Atomic Twister - Sturm des Untergangs

A TBS Production for TV that kind of falls short. A series of powerful tornadoes threaten to destroy a nuclear power plant in Tennessee. Some of the F/X are interesting, more interesting than the story itself. Sharon Lawrence is the unrealistic hero; but she looks oh so good running around in a white tank top trying to save the plant. Also impressive is the eager Mark-Paul Gosselaar as the whipping boy of the police unit. Also in the cast are Corbin Bernsen and Fraser McGregor. My favorite scene is where McGregor, who plays Lawrence's son, tricks his buxom baby sitter into playing a game of Twister so he can look down her blouse. Scenes at the power plant are made to look so technical they lose realism. Hardly enough to get your blood to pumping.

It would take a committee of romance writers to pack as many cliches into this small community beset upon by two disaster movies concurrently.

The story is set mostly outside police cars being battered by loose pages of scripts from stories that had one. The beautiful people in perfect makeup must have been airbrushed by the first tornado, because the busting bosoms are pointless. The absence of nipples in all that augmented cleavage, and the anti-technology political stance, add good family values that will be a boon to tv historians of generations to come.

Not bad enough to watch, but you can always hunt for continuity errors.

Well, the total loss of technical accuracy does make this movie impossible to take seriously. Those of us in the industry, though, regard this as an outstanding comedy! We laugh, we cry, we sob, we roll on the floor!

Please, release this on video!! There are days I could use the laugh!

Atomic Twister is a film about tornadoes threatening a nuclear power plant written by someone who has apparently no knowledge of tornadoes or nuclear power plants. I'm not going into the plot here, because it's pretty simple, rather, let's take a look at what the writer messed up. First of all, I was not aware that, in Tennessee, they had "stealth" tornados. At one point, a character makes a call on his cell phone, then turns around to see a tornado about 50 yards away, bearing down on him. In reality, of course, tornados are so loud that one can be heard at least a mile away, if not more. Also, the impending tornadoes are always signaled by high winds whipping around the characters. The writer must have gotten tornadoes mixed up with hurricanes. The fact of the matter is that the air can be quite calm before a tornado strikes.

As for the nuclear power plant, the writer again drops the ball. The characters keep talking as though a meltdown will cause the plant to explode like an atom bomb. That is a total impossibility. The plant may suffer a meltdown and release large amounts of radiation, but it CANNOT explode!!!

All I can say is, watch Atomic Twister is you want a good laugh. Otherwise, stay clear.

This movie is a real stinker. I studied nuclear engineering in college and if they would have had me on the set I would have slapped the writer of this screenplay. Some of the major problems as I remember them:

The plant seems to have been built in the last few years, with a new computerized control room and satellite phones and all this silliness - no new nuclear plant has been built in the U.S. in 25 years (sadly).

A tornado would do absolutely no damage to a nuclear power plant, or at least no damage to any of the critical components. The critical components of a nuclear power plant (the core itself, coolant pumps, the primary coolant loop (in a PWR), backup generators) are located inside a containment dome that is METERS thick - even an F5 wouldn't touch them - in fact, the people inside would have no idea they had been hit.

The control room and the important components of the plant are run on the power the plant produces and in the event of a shutdown by backup diesel generators. The backups have backups which have backups. The possibility of a strong enough tornado hitting the backup gens and knocking them out is nil.

The plant did not shut down as it would have done automatically. Whenever a nuclear power plant is damaged in any way the computer shuts it down with absolutely no operator input required in a matter of seconds. In the movie the lines that took power from the plant to homes were knocked down - this would have resulted in a load rejection to the generators which would have "tripped" (automatically shutdown) the turbines and the reactor. There is never any need to communicate with the NRC while running a reactor and the NRC has no remote control room. They don't control reactors at all - the companies that own them control them. The NRC licenses and inspects for safety.

At the end of the movie the spent fuel pool is being uncovered and the firefighters have to pump water into it to save the town. Bull. Spent fuel just isn't hot enough to continually boil away water. And the pumps that cool the reactor also cool the pool (in most cases). In any case, the spent fuel pool and it's entire cooling apparatus are INSIDE the enormous containment dome and could never have been damaged by a twister - much less have had a gaggle of firefighters standing over it with a door to the outside just a few yards away.

IF the pool would have gotten as close as it did to being uncovered (I believe a few inches) the firefighters would have received a lethal dose of radiation from the spent fuel because there would not be enough of a water barrier to stop the gamma rays produced by decaying Uranium and other "nuclear ash".

Running a nuclear reactor with four people is impossible. Period. Reactors don't run on "skeleton crews".

Things like electric cooling pumps just can't be turned off willy-nilly. No reactors use diesel cooling pumps as their primary system.