A 66-year-old Arkansas man has been arrested after he allegedly rammed his car through security gates at a South Carolina nuclear power plant and tried to hit security guards.
these facilities were already hard-core protected, long before 9/11. i grew up next to one, the security described that stopped this guy existed, and was in use 40+ years ago
post 9/11 actions didnt do shit to help anyone, anywhere… it was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Yes, thicker cabin doors on planes with trillions spent on security theater and invading places that didn’t cause 9/11, unlike the 15/19 hijackers from Saudi Arabia.
In the UK they took the bins away for a bit, but then it got annoying so they brought them back, and added an announcement to say basically that if you see a terrorist being a terrorist you should probably tell someone, thank you.
Yep security and structural integrity at a nuke plant was a thing decades before 9/11. I grew up about 30 miles away from Salem 1&2, and Hope Creek in Southern NJ. My dad was an electrician that worked there while they built them.
They were hardened as they were built in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. They all pretty much have 30 foot thick concrete walls in the containment building that houses the reactor(s). The Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t want something like Chernobyl to happen, which had no containment building, just a normal structure. Even if a US reactor goes supercritical and melts down, there is about a <1% chance that any radiation leaking out. If the reactor exploded the building would withstand the explosion and vent the pressure into the atmosphere, which may contain small amounts of radioactive alpha and beta particles. The only nuclear accident we’ve ever had was Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and that was because the safety valve in the containment building got stuck open after venting the pressure after one of the reactors went critical.
Even three mile island wasn’t as bad as most people seem to think. It was used as an Anti-nuclear propoganda piece, but it wasn’t that bad. The other reactors there continued operating for several decades after, though I think they’re now all shut down.
(This is true for Chernobyl too though, so I guess it really doesn’t say a whole lot about severity.)
Most of what the Three Mile Island accident did was use up half the power plant. Problem is it spooked a lot of folks, partially due to unfortunate timing. The movie The China Syndrome had recently come out, and a lot of people expected it to go as bad as that.
It really didn’t help when the Soviets blew the roof off a reactor seven years later.
If the US government hadn’t classified the event, the reactor that they intentionally melted down in the late 50s would have been proof that China Syndrome was based on bad math. That incident is why the Army Corps of Engineers lost their nuclear power program. Didn’t anyone else wonder why the Army Corps of Engineers built a bunch of nuclear reactors in the 50s and 60s for the TVA, and then they never worked on nuclear power again? The Navy still has their nuclear power program…
General public wouldn’t have freaked out if the government hadn’t been lying at worst, and misrepresenting data at best, about a lot of things regarding nuclear technology.
Three Mile Island isn’t the only incident, just the only accident, we have had. The only true meltdown was intentionally caused by the Army Corps of Engineers in the late 50s to test if China Syndrome was real. Thankfully someone did the math wrong so there was no danger of the core melting to the center of the earth and detonating. This is why the TVA was the last time that the Army Corps of Engineers was allowed to administer the things. Congress was understandably a bit upset to find out that they basically flipped a coin on destroying civilization at the very least.
It’s relevant. Hyperbole about nuclear energy isn’t helpful. Even counting every single low level nuclear accident throughout the history of the world it is still a better safety record than any other mass market means of power production.
It’s not hyperbole, it’s accurate and it doesn’t try to lie by omission.
Ed: Peach bottom wasn’t experimental and had a number of actual accidents and many near misses.
Among the incidents cited by the NRC: security guards were overworked, one guard was found asleep on the job, 36,000 gallons of “mildly radioactive water” leaked into the Susquehanna River, PECO mislaid data on radioactive waste classification causing misclassification of a waste shipment, and a major fire occurred in the maintenance cage of the Unit 3 turbine building on March 4, 1987
And that’s ignoring the dumpster fire called Hanford that we’ve been cleaning up for 30 fucking years at the cost of ≈200 billion dollars so far.
My grandpa worked for the nrc and was called into both peach bottom and three mile, the amount of near misses that people will almost certainly never know about is quite a bit larger than you would assume.
Honestly thankful that most of these installations were hardened after 9/11.
these facilities were already hard-core protected, long before 9/11. i grew up next to one, the security described that stopped this guy existed, and was in use 40+ years ago
post 9/11 actions didnt do shit to help anyone, anywhere… it was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
They did beef up the cabin doors to the flight crew, so they did one thing based on what actually happened on 9/11.
Yes, thicker cabin doors on planes with trillions spent on security theater and invading places that didn’t cause 9/11, unlike the 15/19 hijackers from Saudi Arabia.
In the UK they took the bins away for a bit, but then it got annoying so they brought them back, and added an announcement to say basically that if you see a terrorist being a terrorist you should probably tell someone, thank you.
That’ll stop them.
Yep security and structural integrity at a nuke plant was a thing decades before 9/11. I grew up about 30 miles away from Salem 1&2, and Hope Creek in Southern NJ. My dad was an electrician that worked there while they built them.
Accurate, there’s more security now but you would have to know what to look for to find it.
They were hardened as they were built in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. They all pretty much have 30 foot thick concrete walls in the containment building that houses the reactor(s). The Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t want something like Chernobyl to happen, which had no containment building, just a normal structure. Even if a US reactor goes supercritical and melts down, there is about a <1% chance that any radiation leaking out. If the reactor exploded the building would withstand the explosion and vent the pressure into the atmosphere, which may contain small amounts of radioactive alpha and beta particles. The only nuclear accident we’ve ever had was Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and that was because the safety valve in the containment building got stuck open after venting the pressure after one of the reactors went critical.
Even three mile island wasn’t as bad as most people seem to think. It was used as an Anti-nuclear propoganda piece, but it wasn’t that bad. The other reactors there continued operating for several decades after, though I think they’re now all shut down.
(This is true for Chernobyl too though, so I guess it really doesn’t say a whole lot about severity.)
Most of what the Three Mile Island accident did was use up half the power plant. Problem is it spooked a lot of folks, partially due to unfortunate timing. The movie The China Syndrome had recently come out, and a lot of people expected it to go as bad as that.
It really didn’t help when the Soviets blew the roof off a reactor seven years later.
If the US government hadn’t classified the event, the reactor that they intentionally melted down in the late 50s would have been proof that China Syndrome was based on bad math. That incident is why the Army Corps of Engineers lost their nuclear power program. Didn’t anyone else wonder why the Army Corps of Engineers built a bunch of nuclear reactors in the 50s and 60s for the TVA, and then they never worked on nuclear power again? The Navy still has their nuclear power program…
You think the general public is able to understand or care that the math checks out in a disaster movie?
General public wouldn’t have freaked out if the government hadn’t been lying at worst, and misrepresenting data at best, about a lot of things regarding nuclear technology.
Very true, the windscale fire is probably a better comparison between incompetence and release.
Yes three mile shut down production completely in 2019 after running at a loss for years.
Three Mile Island isn’t the only incident, just the only accident, we have had. The only true meltdown was intentionally caused by the Army Corps of Engineers in the late 50s to test if China Syndrome was real. Thankfully someone did the math wrong so there was no danger of the core melting to the center of the earth and detonating. This is why the TVA was the last time that the Army Corps of Engineers was allowed to administer the things. Congress was understandably a bit upset to find out that they basically flipped a coin on destroying civilization at the very least.
That’s just not true. We’ve had many many nuclear accidents just not many nation scale events.
I’ll put it this way sl1 went prompt critical and skewered an operator to the ceiling with a control rod. And that’s just one.
Maybe comparing to experimental reactors from 70 years ago is not exactly relevant.
It’s relevant. Hyperbole about nuclear energy isn’t helpful. Even counting every single low level nuclear accident throughout the history of the world it is still a better safety record than any other mass market means of power production.
It’s not hyperbole, it’s accurate and it doesn’t try to lie by omission.
Ed: Peach bottom wasn’t experimental and had a number of actual accidents and many near misses.
And that’s ignoring the dumpster fire called Hanford that we’ve been cleaning up for 30 fucking years at the cost of ≈200 billion dollars so far.
My grandpa worked for the nrc and was called into both peach bottom and three mile, the amount of near misses that people will almost certainly never know about is quite a bit larger than you would assume.
Random dudes who try to storm a nuclear power plant are morons, regardless of security.
This dude would have no idea what to do, and I really doubt he could cause any harm beyond maybe temporarily forcing a plant shutdown.