The Egyptian website featured in the clip linked below is a simulator for nuclear power plants. It lets you simulate disasters, to learn how to manage then.
The hair-trigger situation at the Fort Calhoun plant is what’s currently being modeled, displaying the worst-case scenario, featuring an Eastward-spreading radioactive plume.
There have been rumors that all pre-1980 nuclear power plants are at risk from infection by the Stuxnet computer virus. This threat was allegedly what motivated Germany’s Chancellor, Andrea Merkel to order a shutdown of all pre-1980 power plants and the complete abolition of nuclear energy in Germany by 2022.
Japan, Italy and Switzerland are also officially phasing out nuclear power, while Russia, India, China, the UK and the US plan to move ahead with their programs. The US still has no coherent policy for managing nuclear waste and spent fuel rods, which are more radioactive than unused fuel and are generally stored on-site or aggregated at selected sites, such as the flooded Fort Calhoun facility, which stores not only several years’ worth of it’s own spent fuel rods but years’ worth of spent fuel from other Nebraska nuclear power plants.
France, which relies almost solely on nuclear power for its electricity has also recently been facing its own nuclear safety a crisis, due to wide-scale droughts in that country, putting their water-cooled fuel pools in peril of overheating.
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