only true meltdown was intentionally caused by the Army Corps of Engineers in the late 50s to test if China Syndrome was real. Thankfully someone did the math wrong so there was no danger of the core melting to the center of the earth and detonating. This is why the TVA was the last time that the Army Corps of Engineers was allowed to administer the things. Congress was understandably a bit upset to find out that they basically flipped a coin on destroying civilization at the very least.
The man then drove into nearby Pickens County and pulled onto some property, where shots were fired. Sheriff's office investigators said they don't know who fired shots, but neither security officers nor deputies used their weapons.
I guess the trees were exercising their second amendment rights.
Edit: from another source
Investigators determined that they were warning shots fired by a property owner on Jones Mill Road, the news release says. No shots were fired by security officers or law enforcement during the incident.