ZDF Meltdown

I watched the movie "Meltdown" ("Angst über Amerika") on Germany's public tv channel ZDF on Monday night. The movie was originally produced for the U.S. channel FX Cable, in cooperation with Fox TV (!).

The plot addresses the anxieties and convictions of left-wing audiences: Terrorist group takes over a California based nuclear plant as easy as 1-2-3 and threaten to cause a nuclear meltdown (after all - we all know how dangerous those nuclear plants are!). The U.S government reacts cluelessly and tries to conceal the truth from the public. Also, evil U.S. forces acting on order from the evil U.S. government murder poor terrorist leader who already had given up. And so on. I watched the movie from beginning to the end, but not all of it, falling asleep at irregular intermittent intervals.

ZDF - afraid the naive German public wouldn't get the message - had this to say about the movie: "...production of frightening actuality ... frightening authenticity ... a movie about the feelings of a nation after September 11, 2001 - their anxieties and insecurities, the arrogance and the old lies."

ZDF here perpetuates the old lie of the lying U.S. government. While they can't offer proof for their assertion, a mediocre movie comes handy to remind German audiences of the wickedness of U.S. governments. (I know - the movie was first shown on U.S. television, but without a claim by FX of the "old lies" of the government.)

Regarding the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown deliberately caused by the terrorists, I found this enlightening comment by a student of Nuclear Engineering (scroll page down to "More accurate than some, but still inaccurate"):

Riding the false fear that a Chernobyl style meltdown could happen in an American plant, the movie states that any meltdown (even partial, according to one of the guest commentators in the movie) would mean disaster for the area. In fact, a partial meltdown in an American plant, while destroying the core, would not pose any risk to the surrounding area. Three Mile Island experienced a partial meltdown and no radioactive material was released into the environment at all, thanks to the natural stability of the fuel and core design used in this country paired with substantial containment.

The security steps shown in the movie were perhaps the part of the movie furthest from the truth. At any important strategic location -- be it power plant, chemical plant, military base, anything -- you will never see personnel responding to an alarm by milling around talking as if it were an unannounced drill. This is especially true at a nuclear plant, where, upon the sounding of the alarm, the reactors would be SCRAMed immediately, shutting them off. SCRAMing can be done with the push of a button in the control room (you do not need to put the core in "shutdown mode" like depicted in the movie), and the chemistry of nuclear fission prevents a core from being brought back up to power within about 9 hours of a SCRAM. (...)

Thank you, ZDF, for presenting ideological anti-nuclear crap without any reservation. A further meltdown of the journalistic core of public tv in Germany...

Comments

[mike stein]

just was a tv-B-movie "24 hours"-style under-average ZDF-crap....

I thought instilling fear of terrorist attacks is the administration's business, with all that Orange-Level-crap. Besides that, if Fox is involved, you better medienkritiser them. Sacrilege, i know...

[Helian]

"Oh, and, by the way, lest anyone wonder, the misspelling of "stoopid" is intentional and an indication of extreme sarcasm."

OK, Homer, whatever.

The most interesting thing about nuclear power and Germany is the brain dead attitude of the "Greens." (The quote marks around "Greens" is intentional and an indication of extreme sarcasm.) They want to "preserve the environment" by shutting down Germany's nuclear plants. Doing so will mean that fossil fired plants that could otherwise have been shut down instead will continue to pump out greenhouse gases, particulates that kill tens of thousands of people every year, and lots of other assorted poisons. Shouldn't surprise anyone. For the "Greens" the pose is everything, and the reality nothing.

[mamapajamas]

Helian... yup. However, the position of the greens... and environmentalists everywhere... is spelled out in a book called Small is Beautiful. Their position is to return to nature, have everyone grow their own food on a plot of land, completely abandon power in favor of passive solar and other presently unviable energy systems, etc. What they're completely missing is that the land would not be able to tolerate a setup like that, especially in densly-populated areas like Europe, which would mean killing off a few billion people in order to make their scheme work. Of course, they don't mention the "killing off" part, but can you imagine the world covered with 2-acre garden plots (per human mouth to feed)... and nothing else? Smart! (/sarcasm)

Nice "dream", huh?