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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.
Did you bother to even skim the article? It was essentially entirely focused on human and organizational risk factors, the sort of thing that anthropologists do actually study, in US nuclear facilities and preferred methods of securing them.
If the concern is "will the roof resist a hardware-store-improv mortar attack?", sure you don't want an anthropologist on the job. If the concern is "so, will the guards notice, give a damn, and do something about it; or will I just have to walk past a token force optimized for cheating its way to passing grades during perfunctory audits at lowest possible cost?", that's an anthropological question. And the answer appears to tend toward the latter.
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.
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.
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.
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