The Age of iStupid: Using the iPhone to terrify people about nuclear power

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: