The actors, directors and producers are definitely on "Thin Ice" when it comes to letting stupid mistakes in the English language get through to the final cut. One actor said "nucular" instead of nuclear, and Tea Leoni herself said "artic" instead of arctic. Call me picky if you want to, but it seems to me that these kinds of obvious oversights are part of the reason American kids can't speak proper English anymore.
8 Reviews
Finally Hollywood gets Nuclear Power Right!
nukemann-4688116 May 2018
Having over 35 years working with nuclear energy, first as a reactor operator on Us Navy submarines and then as a technician maintaining the equipment ensuring the safety of the public, I am glad someone in Hollywood finally had the guts to portray the truth about nuclear power instead of going for easy irrational fear so common in todays media. I am impressed!
Fact Check re: Nuclear Energy
golferbanta30 April 2018
In the Thin Ice episode, Blake makes a statement in conversation with Kat that (paraphrasing), 'zero Americans have died in commercial nuclear power accidents since World War II'. This may well NOT be true, as Dr. Steven Goldenberg of Penn State University Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, Pennsylvania, published a study in 2017 documenting that DNA from thyroid cancer patients who lived in area surrounding Three Mile Island showed DNA markers that were distinct from DNA of thyroid cancer patients who did not live in area of TMI. An increased number of thyroid cancer patients were diagnosed & died in the area subsequent to the TMI accident.
So glad we got some truth about Nuclear!
techxperience-3262114 June 2018
This episode was a revelation and certainly deserving of a high rating, it showed the American public a side of Nuclear power that they very often fail to see from Hollywood or frankly anywhere else in the media.
The acting was excellent, and the plot engaging, and the writing crisp! The sad truth that many anti-nuclear advocates won't admit is that this show is spot-on with the statistics and numbers presented! Nuclear really is such an awesome tool to fight climate change, it is sad that Hollywood fails to recognize this routinely.
Fantastic episode!
The acting was excellent, and the plot engaging, and the writing crisp! The sad truth that many anti-nuclear advocates won't admit is that this show is spot-on with the statistics and numbers presented! Nuclear really is such an awesome tool to fight climate change, it is sad that Hollywood fails to recognize this routinely.
Fantastic episode!
Nuclear Power is not "the bridge"....
betsyw-7605327 May 2018
Absolutely disagree with attempt to push nuclear fission power as "the bridge to all renewable energy". It is not clean (releases radiation levels not measured on the Geiger Counters in use...made with 1950's technology LOL). It is not "green" (carbon footprint for building and maintaining these power plants is very high). It is not affordable (Google articles about cost of building and maintaining). Am a real "Madame Secretary" fan, but was astonished at this episode's miss representation of such a serious issue. Where was discussion about nuclear waste? Very disappointed.
Wretched propaganda for nuclear power
mgconlan-130 April 2018
Warning: Spoilers
I watched a "Madam Secretary" episode that really rubbed me the wrong way politically; not only did it feed current Cold War II anxieties by portraying Russia as THE ENEMY, its writers, Moira Kirkland and Alexander Maggio, turned the script into a full-blooded defense of nuclear power as the only way to overcome global warming. The script has the characters spouting the usual propaganda of the nuclear industry - that today's light-water reactors are safe, that the amount of spent fuel they generate is no bigger than the size of a football field (then why is there so much waste that the industry is still trying to figure out a safe way to get rid of massive amounts of it?), and that nuclear power doesn't involve burning hydrocarbons and therefore has no carbon impact. (It's true that nuclear power itself doesn't release greenhouse gases, but the entire nuclear fuel cycle is a huge consumer of energy and much of it is fossil fuel-based.) The assumption seems to be that a modern economy will never be able to power itself purely on solar, wind and hydro, and therefore some large-scale power source will be needed in the future - and barring a technological miracle (and the Kirkland-Maggio script drips with scorn over anyone who believes the salvation is going to come from anything other than nukes), nuclear power is the only way to keep the modern advanced world supplied with the energy it needs. I couldn't disagree more: I think nuclear energy is one of two technologies so evil, so totally destructive of human life and the biosphere itself, it should never be used for anything. (Genetic modification is the other.) That makes me one of the Luddites Maggio and Kirkland go out of their way to ridicule, I know. Other than the pro-nuke propaganda, this is a wild tale in which a conference of nations bordering the Arctic is sabotaged when a bomb is planted by an ostensibly non-violent environmentalist protest group - and it turns out that those pesky Russians spent over a year infiltrating agents provocateurs into the group so they could plant a bomb at the conference, thereby disrupting it and occupying the Northwest Passage themselves while denying access to it to anyone else. The U.S. finally defeats the pesky Russkies but only by inviting the Chinese into the Arctic summit, whereupon the Chinese supply an ice-breaking ship the U.S. Navy lacks so the U.S. can confront the Russians in the Passage and get them to leave. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord (Téa Leoni) is upset with her son Jason (Evan Roe) and his girlfriend Piper (Salena Qureshi) because they talked her into taking them along to the Arctic summit in Canada - only they were using it as an excuse to sneak into a hotel room and have sex. Instead of being grateful that their trick prevented Jason from being in range when the bomb blew up, both McCord and her husband Henry (Tim Daly) are mad at him. Also in the dramatis personae is aspiring Air Force pilot Andrew Hill (Sam Underwood), son of national security advisor Ellen Hill (Johanna Day), who's decided he's a conscientious objector and can't kill - only instead of being forthright about it, he tries to get himself kicked out of the Air Force Academy by deliberately submitting a plagiarized school paper, knowing that Henry, his teacher, will spot it and have him expelled. In the end, the Arctic conference goes on as scheduled, and when the oil and gas company that was originally going to sponsor it pulls out because Elizabeth McCord won't permit it to do a display promoting natural gas (earth to Maggio and Kirkland: natural gas may still be a fossil fuel but it's a lot safer and less environmentally destructive than nuclear!!!!!), she talks Bella Rossi (Colby Minifie), the head of the nonviolent environmental group that staged the protest the Russian agents hijacked to commit terrorism, not only to sponsor the conference but to drop her previous opposition to nuclear power despite her fear that her donors wouldn't like it. Personally I would NEVER support a so-called "environmental" organization that endorsed nukes!
Civilian and military nuclear have long been separate.
albertrogers13 June 2018
She is correct in supporting nuclear, and there is at TMI a reactor built _before_ th one that melted down, with a spotless record. In fact, that old design, despite its three weaknesses, has killed NOBODY, not even when assailed by Japan's worst earthquake on record AND followed by a tsunami that drowned on or two people near the reactor with no held from radiation and drowned the emergency power (diesel-electric) that was needed to prevent the heat of the quite evanescent fission product radioactivity from damaging the reactors. Note that the people who stayed and worked at the reactors suffered nothing but presumably sorrow at the loss of the machines they'd been looking after for so long.
There were fatalities among the thousands that the panicked government evacuated from the area. None of them caused by radiation.
What about Chernobyl? -- Not the same reactor design, in fact a very inferior one.Loss of water coolant in Alvin Weinberg's Light Water designs, or for that matter Canada's Heavy water (D2O) versions, causes the nuclear reaction to fade and go out. The RBMK design uses graphite's carbon atoms to slow down the neutrons, and let them be caught by the uranium, but loss of the coolant water means that neutrons that it would otherwise capture, survive to increase the fission activity. A positive feedback like a howling microphone. Even so, of the heroic crew and emergency workers, the death roll was 28, which is kinda low for a "disaster" There were also thyroid cancers from the shortest lived radioactive iodine isotopes, of whom about 30 died, and that was again the fault of the Soviet central controllers, who refused to admit the breakdown, and did not administer the potassium iodide that prevents absorption of the radioactive stuff. As for the widely broadcast deadly bomb-making plutonium in the waste, about 15% of the energy I get from Dominion Power is from peaceful clean plutonium fission, and the wasteful part of nuclear waste is throwing the rest of it away in the "spent" fuel. Bomb making from nuclear waste's plutonium? Well for one thing, at 2500 tons a year there might be 25 tons of plutonium oxide. It isn't bomb grade, which requires over 90% pure isotope 239. The next isotop spontaneously emits neutrons, which even at bomb grade means a very complicated and precise "Fat Man" bomb. ORNL and LANL scientists say that a bomb "could be made" from reactor grade plutonium, which I do believe those clever guys could do. But any miscreant who is that clever knows that what the Chicago Pile and Hanford did is easier, so why mess with "spent" civilian fuel?
What about Chernobyl? -- Not the same reactor design, in fact a very inferior one.Loss of water coolant in Alvin Weinberg's Light Water designs, or for that matter Canada's Heavy water (D2O) versions, causes the nuclear reaction to fade and go out. The RBMK design uses graphite's carbon atoms to slow down the neutrons, and let them be caught by the uranium, but loss of the coolant water means that neutrons that it would otherwise capture, survive to increase the fission activity. A positive feedback like a howling microphone. Even so, of the heroic crew and emergency workers, the death roll was 28, which is kinda low for a "disaster" There were also thyroid cancers from the shortest lived radioactive iodine isotopes, of whom about 30 died, and that was again the fault of the Soviet central controllers, who refused to admit the breakdown, and did not administer the potassium iodide that prevents absorption of the radioactive stuff. As for the widely broadcast deadly bomb-making plutonium in the waste, about 15% of the energy I get from Dominion Power is from peaceful clean plutonium fission, and the wasteful part of nuclear waste is throwing the rest of it away in the "spent" fuel. Bomb making from nuclear waste's plutonium? Well for one thing, at 2500 tons a year there might be 25 tons of plutonium oxide. It isn't bomb grade, which requires over 90% pure isotope 239. The next isotop spontaneously emits neutrons, which even at bomb grade means a very complicated and precise "Fat Man" bomb. ORNL and LANL scientists say that a bomb "could be made" from reactor grade plutonium, which I do believe those clever guys could do. But any miscreant who is that clever knows that what the Chicago Pile and Hanford did is easier, so why mess with "spent" civilian fuel?
Settle Jason
jazzahi18 May 2024
Unlike all the other reviews about the political stuff I just felt it's about time Insaid if Jason was my kid he would get a clip over his ear for his obnoxious entitled attitude with no respect and borderline narcissistism
He is truly the worse character of the whole family Alison can be a border of self entitlement too and some of her stories have been a bit boo hoo as with Stephanie. I do like that they bring some stories in about extended family members and that they are very big income earners but jeez this episode nearly had me throwing things at the TV for Jason's whole blah blah. Call me a whinge........
He is truly the worse character of the whole family Alison can be a border of self entitlement too and some of her stories have been a bit boo hoo as with Stephanie. I do like that they bring some stories in about extended family members and that they are very big income earners but jeez this episode nearly had me throwing things at the TV for Jason's whole blah blah. Call me a whinge........
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