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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.
Someone unqualified to access the safety of nuclear power plants declares them unsafe.
He thinks it's just private contractors that cut corners to save money?
That's adorable.
I am GM of a nuclear power plan and my bonus is based on the total production of my power plant. My engineering tells me I have to take an outage to fix a pump but if I do that I am going to mix my goal and I am not going to get as big a bonus. That is a fact. The chance that the power plant might melt down that is theoretical. I am not going to take a real loss for a theoretical one no matter how bad the theoretical loss might be. And that is why nuclear power plants can't be run by for profit companies.
The author has a point about the limited effectiveness of audits and drills, as it's nearly impossible (or at least really expensive and time-consuming) to execute one that's both realistic and safe. He missed the mark on the other two faults (reliance on tech and use of contractors), since people fail more often than tech and contractors are no worse than impossible-to-fire civil servants. The article carries echoes of the "profit is evil and government is good" mantra so popular lately.
"The United States loves to use statistical metrics and audit procedures to decide which teachers and principals at public schools should be fired or retained"
Which "United States" is he talking about, the other one that doesn't have teacher's unions?
You may have read the report of the USS Srark. This was a US naval ship fired on by an Iraqi F1. The facts of the case are that it was fired on and hit by two missiles and never fired a shot in defense or revenge. The captain was indicted and several officers were drummed out of the Navy. The official inquiry essentially blamed the ships officers. I looked more deeply into the matter a few months ago when I wanted to find out about possible reasons these guys weren't blown out of the water. Back to that later.
My research on the Stark indicated that most of the ship's defensive systems including two kinds of fire control radar and the PHALANX CIWS were offline awaiting parts or maintenance that needed to be done by a contractor in port.. The real cause of the ship's poor performance under fire was accounting procedures designed to provide an 80% readiness/50% cost solution. Instead of acknowledging the cause the Navy chose to blame the closest people to the incident and call it done.
Now the piracy incident. First, one of the comments says the pirates were in the big boat and the rafts were US Navy attacking it. I don't believe this to be true. I looked up comments on several forums found a consensus agreeing with a Youtube comment:
This happened in 2006, the ship in the video is the USS Cape St George and then video was shot from the USS Gonzalez. They didn't try to attack or board anything, we sent a boarding team to talk to them and they pointed an RPG at us. All of the mounts kept jamming because they had old shitty ammo sitting on them exposed to the weather for months and there are no sights on those weapons (you're supposed to walk fire onto targets, difficult to do when your weapon jams every 3 rounds). Source: I was there
The consensus was that the ammunition on the firing ship hadn't been properly kept dry, and was old. This causes jams. And they didn't do enough live-fire exercises to be able to reliably prevent this problem. Again, an 80%/50% solution. This isn't to say it's easy to hit small rafts in the dark with a jamming weapon but that's not the point. The Navy has all the latest whizbangery and night vision gear. Those rafts should have been shot up by the third burst.
A third happenstance, part of the Stark incident IIRC: The ship was carrying old missiles and had to dump them into the sea ASAP. This prevented returning fire on the attacking jet. My conclusion is that the US Navy has a firmly entrenched culture of saving money at the cost of readiness.
incomplete source: http://www.jag.navy.mil/librar...
All that said: Why should we believe that if general military readiness is flagging to save costs in official government programs the government would do any better than these contractors? A choice has to be made and stuck to: budget or safety. The half assing, ass grabbing, and ass covering needs to stop.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Except he really doesn't do anything. There doesn't appear to be any study, only the subjective (i.e., qualitative) third party claims, which doesn't mean that they are wrong, just that he didn't do anything himself. He does however launch an attack at quantitative methodology, which isn't a surprise, given that his article approach is a defence of his own field, at heart: If you can measure it, it is by default open to quantitative assessment.
This applies to scales (hello psychometrics) which are almost never measured without error (heh, look: Error in variables and latent measurement models!), open ended responses (latent direlecht allocation models and similar) and multiple measurements from different sources (back to reliability and latent measurement models). He is right in principal, and makes the point in the article that having poor test security and design (where the testees' employers have access to, or even provide the examinations and assessments themselves) is wrong, and that systems that provide too many false positives are ignored.
The correct approach to the final system would be a layered system, in which sensitivity increases with depth. As for assessments: no shit, don't let people grade themselves. Ever. And impose penalties and randomly conducted tests by third parties. If you want to hire this out: make it so that whoever succeeds get a bonus. Make the two sides compete. This only defines why QA is of vital importance.
My vote goes to the next nuclear accident being caused by environmentalists. Not direct sabotage, mind you, but protesting anything that might be done to upgrade or even maintain old plants or replace them with newer ones or safely store nuclear fuel. Then they'll say, "See how dangerous it is -- we told you so."
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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.
and yes, dammit, I know I should have logged in before posting.
The Spanish Inquisition of Psychometrics; Burning all the heretics.
Every time nuclear power comes up someone blames environmentalists for the industry's problems -- in this case before the problems have manifested. It's an article of faith.
So far as I can see there's only ever been one plant in the US that's ever been cancelled for environmental concerns is the proposed plant at Bodega Harbor, which as you can see on the map would have been right on top of the San Andreas fault. In every other case projects have been shut down after serious miscalculations in the industry's economic forecasting (e.g. lower energy prices in the 80s than anticipated in the 70s), often exacerbated by poor project management performance. In those cases environmentalists were just a convenient scapegoat for management screw-ups.
You can see that because after the very largest anti-nuclear protests in history -- against Seabrook in NH and Diablo Canyon -- the plants were built and put into operation anyway. If a company had a plant under construction that it could make money operating, that plant would get built, even if thirty thousand people turned out to protest.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There are valid concerns about nuclear safety, but all too often these issues are spoken of as if they exist in a vacuum. Do you have any idea how many people solar panels and wind turbines kill, to say nothing of coal-fired power plants? More than nuclear, per unit power, even including accidents, and this is in normal operation, not an accident!
In any case, as with all technology, it gets better. The latest reactors can't have the kind of serious accident seen at Fukushima or Chernobyl, and they solve the waste problem, as well.
If there is a problem, it is that Russia and China are building them while we continue with these pipe-dream fantasies that we can somehow build enough solar and wind units before we start seeing serious climate disruption, that doing so would actually help, and that other, poor countries will just stop using energy, themselves.
Whatever your political disposition, it must surely be obvious that - just as in the world of banking and finance - the incentives are dangerously skewed. The arguments in favour of private enterprise focus on efficiency and the profit motive. So far, so good: but how are we to guarantee the quality of work done by private enterprise? It's surprisingly easy to enter the low bid, and then use weasel methods to deliver far less than was required and promised.
Take the analogy of big banks. They gamble dangerously, so dangerously in fact that they are almost certain to fail after a fairly short time. Because they gamble so riskily, they make big profits. Then, when they step on a mine and get blown up, instead of being allowed to go bankrupt, they are bailed out by government using taxpayers' money. This has been described as "social security for the rich". The obvious solution is to forbid the creation of banks "too big to fail", and then allow nature to take its course. Also, no doubt, to enforce the separation between everyday consumer banking and legalised gambling.
When it comes to government contracts, especially for potentially very dangerous projects such as nuclear power stations, we need to demand a far greater degree of accountability from the contractors. The Romans are said to have required that, whenever a new bridge or aqueduct was built, the designers and architects should stand underneath it. That gave them a powerful personal interest in safety; and they built in such adequate safety factors that much of their work is still standing (and even usable) today.
What is the modern day equivalent of making an engineer stand underneath an aqueduct as it fills with water? If an industrial accident of any kind happens, possibly causing great harm, all those responsible should have to answer for their actions. Maybe the death penalty would be excessive, but certainly very long jail sentences would be in order. For a corporation, perhaps a fine equal to twice its annual profits coupled to prison sentences for all executives involved...
It will be objected that this would raise the cost of such projects excessively. So be it: if there is a serious element of danger, the cost of avoiding that danger must be factored in. If we can't afford the project, again so be it.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The next major US coal disaster is just coal plants operating as designed on July 2.
Although it is prudent to be aware of possible modes of failure, and although it is prudent to examine cultural biases that may affect our safety, this particular article seems more like clickbait.
So-called "news" has recently become over-populated with "might happen" sorts of stories, when entire pages are given over to what would amount to a paragraph in a larger article surveying all of the possible scenarios along with a relative measure of their likelihood.
It might also happen (and might not) for several other rather unlikely reasons, none of which this article mentions.
Sorry for the flamebait, but the next "accident" really is the complete failure to start building more power plants. The cost we're incurring by sticking w/ fossil fuels, in environmental damage, human health, $$ flowing to the Middle East, far outweighs either the cost of nuc plants or the potential hazards of such plants.
Not all disasters are active. Some are purely passive but just as destructive.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw