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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."
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!
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC