Radioactive material is not something you can only find in nuclear plants (you can get same levels of radioactive materials in hospitals for example), there are also much easier ways to cause worse disasters (think about destroying a dam for example)
A destroyed dam is temporary damage. There are going to be eventually gravely ill Russian soldiers last year because they ignored the warnings in the Chernobyl exclusion area.
> In a particularly ill-advised action, a Russian soldier from a chemical, biological and nuclear protection unit picked up a source of cobalt-60 at one waste storage site with his bare hands, exposing himself to so much radiation in a few seconds that it went off the scales of a Geiger counter, Mr. Simyonov said. It was not clear what happened to the man, he said.
> But in invisible hot spots, some covering an acre or two, some just a few square yards, radiation can soar to thousands of times normal ambient levels.
> A soldier in such a spot would be exposed every hour to what experts consider a safe limit for an entire year, said Mr. Chareyron, the nuclear expert. The most dangerous isotopes in the soil are Cesium 137, Strontium 90 and various isotopes of plutonium. Days or weeks spent in these areas bring a high risk of causing cancer, he said.
"Temporary damage", really? The deaths of those downstream from a burst dam are no less permanent than the death of an irradiated Russian. And there are a lot more of the former than the latter.
how is destroying an entire dam easier than making an armed incursion into a nuclear power plant to steal radioactive waste? Just in terms of metric tons of ammunition needed
not to mention, maybe the place you want to attack doesn't have a dam?
