South Korea stores most of its 10,000 tons of spent fuel next to its reactors in spent fuel ponds. These ponds, like those in the US and Japan, are not located inside primary containment. South Korea has placed its 23 reactors on the coast, stacked up next to each other like those at Fukushima and other Japanese nuclear power plants.

Consider now the consequences of a North Korean attack on one or more of these facilities, which would rupture the reactors and breach the spent fuel pools. At each plant, this would release many tens of times more cesium-137 than was released by Chernobyl. Bombing these plants would leave vast areas of Japan and Korea uninhabitable for centuries.

Now is the time to understand that the nuclear industry failed to include one vital calculation in its design parameters for its "safe" and "clean" nuclear reactors. They forgot about WAR, they disregarded the inevitable fact of state-sponsored terror, about the targeting of nuclear power plants with conventional and nuclear weapons.

Every nuclear reactor and spent fuel pond amount to pre-positioned radiological weapons of mass destruction. Each nuclear power plant and its massive stores of spent reactor fuel contain enough long-lived radionuclides to make tens of thousands of square miles into uninhabitable radioactive wastelands - like those permanent exclusion zones that now surround the destroyed reactors at Chernobyl and Fukushima.

The illusion of the peaceful atom may soon be shattered in a way that can no longer be hidden from public view.

Steven Starr

Senior Scientist, Physicians for Social Responsibility