Atomic Twister
Atomic Twister
PG | 09 June 2002 (USA)
Atomic Twister Trailers

When tornadoes hit a nuclear power plant, critically damaging the plant's cooling system, the results could be catastrophic. Atomic Twister, a countdown to disaster, traces an extraordinary day in the lives of small town citizens who unexpectedly find themselves facing the possibility of mass destruction.

Reviews
Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.
Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%
Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
Alistair Olson After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
Marshal Phipps This film starts off strong and manages to keep its strength to the end. For a TV movie it does impress, the tornadoes looks surprisingly realistic and the characters are developed enough to where you can easily sympathize with them during their conflict.On a technical standpoint the film stumbles due to the inaccurate depiction of a nuclear power plant. If tornadoes were to hit a nuclear power plant in real life a meltdown would be extremely unlikely due to the multiple fail-safes, a good example of this is when the Davis- Besse Nuclear Power Station was struck by an F2 tornado in 1998, the reactor core automatically shutting down after external power was disabled when the switchyard was damaged, power was restored without incident. Interestingly enough, this incident inspired the movie, though very loosely.Atomic Twister is an enjoyable film with suspense and humor here and there, I recommend you check it out.
TheLittleSongbird What is there left to say? Atomic Twister is nothing more than an atomic mess. I suppose there is some novelty value on viewing, but again that is if you are watching the film in the right mood. For me I actually was finding myself laughing at all the logical fallacies that have been outlined very well in previous reviews, at the scenes that were meant to have been set in a nuclear power plant but actually looked like they had been shot in a room under someone's house and at the truly unbelievable, stilted dialogue. Atomic Twister also has the increasingly contrived relationships that formed the very predictable and already far-fetched in concept story, the unlikeable and stereotypical characters and the terrible acting from all involved with Sharon Lawrence overacting and Corbin Bernson has been much better especially in Psych, where he's used much better. All in all, some may revel in its awfulness, if not it will physically hurt to watch it. 1/10 Bethany Cox
garbageacc2 As the person said before, a nuclear power plant cannot explode.The reason is that the uranium used in atomic bombs have a much higher purity then in power plants. Therefore, it is impossible for an explosion to occur. The worst that could happen is that the core melts through the containment chamber and spreads a lot of radiation out.And unless the tornado ripped out the control rods, which is practically impossible as the control rods are dispersed around the fission material, then it wouldn't be hard to control the meltdown. All one needs to do is lower the control rods to absorb the excess neutrons.
childoferna 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.