While looking at some of the organizations that our “amateur Wikipedia grapher cum UNEP cited as peer reviewed source” belongs to I came across the German webpage of “Friends of the Earth”. This is an organization that Hanno Sandvik says he himself belongs to.
This is what I found on the German “Friends of the Earth” page:
Main link here Translated link here
The absurd Atom-Alarm game shows airplanes crashing into the pressure vessel, nuclear waste casks spewing out directly into the ground, and the cooling towers cracking. In other words, things that haven’t happened in real life operation of nuclear plants. The Nuclear Energy Institute has a report about what would happen if a plane crashed (Boeing 767) into a nuclear power plant here. They write:
The containment structure was not breached, despite some crushing and spalling (chipping of material at the impact point) of the concrete.
They’ve even done crash tests with a fighter jet into the wall segments of a nuclear plant. Would a nuclear power plant withstand a 9/11 style terrorist attack? Yes.
According to the Atom-Alarm game instructions, your task, as one individual, is to keep any of this happening for a period of a million years. This of course is impossible, since the game is rigged to ensure failure.
Here’s what they say about it (via Google Translation which is broadly imperfect):
Nuclear waste casks, terrorist pilots, temperature fluctuations
As an operator of a fictional nuclear power plants will be after you press the start button immediately often claimed. Some appear as routine – as if the increasing number of dangerous nuclear waste drums to be disposed of brilliant. It is important to keep risky temperature fluctuations under control. Or the unexpected happens, when it comes to earthquakes, and the aging nuclear power plant in cracked concrete. No sooner are the cracks forming, then a bomber pilot on the horizon and wants to throw himself on the reactors.
Power plant management, desperately overstretched
A million years is to ensure the safety of the players of the nuclear plant. For this purpose a counter runs backwards. Even after ten or twenty years ago – played three, and felt hectic 15 minutes – is the infernal noise of sonicated power plant management, desperately overstretched. Damp hands cramp the finger and a steadily increasing accident rate can rise to serious doubts – first at the response and later on his own megalomania to try to keep such a risky technology and the ever-radiant nuclear waste for millennia under control.
Yeah, whatever. So that you can remain terrorized on the go, or terrorize nearby people at the bus/train/plane station, you can download and install the iPhone app direct from Apple’s app store. Here’s what it looks like in use:
Atomic Alarm for iPhone and iPod (for free)
- Direct link Atomic Alarm in the App Store (Apple’s iTunes software installed required)
- Or just type in the App Store “Atomic Alert” as a search
There’s a recent alarmist film out called “The Age of Stupid”. When I see things like this, I agree that we certainly seem to be living in it.
Of course the engineering testing proving that planes don’t actually penetrate the pressure vessels of nuclear plants doesn’t stop organizations like Greenpeace from spreading more stupid:
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well I suppose we’d better get rid of all the nuclear subs and aircraft carriers. Someone might fly a plane, or even a missile, into them as well.
When we get on the topic of climate, or environment, or deviance, I give my students the links to RC, Tamino, and STOAT before I tell them about CA, Jo Nova, WUWT or Jeff Id. I tell them to take no one’s word, not even mine. I know that facts don’t speak for themselves, but I’m hoping that my students will eventually come to understand the meaning of “cognitive dissonance”. The Age of Stupid” is the “Age of Scientific Consensus”.
OK, everyone drop everything and go look at climateaudit.org for Steve’s destruction of the Yamal series. I don’t think you are going to believe your eyes.
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Seems they didn’t succeed to frighten the german voters today, socialists thrown out of the government liberals get in, and the latter are pro nuclear.
janama (13:55:43) :
well I suppose we’d better get rid of all the nuclear subs and aircraft carriers. Someone might fly a plane, or even a missile, into them as well.
That will be known as the end of the world as we know, aka WWIII.
When the UK government moved to reinforced concrete pressure vessels for the Magnox and later AGR programmes the new designs took into account resistance to a nuclear strike.
Kindest Regards.
kim (14:14:27) :
“OK, everyone drop everything and go look at climateaudit.org for Steve’s destruction of the Yamal series. I don’t think you are going to believe your eyes”.
Don’t tell me, he is killing another hockey stick?
Here in Canada, we’ve had some interesting discussions about the crash-resistance of various parts of nuclear reactors. The video game isn’t an accurate scientific assessment, but it may be about as close as the blanket reassurances! Saying that a caution about nuclear power includes “things that haven’t happened in real life operation of nuclear plants” is also scant reassurance, Anthony, don’t you think?
Nobody’s actually disposed of any spent fuel yet, so I guess the people who claim it’s going to happen (and safely so for the ~million-year toxic life of the wastes) are also part of the age of Stupid? Warnings about an accident like TMI and later Chernobyl, before the fact, were given and some of them were brilliant and prescient — but they included “things that hadn’t happened in real life operation of nuclear plants”.
The funniest reassurance that was made on that basis was made by a Soviet delegation that appeared before a US congressional committee between the TMI and Chernobyl accidents. The Soviet officials praised their home-grown RBMK design (which later became famous at Chernobyl), and teased the Americans for licensing a design as unsafe as TMI, which they claimed (maybe correctly) could never receive a license in the USSR.
Sure, it’s a bit of a silly video game, but if we lined up all the world’s video games in order of silliness, this one might be a stone’s throw from the extreme smart end. You haven’t run out of important and seriously dangerous silliness to attack, have you?
REPLY: I’ll believe engineers and their results over activists every day of the week and twice on Sundays. The engineer view: “We have to get this right or people die” The activist view: “If people die that helps our cause”.
Nuclear safety hasn’t stood still since Chernobyl or TMI. To assume it has would be folly. Thirty years have passed since TMI. BTW can you show me any nuclear power plant that throws waste casks out onto the ground? Or can you show me any nuclear power plant that can’t withstand a light plane crash like the Cessna style aircraft depicted in the silly game? Or can you show me any nuclear power plant where the cooling towers have cracked like that?
Meanwhile while the West goes through hand-wringing and video game angst, China is building new nuclear power plants, and fast, 5 new ones, 22 under construction:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2009-04/21/content_7697913.htm
I don’t agree with your claim that the game is near smart. Since when is cartoonish propaganda like this “smart”? – A
“Håkan B (14:18:42) :
Seems they didn’t succeed to frighten the german voters today, socialists thrown out of the government liberals get in, and the latter are pro nuclear.”
“Liberals” in the old European sense; those who want to let you have your freedom if it does not compromise the freedom of others. The contrary to US-liberals.
You may call their boss “Schwesterwelle”, but he is a success story.
Are terrorists stupid? Where would you choose to crash a plane to make your point? A hardened nuclear plant? The White House? The Houses of Parliament? A football stadium (Superbowl or Cup Final or World Cup)? The Olympics opening ceremony? A city centre? The vatican? There is an endless list of locations better than a hardened nuclear plant, where all you would likely do is put the plant out of operation for a year or so.
I love the smell of alarmists destroying their reputation with hysteria in the morning…..
And on the subject of nuclear: Question: how many people did the accident at Three Mile Island kill? Answer: zero. I remember after Chappaquidick the joke ” who has killed more people, the nuclear industry or Edward Kennedy?”, an anti-nuclear politician.
Greenpeace must immediately have its charitable status revoked. it is a political organization.
And so should FOE, The Sierra Foundatuion, and all other poltiico-religious groupuscules.
Ron de Haan 14:31:31
It’s genocide, Ron; he’s killing all the hockey stick’s progeny, too. Especially read Ross McKitrick’s comment #10.
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Send complaints to Steve Jobs’ email sjobs@apple.com for the app to be pulled from the Apple iTunes Store.
And, of course, you have to protect your million-year-old nuclear plant so it’s just like all the other million-year-old nuclear plants. In real life we don’t get an increasing number of problems due to a nuclear plant being 200 years old… we’ve already torn down a few after only a few decades. Many industrial plants that are decades old get all of the working parts replaced, so a 100-year-old building is full of microcomputer-controlled conveyors and robots.
An airliner that is perceived to be an actual threat to a nuclear power plant WILL be shot down if it continues on its course. In the meantime, the nuclear power plant that is threatened will be in the process of shutting down in the time remaining before the anticipated strike, which is assumed to hit the weaker areas of the plant, which is NOT the reactor building. An airliner, even full of fuel is NOT a threat to the reactor or the building it is contained in.
Hardened nuclear power plants are becoming more hardened, at least in the United States — new fences and walls, intruder delaying devices and heavier weapons, including automatic machine weapons.
While that F-4 Phantom video is impressive, a 767 carries x7 the amount of fuel (and x12.7 without its external tanks).
@ur momisugly Phillip Bratby (14:56:54)
A better target would be the Houston refineries.
Just for the record; there is no neuclear material in the cooling towers, so even if they crack, it would not be any disaster. But the coolingtowers has come to be the symbol of neuclear power and all evil.
Secondly the facility in the Greenpeace video is not a powrplant but a radar installation, as seen by the white dome.
Whether a nuclear power station can withstand or not withstand an attack is one question. The other question is whether a power station (including coal, hydro, etc) is armed or not armed with a ground-to-air defence system as all of them should be.
I live in Hamburg/Germany and I can say nuclear power is no fun. Nearby is the now infamous nuclear power plant “Krümmel”, which had to be switched off two years ago after a transformer burned down (which looked quite spectacular, as I might add). In the wake of this accident, they “found” several serious weaknesses in the safety of this power plant. It was like “How would have thought, this and that is not up to spec!” – only it supplying power for over twenty years! And this one of the more “modern” nuclear power plants.
So they had to fix the most important problems over the course of the last two years. When they finally switched it on again it was preceded and followed by a number of accidents.
Less then two weeks after switch on they had an emergency shutdown. I was currently shopping and the lights went briefly out in the supermarket where I was. I need half an hour to get home (for a five minute ride), because a quarter of the traffic lights switch off. A couple of power mains ruptured and flooded streets due to pumps stopping and starting again. Oh, what fun it was.
So again, this is a modern power plant. I say, the companies running them only look for the bucks they can make and they give a chicken shit about safety. All nuclear power plants should be shut down, ASAP, and the companies running them (including the profits they made over the last ten years) should be socialized.
And I haven’t even started talking about the problem with the nuclear waste…
Isn’t the real question, if France can recycle nuclear fuel why can’t the USA? Simple answer, because Congressional Democrats passed a law banning the reprocessing of spent fuel into usable reactor fuel.
Yep, it was legislation signed by Jimmy Carter back in the 70s that prohibits the recycling-reprocessing of spent fuel. The things you learn when you pay attention to what Congress actually does, instead of what it says it does. Read the bills is a good place to start.
If we did reprocess the spent fuel, the only thing left to dispose of would be low level wastes for the most part.
Not strictly on topic, but still relevant to the age of stupid – the Met Office have come up with another of their comedy predictions:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6236690/Met-Office-catastrophic-climate-change-could-happen-with-50-years.html
I tried to post this on the Tips and Notes thread, but I couldn’t get a comment box to open. This article from the WSJ, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125383160812639013.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLTopStories
discusses the granting of loans totaling almost a billion dollars, from one of the fed’s green jobs programs, to two companies, Fisker and Tesla, who produce or plan to produce vehicles that are mostly over priced electric toys to provide feel good emotional satisfaction to the celebutard class. Tesla makes an electric version of a Lotus roadster which admittedly has startling performance, if overstated range capability, but sells for over $100K. The cars are mostly built in ENGLAND. Fisker has plans for a somewhat more practical 4 door sedan which will also be priced near six figures and it’s mostly vaporware at this point. If it does go into production, it will be built in FINLAND. One might suspect that the reason these projects were deemed worthy recipients of public monies, supposedly marked to develop green jobs in the US, has more to do with the long list of Democratic party contributors who are backers of the companies than with any prospect they have of creating a meaningful number if jobs in the US economy.