The US launched devastating strikes that “obliterated” Iranian nuclear facilities Saturday night — but don’t expect another Chernobyl, experts said.
President Trump ordered strikes on three nuclear sites inside Iran, where International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have found uranium purified to near weapons grade.
Bunker-buster bombs are believed to have wiped out the Fordow facility, while 30 Tomahawk missiles fired from submarines 400 miles away struck Natanz and Isfahan.
But the hits on Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow — Iran’s most secure nuclear enrichment facility, which was buried 300 feet inside a mountain — shouldn’t spark panic over possible nuclear fallout.
Experts in radiation hazards say there is little risk of widespread contamination such as what took place on April 26, 1986, when an infamous power surge and subsequent fire at Russia’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant released massive amounts of deadly radiation into the air, killing 31 and causing widespread contamination and long-term health impacts.
Chernobyl is widely considered the worst nuclear disaster in world history.
“This isn’t a Chernobyl scenario,” author Aimen Dean posted to X.
“So, in layman’s terms: this isn’t ‘hot’ nuclear fuel undergoing fission,” he wrote. “It’s uranium in various stages of enrichment, and even a military strike that destroys centrifuges or disperses material is unlikely to produce a large-scale, long-lasting fallout event.
Read the latest on the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities:
The US targeted enrichment facilities — not nuclear reactors — deep within Iran, buffered by mountains in the north and the Caspian Sea in the Northeast, so “there may be localized contamination, but not a region-wide radiological disaster.”
“There’s no fallout threat from this because it’s all underneath,” according to Atlantic Council’s Alex Plitsas.
“The president just prevented World War III with this decisive action. This is the ‘strength’ in ‘peace through strength’ boldly shown to the world at last.”
The nature of the material in Iran is a key reason a nuclear fallout-type event is unlikely.
“With uranium … the radiation doesn’t really travel very far,” Prof Claire Corkhill, chair in Mineralogy and Radioactive Waste Management at the University of Bristol, told the BBC.
Uranium’s toxicity would wreak havoc on the human body if it were ingested, or if the particles from the dangerous substances were inhaled — meaning those close to the site of the bombings could face some health risks, she noted.
But another expert insisted that while there might be impacts in a “very local area,” the bombing shouldn’t create “a massive environmental fallout.”
“If there was an incident and the centrifuges were to release the uranium hexafluoride, the gas contained within the centrifuges, then it would be a really severe chemical incident,” Prof Simon Middleburgh, a nuclear materials scientist from Bangor University, told the outlet.
Iran’s uranium was well on its way to being concentrated enough for a nuclear weapon, according to the IAEA.
But blasting a rocket into stockpiles of enriched uranium would not pose risk of a “nuclear incident.”
“Highly enriched uranium is about three times more radioactive than non-enriched uranium,” said Prof. Jim Smith, from the University of Portsmouth, who has studied the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. “But … neither of them are particularly densely radioactive.
“It wouldn’t cause a major environmental contamination problem.”
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