How the Next US Nuclear Accident Might Happen

Lasrick writes: Anthropologist Hugh Gusterson analyzes safety at US nuclear facilities and finds a disaster waiting to happen due to an over-reliance on automated security technology and private contractors cutting corners to increase profits. Gusterson follows on the work of Eric Schlosser, Frank Munger, and Dan Zak in warning us of the serious problems at US nuclear facilities, both in the energy industry and in the nuclear security complex.

Comments

Re:Profit over safety

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no way you are a GM of a nuclear power "plan". I have 25 years of engineering, operations, and management experience in nuclear power plants in Canada and the United States and am currently a licensed Senior Reactor Operator. If you were a GM you might recognize that no one pump failure would result in a meltdown, and that we don't shut down nuclear plants typically when one pump has an issue - we have Technical Specification Limiting Conditions for Operation that provide a fixed time period for you to fix the equipment before you have to shut down. This is typically 72 hours, seven days, or longer if a risk-informed Technical Specification action time has been licensed by the NRC. How do you manage to cover up a failed periodic surveillance test of the pump that is mandated by your Technical Specifications? In my plant, about 10 people would all have to be complicit with you. Seems pretty unlikely given that they all make a lot more money than they'd make outside the industry, and you are opening yourself up to sanction - up to and including being barred from licensed activities for life.

By the way - in my experience privately-run US nuclear power plants run far better than publicly-run Canadian nuclear plants, and the regulator is more potent. High production plants typically have much better equipment reliability and corrective action programs. This ensures that the equipment is available when it is called upon in an event. That tends to mean that higher performing plants are in fact safer.

So yes - I'm calling you a liar.

   

Re:Anthropologist

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a couple of additional points. If you read his other columns, which I have, you see Gusterson has a theme of dismissing quantitative methods, which are admittedly flawed here. It's interesting, because he decried the fundamental attribution error against Eric Shinseki (correctly in my opinion) but commits the very same error against quantitative methods in both that article and the one linked in the summary. Again, I would argue that he is decrying not a flaw in simple quantitative measurement, but instead a fundamental error in judgement that implies measuring something must necessitate that is measured without error.

And also, I labelled multiple measurements from different sources just as latent measurement models. They are, however they are specifically known as Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model and/or Multitrait-Multimethod SEM. There's a distinction between the two, but they underlay a common goal of utilising different measurement sources to produce a higher ability to distinguish between error sources.

Re:Profit over safety

[dunkelfalke]

Here in Germany there was a minor scandal because Vattenfall - a private company - kept quiet about a hydrogen explosion and the ensuing cooling water loss in one of their nuclear power plants (INES 1, but still), and continuing to operate the power plant after quickly patching some pipes. This is against every law for operation of nuclear power plants. It were government officials, who found out about the problem and the company tried to talk themselves out of it.

Re:Antropologist

[AmiMoJo]

Japanese shinkansen (bullet train) drivers are required to follow written procedures in the event of any kind of anomaly, failure or emergency. They have a book in the cab with all the procedures, and are not allowed to follow them from memory, they have to read each instruction from the book, speak it out loud and follow it.

So far there have been no fatalities or serious injuries due to accidents on the shinkansen system, which has been operating since 1964 and carried billions of passengers.

Unfortunately, nuclear plants might be too complex for this sort of thing to work.