Star Trek-Themed Training Video From A Nuclear Plant
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No, this homemade Star Trek video wasn’t made in 1984. San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in Southern California made the above video, titled “Songs Trek,” in 2010 as a training aid for their nuclear power plant. While the video depicts Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and a very, very light-skinned Lt. Uhura, the San Onofre Nuclear training video is stirring a bit of a controversy among environmentalists and the nuclear power industry.
An unnamed employee, who felt the video was inappropriate, leaked it to California’s KGTV-TV news in the hopes of exposing SONGS. With a budget of $800, the leaked video was made in the San Onofre control room simulator, which stood in for the deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise. The training video was later shown at an employee recognition event.
The video has drawn red flags from the Friends Of The Earth, an environmental activist group who have already put the nuclear power plant on their radar for numerous safety violations, such as images of a leaky pipe being held together with masking tape, broom handles, and plastic bags. Kendra Ulrich, a spokesperson for Friends of the Earth, told the Huffington Post, “The video is ridiculous and funny, but it shows how the plant’s corporate culture makes light of safety issues. It focused on Star Trek, not The Simpsons, but we expected to see Homer Simpson in the background.”
Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had no idea this training video existed until it emerged on KGTV-TV news. Here’s Victor Dricks, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesperson, speaking about the video:
‘There was no safety implication, other than enforcing safety,’ he said, adding that the video’s purpose was to emphasize three-way communication. ‘That’s where an officer requests something, the person responds back saying what the request was and the first person confirms it by repeating it.’
‘Since it was filmed in a simulator, there was no safety issue.’
For another example of unfortunate workplace parody, there’s that Star Trek training video the IRS spent sixty grand on…
