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Greenpeace Breaks Into French Nuclear Plant
dotancohen writes "Greenpeace activists secretly entered a French nuclear site before dawn and draped a banner reading 'Hey' and 'Easy' on its reactor containment building, to expose the vulnerability of atomic sites in the country. Greenpeace said the break-in aimed to show that an ongoing review of safety measures, ordered by French authorities after a tsunami ravaged Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant earlier this year, was focused too narrowly on possible natural disasters, and not human factors."
I have to wonder what sort of spin they would put on it if the alternate heasline outcome happend: Greenpeace Activist Shot While breaking into Nuclear Power Plant?
Let me know when they actually get inside the building. Then I might care a bit.
Sounds like they didn't protest against nuclear energy. They protested against lax security. This is one of the best white-hat real-world sneaks I've every heard of in my life. What a way to make their point!
Greenpeace has confirmed time and time again that their activists are insane. Who keeps giving these people money anyway?
I'm not sure that this act proves that they are insane - sounds like they proved that a very real security hole exists. (note that I don't agree with Greenpeace's message against Nuclear - I think Nuclear can be a safe, clean alternative to many other power generation methods)
They were stopped before they could penetrate several other nuclear plants, but they shouldn't have been able to penetrate any of them long enough to hang a banner.
I think the real question is - why did Greenpeace do this intrusion detection test rather than a nuclear regulatory body? if a group of crazy activists could penetrate the plants, then anyone could.
Less polluting than WHAT exactly? Actually it's the MOST polluting, as well as most expensive way of boiling water that we know of. You need to read up on radioactivity.
And how exactly is it the most polluting? CO2? Radioactivity? Coal has nuke fission plants trumped on both of those.
Oh wait, coal plants put out more radiation in one day than a nuke plant would be allowed to put out in one year. Also a nuke reactor kicks out ZERO in the terms of green house gasses.
I'd also like to point out that radiation is not the instant killer a fireball from an exploding gas* tank is!
*Gas or petrol, take your pick.
but the expanded life span due to having heat on demand and the ability to light you home at night with something other than smoky fires counters that as well.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I can't even imagine a more disingenuous stunt.
Greenpeace are extensively established as absolutely against almost all uses of nuclear power. They don't give a flying fuck about "increasing security" or pointing out possible threats; they want those plants shutdown entirely, and yesterday.
Putting on a white hat doesn't make you a White Hat; they're only dressing up their usual tactics in the guise of a benevolent hack. This is just a publicity stunt in their campaign to destroy nuclear power.
If we're going to start counting 'measurably shortened lifespan' (if you have links to sources that prove this is the case then please, by all means), then the numbers for coal and oil would also climb, probably by a lot more. Working around burning coal or mining it (black lung will put you down a few years early) and near oil refineries is not kind to the human body. Solar and Wind will (of course) be better in this regards, but this doesn't solve the underlying issue of scale.
It was in Europe - people don't have guns, and doesn't get shot during break-ins.
Article I read about the event mentioned that Greenpeace called the French authorities and said that their guys were doing this, so the French troops who were about to gun down the "white hats" came within a couple of minutes of reading about this in the obituaries.
Telling the French "oh, yeah, those are our guys, please don't shoot them" doesn't strike me as making nearly as much of a point as Greenpeace would like to think they made.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Sounds like the came very close to proving that no such hole existed - when you call ahead to tell the police not to shoot your guys, you're not proving much.
And from what I've read so far, the only reason they managed to deploy their banner is that the French snipers were ordered not to take the shots after Greenpeace called and said that they had sent those guys....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Greenpeace will never be satisfied until the all energy resources are eliminated.
That would shut them up. But Greenpeace does occasionally make valid points. If a bunch of leftist yahoo girls can breach reactor security, then somebody is doing something very, very wrong.
Yes, nuclear power can be done safely and maybe even economically. No, it doesn't look like anybody but the US Navy is actually doing it right.
That is the big problem with nuclear power. It COULD be done safely. It hasn't been and likely won't be because it's expensive.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I think the point was to generate press coverage. Greenpeace's greatest cause is self-promotion.
Not claiming that coal doesn't kill through pollution, too. Claiming that nuclear never kills, including by accidental emission and mishandling of waste, however, is naive and deceptive.
Probably would have been better had I used Chernobyl as opposed to Fukushima for my example; those statistics are in and readily available.
Check your premises.
If Fukushima ends up having a cancer impact outside the error bars on normal cancer, as a health physicist, I will be shocked. Even Chernobyl was murky healthwise (besides the few children killed by iodine, and we watch closely for that now that we know its a risk), and leading opponents of nuclear have already started warning people that not seeing an impact doesn't mean there wasn't one. Which is true, hence our use of highly conservative models for these incidents. But to imply widespread cancer increases due to Fukushima is to be disingenuous at best and a liar at worst. I mean for Gods sake, even among the survivors of the atomic bombs the cancer incidence rate was such a small blip it is widely considered to be statistically useless.
in a world where nuclear power plants don't have half-assed security. Call me crazy.
To be effective, regulators must have an adversarial relationship with those they regulate. When that's gone, you get Deepwater Horizon, or Fukishima. I agree Greenpeace shouldn't be doing this kind of thing, but unfortunately they're all we've got since federal regulators crawled into industry's bed. I don't know if the same is true in France, but I'd be surprised it it wasn't.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I disagree. It just means the security hole is that they didn't simply stick to the reply of "call your men off. We WILL shoot them.
Nobody is saying that. What people are saying is that since its advent, fewer people have died from nuclear power than coal, even if you count Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You are wrong about the certitude of the shortened life expectancy. Marie-Curie who worked without any protection with Radium, Polonium and Uranium, died at 66. She was 1 years older than the US female average life expectancy at that time.
Okay, the first problem is that you are trying to make an argument based on an anecdote. A single case does not a trend make, one way or the other. But even if we ignore that, you're still doing it wrong: to do it right, you'd have to compare Marie Curie's actual lifespan against the lifespan Marie Curie would have attained had she not suffered from radiation poisoning. Comparing her lifespan against the average woman's lifespan is meaningless because Mme Curie was not the average woman -- no woman is. You might as well argue that getting a piano dropped on your head is harmless as long as you are 65 or older when it happens.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
..where people think that exposing software security flaws in order to fix them is good, but complain about the "ugly hippies" who expose a security flaw in a nuclear power plant.
Versus what, the residents of West Virginia, China, or anywhere else where coal is the predominant source of electricity?
People are stupid. "Nuclear power is dangerous, look at Fukishima". The following month, a nuclear power plant (IIRC of the same vintage) in Omaha, Nebraska was flooded. No permanent harm came of the flooding. Why was that not "big news"?
The problem is that the Japanese put too much stock in their government, and their nuclear reactors were both out of date and ill maintained. This tragedy has been used politically well beyond the scope of the problem. The problem wasn't nuclear power, it was incompetence and negligence.
People talk about there being a "good, green alternative". I've got news for you: there are nuclear reactor designs which can take weapons grade whatever and turn it into relatively inert materials, all while being designed in a fashion which does not allow for a meltdown to occur using passive safety methods and different approaches in the reactors. China is doing this. France, to a limited degree, is doing this.
There's also talk about nuke power being expensive. Why is it expensive? The impoverished (relatively) Chinese seem to think it's an economically feasible situation, even though they've got more than enough coal and hydroelectric to power things completely if they wanted to. Is it more expensive than the loss of health, longevity, environment, and mental accuity that other power methods produce? Not really.
The real truth here is that Greenpeace is a group of crazed radicals. They burn industrial complexes in the name of saving the environment, kill animals off in the name of preserving them (particularly through subsidiaries like PETA), and protest the only clear, viable power source we have for the future (the US has hundreds of years of nuclear power in nuclear waste alone).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Give it time. Nuclear hasn't been around as long as coal, and with nuclear the plants themselves become more dangerous to operate as they age.
Christ on a crutch. This is why people are advocating for newer, cleaner, safer designs! Instead of continuing to rely stuff built in the 70's with technology firmly rooted in the 50's, why not build new plants based off cleaner, safer designs that have emerged in the last decade or two?
The problem is all the NIMBYs and BANANAs and people who've been hyper-conditioned to think "Nuclear = bomb in my yard".
And such stockpiles of waste wouldn't accumulate as fast or in as vast a quantity if we use newer designs and actually recycled the damn fuel! Yet another thing the "Nuclear = China Meltdown System On My Children" hyperbole-spewers have prevented us from undertaking.
Yes, the final end-product is quite dangerous. But it's quite compact and can be stored away from the populace quite easily. Or would if, yet again, the "Nuclear = THE DEVIL!" crowd would stop blowing holes in comprehensive planning and then bitching because the plan is now no longer comprehensive.
Personally, I'd rather have a man-made cavern in a geologically safe area be dangerous as hell for the next 10,000 years than have to breathe that crap in every day of my lives from coal-fired plants. Or risk dying in a cave-in. Or having the state I live in become a vassal-entity to another state simply because all the "renewable" power schemes don't work here due to climate conditions.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Nuclear apologists seem to be fixated on this comparison with coal, but as the GP said it is highly misleading and a straw man. Greenpeace, or the mainstream green movement for that matter, are not arguing for more coal. They are arguing for clean and reliable energy.
Look at Japan, a nation heavily dependent on nuclear power because it has few natural resources. 80% of their reactors are still offline but the country has not reverted to the stone age. I was there in the immediate aftermath and people had to cut down energy usage, but the country coped. Now they have lifted most of the restrictions, so it just goes to show that even when forced to drop most nuclear power with no warning or preparation it won't completely cripple a country.
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