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:
This is an interesting post. There is some good data, some incomplete data, some misconceptions, and some outright fallacies.
I work at the Advanced Test Reactor in Idaho and have over 20 years in operations and engineering at nuclear plants.The guys in the three cubicles around me worked at Davis-Bessie (hole in the head incident), at the Loss of Flow Testing Facility (intentional melting of TMI type fuel to validate analysis done on the fuel), and on the fuel analysis of fuel recovered from TMI (the TMI fuel is stored a few hundred yards off of the road that I use to get to work). We test materials and fuels for use in reactors and make isotopes for other uses. Any time I have a question about other reactors, there is a wealth of firsthand knowledge available.
Yes, there was a facility just up the road (low power, portable reactor prototype for the US Army called SL-1) that had an inadvertent criticality during maintenance that killed all three operators. Yes, the site is cleaned up so that it presents no risk for spread of contamination. Based on this accident, requirements for all subsequent US reactor designs were changed so that a similar accident cannot happen.
These are not the only nuclear related fatalities in the US, much less the world. They may be the only reactor related fatalities in the US (not sure), but are definitely not the only deaths. Additionally, there have been fatalities at several research facilities, fuel processing facilities, power plants, and (several?) Russian subs that have had criticality or reactor accidents with deaths.
I don’t think the RBMK (Chernobyl) design is that bad, it just has to be operated by the book. Failure to do that is what resulted in the accident. It was compounded by the design, though. Changing the rod followers would probably fix the concern.
I agree with CodeTech as far as background radiation. We have strong temperature inversions in Idaho and the layer of trapped air under the inversion acts like a well insulated house. It fills with radon. So much so that we often have trouble getting in and out of the plant because of static cling. Charged particle+charged clothing=store for decay. And some people claim the g’ment doesn’t tell us how much exposure we really get!
As far as why to use nuclear. There are plenty of good reasons. In my mind it is because it is cheap, safe, and has essentially zero emissions. A subsidy of $1.59/MW of power is 0.15 cents per KW. Even if that were passed on to the consumer through the power bill instead of the IRS, cost to the consumer would go down, on average, if all power in the US came from nuclear. Nuclear is safe, our operating history shows that. Tony said that there were safety concerns found at the plant near his home after a transformer melted that resulted in (I assume) an automatic shutdown. Nothing like automatic protective actions to get the regulator breathing down your neck. The safety violations could run from very minor (for example failure to properly calibrate instruments resulting in no real degradation in the protective function) to major (the emergency cooling system is inoperable while the reactor is at power). To the news weenies any safety violation at a nuke is serious. Zero emissions is good. I don’t care about CO2. I do care about heavy metal, radioactive, and other waste products that get released up the stack or into the water.
Andy
But what if someone dropped an atomic bomb on a nuclear plant?????!!!!!!! The containment wouldn’t hold then and imagine the radioactive material that would leak out.
Nuclear power is just too dangerous.
More hysterical nonsense from Geckko. If someone drops a nuclear bomb, we’ve got much bigger problems than worrying about the consequences of a nuclear accident.
CodeTech raises an interesting point about background radiation, and reminds me of a case study we did during my geochemistry Masters – Investigating the potential for a ‘nuclear material’ repository at Sellafield
For those that don’t know, Sellafield (originally Calder Hall, then Windscale) is the UKs nuclear reprocessing plant as well as the site of the original 1950s experimental/military reactor, and was the site of a serious fire in the 1960s.
The plan for the repository was to build a large underground cavern and use it to store low and medium grade nuclear waste. It turned out that the waste likely to go into the ground actually had a lower radioactivity that the natural rock that was excavated…
so running a plant from 400 miles (KM ?) is far fetched.
NO. Entirely normal.
UK to Sweden is somewhat more than 400 miles. Yet i regularly ‘visit’ a plant there – I don’t ‘run’ the plant – I engineer it; ‘running’ it is the easy bit.
Oh by the way I was working ‘in’ Japan today – between sorting out a problem on a plant in Bugaria.
We’ve being doing remote engineering for years. Fortunately at the moment; the regulators are being sensible (maybe they’re listening to us Engineers for a change) and do NOT allow remote OPERATION of plants.
As to Nuclear – well no regulator in the West would ever have allowed Chenobyl – antiquated rubbish control system; wouldn’t even be allowed to run a milking parlour.
Why is it when the safeties work the stupid think its a disaster ?
peter_dtm (12:56:07) : As to Nuclear – well no regulator in the West would ever have allowed Chenobyl – antiquated rubbish control system; wouldn’t even be allowed to run a milking parlour.
Agreed that we would never allow the design in the west. However, there were 17 RBMK reactors built, as far as I can find, with 15 of them still operating. They have had good operating records for reliability and safety. Chernobyl unit 4 is the obvious exception. That accident was caused by operator error primarily from operating outside the approved limits for a special test and disabling safety interlocks. Just when you think you’ve made something idiot proof, they invent a bigger idiot.
Andy