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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Sandia Demo of Nuclear Plant Strength Badly Rigged |
Current rating: 0 |
by Robert L. Park via Joe Futrelle
(No verified email address) |
01 Feb 2002
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A test conducted by Sandia Nuclear Lab which demonstrated that a plane could collide with a concrete wall supposedly of the type used to protect nuclear reactor cores and remain intact was misleading, according to American Physical Society member Rober L. Park in "What's New". |
4. TERRORISM: COULD NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS WITHSTAND 9-11 ATTACKS?
Maybe you saw it on 60-Minutes or the evening news: a film of a
plane crashing into a massive concrete wall. It disintegrates in
a fireball, but the wall is barely scratched. Hill staffers were
shown the film at an ASME briefing by R.E. Nickell, "an expert on
nuclear power." "Nuclear power structures," Nickell puffed, "are
very rugged and robust." The implications were obvious, and most
American's breathed a little easier. But it wasn't the wall of a
containment dome. Paul Leventhal, the President of the Nuclear
Control Institute, points out that the test, conducted by Sandia
Labs in 1988, used a wall 12 feet thick compared with 3.5 foot
thick containment domes. The purpose of the test was not to test
the strength of the wall, but to measure the impact forces. The
wall, therefore, was designed to move, and was displaced 6 feet
by the impact. Wait, there's more, the plane was a Phantom jet
fighter weighing about 5% as much as a jumbo jet airliner. Its
fuel tanks were filled with water to measure "fuel" dispersion.
Sandia made no attempt to clear up the misleading reports. |
