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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For the sake of us all I really hope we can limit the “Age of Stupid” to the “Decade of Stupid”. That will leave the people with a full year and two months to wise up.
The German Elections show some evidence we’re heading or the right direction.
Speaking of the age of stupid, I assume most people have seen this video of the blatant hypocrisy of the makers of that film, but if not, makes for interesting viewing — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-cvK9vxA6M
Chernobyl was an on-the-cheap no-containment graphite reactor, unlike anything in the west, and its total, calamitous failure has so far produced what, 50 fatals?
Three Mile Island is a modern, well designed system, and even though the operators did everything wrong, all we lost there was a couple hundred million bucks worth of equipment. No fatalities, no casualties, no injuries, just a lot of ill-informed press hype.
The nuke industry has spent a lot of time what-if-ing, and it’s hard to imagine someone with the I Q of protester coming up with a scenario that the engineers haven’t run through the simulator and beaten into submission.
On the terrorist side, every airline pilot knew you could hijack a plane and crash it into a tall building, but where would you find someone stupid enough to do that? Okay, so now we know, but Saudi Arabia didn’t exactly spring to mind back then.
Airliners are a thin aluminum shell filled mostly with air and some liquids. Think of an empty soda can. Whacking into the thickness of steel reinforced concrete of the containment structure is gonna make a big splat and kill everyone on board. Also squash any greenpeace types who we up on the side of the building painting eco-slogans.
Hose down the fuel spill, scrape the plane off the wall, separate the aluminum out from the organics for recycling, repave the parking lot down below, and you’re back in business. Shouldn’t take more than a couple weeks.
Clean, green nuclear power, the energy of ancient supernovae delivered to your door. Natural, pristine, sustainable, renewable, but unfortunately it isn’t organic, like coal.
This is gonna make the Greens day –
Looks like a pro-nuclear coalition just won the German Elections!
“Merkel had argued that a change of coalition was needed to ensure stronger economic growth amid the global economic decline. In joining with the Free Democrats, she hopes to cut taxes and halt a plan to shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants by 2021.”
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9AVPSVO2&show_article=1&catnum=-1
I love how everyone always point to TMI and Chernobyl as signs to end all nuclear power plant production. Were they disasters? of course, but every seems to forget that both accidents were caused by operator error. Wierd things happen when you shut cooling water off to your reactors…
Ron de Haan (14:31:31) :
No, Ron, he’s coming real close to using the “F” word… and I’m not refering to the pleasureable activity most of us engage in…
Good news–“Friends of the Earth” admits there is a terrorist threat!
Bad news–the only thing to do about it is to give terrorists Constitutional rights, and embargo ourselves out of energy use.
Norman Rubin says:
More people died in the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car than died in TMI.
Hanno Sandvik, Lisa Jackson are on the Obama agenda to drive the cost of non endorsed energy into the stratosphere. No nukes no coal! No heat, no power, very ‘green’, not very human. I wonder how they propose to process sewage without power.
TonyS:
If it had an emergency shutdown, then it shows that the safety systems are working.
Gas plant I work on has an emergency shutdown a couple of times a year, and not one of these is even CLOSE to a loss of containment / major accident.
I had a roommate in college who worked for Carolina Power and Light, a major operator of nuclear facilities in North Carolina. I remember him showing me construction blueprints of the containment vessel for a plant being built at the time (1974) which was over ten feet thick of reinforced concrete. The rebar lattice was almost solid itself, then the concrete was poured around that.
About the only thing a passenger jet would do to the containment vessel of an American-made nuclear plant is scratch the paint. That’s all. Only a purposefully designed penetrator weapon is going to get through all that steel and concrete. Oh, and did I mention that the reactor itself is usually below ground level inside another reinforced concrete and steel vessel? So, blowing a hole in the side of the containment vessel will not be enough by itself to liberate any radioactive materials from the reactor or the radioactive side of the cooling/heat exchange system.
iPhone Applications for and by iDiots
In fairness, one should note that the German nuclear program has been plagued by a series of confidence eroding management failures, exemplified by a recent reactor glitch that senior management only learned of when the local politicians called up to get the corporate reaction. Likewise, the showcase nuclear waste storage site in an old salt mine at Asse has been found to be poorly characterized and subject to water intrusion, so the entombed nuclear wastes are getting dissolved in a corrosive salt solution and migrating into the outside environment. Given this performance, it is unsurprising that public trust in the nuclear industry is minimal in Germany. That makes absurd scare stories an easy sale.
How on earth did you find the video of my wife’s first solo flight?
Silly me, and I was expecting a bit about that recent ‘piece’ discussing “phone radiation” (sic) by
Jane Houlihan, Vice President for Research Environmental Working.
Other recent ‘scare’ warnings issued by this same group appear to be on the subjects of Polluted Pets, Cosmetics Safety and Bottled Water …
.
.
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I saw on TV that two Jags Prescott is using clips from Age of stupid to scare schoolkids in the UK!
DaveE.
As a side note; the USHCN weather station is located directly behind that wall.
@INGSOC (17:52:39) :
“How on earth did you find the video of my wife’s first solo flight?”
My condolences…
We didn’t listen!!!
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/103844
OT — but the usual suspects are trying to get Anthony Watts deleted from Wikipedia. See debate here: here.
REPLY: I hope they do remove me. The page is wholly inaccurate and full of junk put there by Atmoz (Nate Johnson) and William Connolley. With the kind of food fights that develop there over privately held views translated onto articles, who’d want to be on it? – Anthony
” Tom in Texas (15:22:16) :
While that F-4 Phantom video is impressive, a 767 carries x7 the amount of fuel (and x12.7 without its external tanks).”
What counts is the mass and speed (=momentum) of the biggest solid part, so a fast flying fighter with one relatively big engine is the greatest danger.
The real problem with nuclear power is cost.
More recent calamities that had large price tags were Davis Besse in the US (shut down just before the vessel got a hole), and Kashiwazaki-Kariwa was shut down as well for a couple of years after an earthquake.
I believe nuclear power is essentially subsidized by governments worldwide, both through insurance and fuel disposal in the US.
If you really don’t believe in global warming, there is absolutely no reason for the US to build any more nuclear power plants, at least in the 48 states.
_Jim (17:57:10) :
Silly me, and I was expecting a bit about that recent ‘piece’ discussing “phone radiation”
Warning about nuclear disaster or….brain cancer from your phone?
I wonder if when they get up in the morning, they decide what will
kill them today?
“They’ve even done crash tests with a fighter jet into the wall segments of a nuclear plant. ”
Now that’s alpha, beta and gamma testing!
Those videos should be publicized more widely
to counter the Greenpeace idiocy.
kim (15:07:23) :
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.
==========================================
He is doing a great Job.
Today he was mentioned in this excellent article from American Thinker,
you will like it:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/global_warming_science.html