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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."
If they'd gotten shot they probably wouldn't be talking at all.
Greenpeace has confirmed time and time again that their activists are insane. Who keeps giving these people money anyway?
People who would rather someone else get their hands dirty or risk their lives, while they go on enjoying a cup of tea and good book of poetry.
Interesting game, isn't it? Not entirely unlike the other side of the coin - Corporations and lawyers.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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"
Gotta give Greenpeace credit for having balls.
Ever been to a Greenpeace function? Most of them don't. **
* * Well, at least on external inspection. My GF at the time would have frowned at more detailed research
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'd like to see how that "measurability" was established, considering that scientists can't even figure out if minor increase in radioactivity is net negative or net positive, as there are different factors at play, which represent both directions.
Oh, you're probably referring to stuff like being exposed to elements for prolonged time, having to eat dirty food, and so on. Bad news: that was earthquake and tsunami. They also killed over thirty thousand people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.
There was this really funny research on survivors of people who were putting out Chernobyl fires. Of those who survived the ordeal and a couple of months after it (when most people who got lethal dose died), there was a greater portion of them alive now then there was of general population. This was (at least partially) attributed to significant increase in health checks of the rescue crews, which allowed medics to find many problems and fix them rather then have them evolve into something incurably lethal (as is the case with many cancers).
So should we now state that Fukushima accident will likely increase life expectancy of the workers who were fixing it like it was in Chernobyl. We'll know in a couple of decades.
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.
On the contrary, I've never seen so many guns as during any of my trips to Europe. Particularly in airports, trainstations and around tourist spots. I think they're more paranoid than we are about the whole terrorism thing.
And I can promise you, the farm I lived on briefly in France had a few firearms on premises. If I remember correctly, the Swiss have among the highest percentage of armed citizens you'll find.
Don't let your TV spoon-feed you generalizations about very large and diverse places. They're often wrong.
yeah accidents to measurably shorten life spans, but in day-to-day runnings there is significantly more radiation around coal-fired plants than by nuclear plants.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
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.
I was expecting, "French army surrenders to Greenpeace..."
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
It's worth noting that not only was there a major change, but there also is an issue of significantly increased checks for cancers commonly associated with irradiation (but which may or may not be caused by radiation), which in turn results in more findings of said cancers and ironically, more people that survive those cancers as they are found early enough to be able to treat them.
Real killer in the territory around Chernobyl, and across all former USSR members is alcohol, and it's also by far the biggest factor in the shortening of life-spans (observable also by remarkable difference between average age of men vs women).
What I find astonishing about Fukushima is learning that we've decided to keep nuclear waste in a manner that is not failsafe. That we need to actively cool.
That is possibly the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. It's not like it's an infinite amount of heat.
Spread it out, pour some iron on it, and put in some giant heat sinks or something.
Christ, it's like everyone is an idiot or something. 'Hey, this generates a set amount of heat per second, forever, and if it ever gets above a certain temperature it will melt through things.'. 'Herp derp, let's pump water past it. There's no way that could go wrong.' 'Maybe we could rig it where it just distributes the heat to the air or the ground or something, which would only fail if the sun started consuming the earth and heated the atmosphere up massively?' 'Nope, takes too much space. Water pump, that's the plan!'
I understand reactors having problems when shut down, but the waste? Seriously?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I think the point was to generate press coverage. Greenpeace's greatest cause is self-promotion.
Close. Greenpeace's main tactic is publicity: Doing showy stunts that bring popular attention to issues they deem to be important.
So yeah, they want press coverage. That's their schtick.
I worked for Greenpeace in the 1980s, and let me tell you, there is a LOT to complain about with this organisation. But this action is not one of them. It's a classic hacker tactic, showing with a single action what a thousand words of dry exposition could never convey: Civilian nuclear technology in France is not adequately secured.
Everybody seems to focus on the 'Green' part of their name and ignore the 'Peace'. Greenpeace was actually founded by a bunch of folks on the West Coast of Canada who wanted to block underground nuclear tests in a tectonically unstable section of Alaska. Rather than march and Occupy and write letters and etc., they just got into a boat and sailed toward the test site. The front pages were covered with headlines to the effect of 'Who Are These Wackos', but in the process they got people to think about the dangers of nuclear testing in a geologically unsuitable location.
I have no truck whatsoever with the insanely stupid 'Save the Seals' crap that Paul Watson and co. brought into the organisation. Personally, I think their take on environmentalism is crushingly stupid, for the most part. But their campaigns for nuclear security are often smart, focused and, while they're fraught with histrionics, they generally make a valid point.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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
Disclaimer- I work for Toshiba Power Systems (Steam turbines)
While it is true that Japan has a functioning grid now without most of their nuclear units, you can not look only at that fact. To get back to minimum capacity, they had to restart many of their old coal plants which had been partially or recently decommissioned. These plants were shut down because they were really filthy, and more expensive than nuclear- Japan imports 100% of their coal.
They restarted some of their old hydro facilities also. Mostly those were shut down because of environmental reasons also. They are lucky that they were only recently shut down and the dams were not demolished yet.
They borrowed a bunch of portable power units (generators in a container) from Taiwan, and purchased many also. These are diesel generators or gas turbines mounted in a container, producing maybe 3 to 7MW apiece. I am not sure about the details of Japan's pollution laws, but in the US, these container generators are only allowed to run in extreme emergencies, or for less than a few dozen hours a year since they have very little pollution controls.
The conservation effort is also still in progress, but maybe you didn't notice it. Our factory still has power saving measures in place, mostly relating to lighting and heating/cooling. I was there recently and working at a desk in my winter jacket might not have been "the stone age", but it was not very comfortable.
I did a quick calculation on how much energy would be saved by the earthquake victims and their companies not using electricity, but this is not that significant (around 25MW). Apologies if this is insensitive.
The country is still on the edge of a stable grid also. There is a big concern that later in the winter when it is much colder, there might be a big problem. Most Japanese apartments and houses use electric-based heating. In the summer, cutting off the AC might be a viable, if uncomfortable option, but you can't let people freeze.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.