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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."
Said, with tongue firmly in cheek.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And if they'd gotten shot doing this, would they be saying how mean the French are?
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Nuclear power is one of the less polluting ways to get energy out there. Yet they protest against it. Guess they would be more happy with coal plants. (I have no real life idea about the situation, but this is what I learned from SimCity)
Greenpeace has confirmed time and time again that their activists are insane. Who keeps giving these people money anyway?
Nukes are not going away. Too many reasons to continue it. HOWEVER, between Japan and now this, I think that France requires some massive upgrades. However, job #1 MUST BE SECRUITY.
And these ppl should NOT be ripped for this. THey should be scolded publicly and then privately thanked.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And when one of these fuckers gets smoked by GIGN or whatever the French use for this sort of thing, I don't want to hear the damned whining of bleeding hearts on the interweb.
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.
Le Simpson d'Homer
I only hope these people live long enough to see the consequences of the abandonment of nuclear power. Seriously, why don't they pull this shit in coal stations?
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
... how a single comment has yet to say the obvious.
No matter if you are pro or anti nuclear GP has just proven that obviously security measures need to be beefed up. There is absolutely no reason that a hostile, unOKed, group of people should be able to break into a nuclear power plant and have enough time to hang up a big sign in the middle of the factory and then escape.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
That involved being on the other side of this airtight hatch.
How long would it take to actually penetrate the containment building?
From Wikipedia:
The containment building itself is typically an airtight steel structure enclosing the reactor normally sealed off from the outside atmosphere. The steel is either free-standing or attached to the concrete missile shield. In the United States, the design and thickness of the containment and the missile shield are governed by federal regulations (10 CFR 50.55a), and must be strong enough to withstand the impact of a fully loaded passenger airliner without rupture.
Have they tried breaking into coal or hydro plants? Because they can cause huge damage by breaking into those ones as well.
Oh well, hope they shut down all the nuclear plants around the world and go back to oil, coal, gas and hydro, see how well that works out for the environment.
BTW., do you realize that the natural outcome of this 'greenpeace' movement agenda would be further destruction of economy and society? Aren't they acting like people we love to call 'terrorists' here?
You can't handle the truth.
..."Homer Simpson"? Because it sounds like their plants are run about as well as the one on The Simpsons.
Not Homer, for this one, but Monty Burns - his lack of vision and expenditure on proper staffing levels, properly trained staff and adequate security are secondary to his accumulation of wealth
"What?!? Smithers did a gaggle of unwashed hippies just enter our plant and hang a banner without my approval? Not ehhxcellent.
But I'm not sure that really fits the French in this case. More like blind optimism they have everything under control and nothing could ever go wrong.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So show me the clean energy research and development that Green Peace does.
If they care about the planet so much maybe they should invest some money, hire some scientists, develop new technologies and fix something for a change instead of protesting pointlessly.
So maybe for once they could take all this money from donations and build say a windfarm and sell clean electric energy to people?
But wait, I bet they are protesting those as well.
The only thing these activists managed to get through was the fence, they then hung their banners on the outside of the containment building. No risk to security.
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.
So show me the clean energy research and development that Green Peace does.
Clean energy would be unnecessary, because as far as I've been able to figure, Greenpeace wants the human race to simply all die. No energy required after that.
In Soviet Russia the nuclear reactor Hey Easy's you.
Umm, no. Greenpeace called the French authorities and told them that they'd sent men sneaking into nuclear power plants, and the French authorities then stood down their snipers and allowed the Greenpeace guys to finish climbing the building and deploy their banner before arresting them.
So, the phone call saved the lives of the Greenpeace protesters, which hardly shows that security of the plants was lax....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
..."Homer Simpson"? Because it sounds like their plants are run about as well as the one on The Simpsons.
Not Homer, for this one, but Monty Burns - his lack of vision and expenditure on proper staffing levels, properly trained staff and adequate security are secondary to his accumulation of wealth
"What?!? Smithers did a gaggle of unwashed hippies just enter our plant and hang a banner without my approval? Not ehhxcellent.
But I'm not sure that really fits the French in this case. More like blind optimism they have everything under control and nothing could ever go wrong.
What are you going to do, release the hounds? Or release the bees? Or release the hound with bees in their mouths, so that when they bark they shoot bees at you?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Sniping people should NOT be the first response. This is France, not some hellhole governed by a warlord.
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Not able =! Don't want to go the way of frontiersman "step on my lawn and I'll kill you" America.
You can go two ways about security. First is to just wall everything important up, and leave the rest to fend for themselves (in turn creating more of those who will storm your walls, requiring more walls..). That is the path that USA and many third world countries choose, because it's the fairly cheap way of doing it, especially when you only care about a few percent of wealthy who can afford the walls and guards.
Other way is to control what happens before people who actually do mean harm ever get to the plant. That is the way used in Europe in general. Society lives in a more happy and to extent more controlled way of life, and as a result people who want to be terrorists stand out badly and get nailed before the act. That's why Breivik et al are rare exceptions to the rule, and why we have a whole lot less crime while having a whole lot less prisoners at the same time. Just recently after Breivik we had a big wave of even more scrutiny over "what comes in" in Europe, with arrests of people ordering "strangely big portions of fertiliser". And as investigation has showed, Breivik had a ridiculous amount of luck on his side, coming close to being found out several times during his preparations, because he really stood out with his bomb making antics even in very sparsely populated rural Norway and being very smart and cautious.
Now imagine someone trying to do the same in much more populated rural France. Security forces will have your ass before you get your bomb half done because you'll stand out. That is if european ETA-like terrorists will have not get you first for indiscriminate targeting that would harm their currently widespread agenda of "kill only certain politicians, cause maximum property damage and avoid damage to civilians at all costs".
Finally, there's a really funny question of "what exactly will you bomb at a nuclear plant"? Reactor? It's solid steel - there are no welding seams. You'll need a shitload of explosives, and some way of actually strapping them onto the reactor vessel to do the damage to it, not to mention that blowing it up... will terminate criticality so all you get is localized spread of fissile material from reactor as far as your bomb can carry it which will usually mean inside the reactor building meaning just to get fissile materials out, you'll have to raze that too. Better bring many truckloads of high explosives. Cooling systems? Reactor will just be scrambled with boric acid and all the damage you do will be limited to having to get a new reactor vessel. This is one of the parts that many anti-nuclear "but TERRORISTS" people like to ignore - nuclear power plant is just not an attractive target for indiscriminate bombing - especially since there are far, FAR easier targets to bomb if you want to cause massive mayhem, such as large population centers.
I was expecting, "French army surrenders to Greenpeace..."
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
So maybe for once they could take all this money from donations and build say a windfarm and sell clean electric energy to people?
Guess what Greenpeace Germany is doing!
I don't give up hope that there are people out there who know about the origin of sabotage from reading (p.e. Gibson/Sterling's The Difference Engine) instead of Star Trek marathons.
I had no recollection of Sabotage and the origin of the word being in a Star Trek episode. I knew this from studying French and the little bit of French history where striking workers threw their shoes into machinery to bring the machinery to a halt.
In the US we learn (or at least used to) the word in elementary school during social studies (history) when we get to the part about the industrial revolution. That incident was one of several that occurred across the industrializing nations, this one happened to be more visually evocative and happened to be in France. Its a notable event in world history, its not really specific to French history.
The story was posted on Al Jazera, this is obviously a ploy to get sleeper terrorist cells to attempt to breach the plants.
..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.
That's an interesting response. Pretty much the exact opposite of my own. Frankly I am impressed that Greenpeace actually managed to do something vaguely positive. First time for everything I guess.
And no, I am not anti-nuclear, quite the opposite. But obviously security at this installation needs some attention, and it sounds like they brought attention to that fact without doing any damage. Compared to their usual activities, this was a real good deed.
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This is the third time now someone has posted that Greenpeace called ahead and that was why they were not killed, but it does not mention this in the article and no one has posted a link to where you get your info, you mind posting a link to where you are getting your part of this story? Or you just repeating what someone else posted 50 posts ago and figure they would not make shit up?
I can agree with Greenpeace that nuclear is kinda itchy stuff - lots of shit can go wrong. However, there's lot of research in nuke field and LFTR (aka Liquid fluoride thorium reactor) are kinda hopeful stuff. No one knows if it turns out to "good guy" and saveour of our energy needs, but I would be very happy to Greenpeace express some sense and support less harmful and potentially dangerous nuclear energy ways. However, they deny all nuclear outright even without slipping into discussion. And that's hurts, because there's lot of stuff I and Greenpeace can fully agree with.
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"I was there in the immediate aftermath and people had to cut down energy usage, but the country coped."
Yes. For awhile. Do you think that Japan can really survive, and feed it's current population, if they have to dramatically reduce power consumption basically forever?
Well, you say, Wind and Solar. Ok, so Japan is a relatively small and densely populated island nation. Their ability to build wind and solar on-shore is very limited. So, that means offshore. Building things off-shore is very, very expensive, which means the power produced by off-shore wind (or solar; although I don't think I've ever heard of an off-shore solar project, but I suppose it would be perfectly possible with enough money) would be very expensive power.
Japan, in order to feed and provide for itself, from what I've heard, depends pretty heavily on industrial exports to make money which they can then trade for food and resources/materials. If your power is more expensive than most other nations, how will you be able to produce goods for export at a price that most other nations are willing to pay?
For example, according to Wikipedia's page on Cost of Electricity By Source, on-shore wind is the only form of renewable energy which is projected to be cost competitive with coal, gas, or nuclear.
A useful sampling of info from that page:
advanced nuclear: $113.9/mWh
On-shore wind: $97/mWh
Off-shore wind: $243.2/mWh
At twice as much cost as "too expensive" (at least, that's what a lot of anti-nuke pro-renewables advocates try to say) nuclear, off-shore wind really seems like a non-starter for Japan.
There's one other factor which I'm pretty sure is not even reflected in the above figures. . . In order to get more than 20% of your power from renewables, you MUST, MUST implement large-scale energy storage solutions. There's some companies working on ideas on how to do this (compressed gas, flywheels, and molten salts are three interesting looking approaches). I have no idea what it'll cost to implement massive amounts of energy storage, but I'm sure it can't be cheap.
It'll be interesting to see. I'd love to be wrong - I'd love for Japan, and the rest of the world to be able to generate sufficient supplies of power, at competitive/affordable prices, from renewable power. I just don't see how you make that happen.
One possibility which, I dunno why, but for some reason, often isn't discussed is "Enhanced Geothermal Power". Perhaps Japan can implement EGP on a large scale - although, since they are already one of the most tectonically active places on earth, they probably don't want to risk triggering *more* earthquakes by trying to do EGP, or at least it might be politically unpopular because of fear, even if it isn't a real threat.