Before the United States announced the targeting of Iran’s nuclear facilities, including its Fordow site, experts addressed concerns by saying there is little environmental threat to the surrounding region if attacked.

The Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant is built underground deep within the mountains near the city of Qom, making it difficult to be targeted and destroyed.

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Unlike a nuclear power plant, which typically stores radioactive waste on-site or nearby and has a reactor that generates electricity through nuclear fission, the Fordow site is only an enrichment facility.

Here, the facility processes isotopes of uranium to potentially make them usable in a nuclear weapon. This type of uranium is considered to be far less radioactive than what it can become when used in a nuclear weapon’s reactor.

The stockpiles of enriched uranium are not believed to cause the same scale of disaster seen at nuclear power plants such as Chernobyl or Fukushima.

“It would be relatively low-level contamination and wouldn’t disperse,” Edwin Lyman, a nuclear expert and director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Washington Examiner before the U.S. launched its strikes on Saturday evening.

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Lyman explained that a far greater risk connected to an attack on an enrichment plant is chemical hazards stemming from the hexafluoride gas, a material used in the facility’s centrifuges. Any leaks of this material could lead to injuries from chemical exposure. However, the Fordow site could curb any of those effects based on its location.

“In the case of Fordow, since it’s deeply buried in, the way it would be destroyed would be to drop this bunker-buster bomb and cause the mountain to collapse on top of it. Then there would be even less chance of any kind of release,” Lyman said.

“So as far as the environmental hazards from an attack on Fordow, I don’t think those are that significant,” he said. “There have been some statements from various parties that, you know, again, bombing a facility where uranium is stored a process like an enrichment plant, would lead to some nuclear catastrophe. As we discussed, I just don’t think that — that’s not supported by the science.”

The U.S. is understood to have used half a dozen “bunker-buster” bombs, known as GBU-57 A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrators, which are specifically designed to penetrate hardened infrastructure underground. Israel does not have the MOP.

Thomas Karako, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner that “the happy outcome is it’s buried under the mountain and we never hear from it again,” while the “less good outcome is if it’s unsuccessful in destroying the facility, and while they may be able to destroy the tunnels and that kind of thing, ultimately the Iranians may be able to resume activity sometime in the future.”

The Fordow facility is the only Iranian nuclear enrichment facility thought to require the MOP to destroy it. However, there could be other sites unknown to the outside world.

At least one of these sites, an enrichment plant at Natanz, had centrifuges that were believed to have been severely, if not wholly, destroyed within the last week. IAEA officials told the BBC that there was radiological and chemical contamination after the attack, though the level of radioactivity outside the site was unchanged. The U.S. also targeted Natanz on Saturday night.

Iran does have a research reactor in Tehran that poses the threat of unintended consequences if attacked.

There were similar, albeit different, concerns that have emerged from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, which is the largest nuclear power plant in all of Europe. Russian forces seized the territory surrounding the facility in the early weeks of the war and have primarily shut it down since then.

The difference between the Zaporizhzhia power plant and Fordow is that “the Zaporizhzhia plant is a nuclear power plant where electricity is generated through nuclear fission,” Lyman said. “So the risk profile from any attack on a nuclear reactor is much different than it would be on a uranium enrichment facility.”