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Grex > Agora41 > #159: Two words you don't want to see used together: "nuclear" and "surprise" | |
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gull
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Two words you don't want to see used together: "nuclear" and "surprise"
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May 7 17:40 UTC 2002 |
http://www.freep.com/news/nw/nuc7_20020507.htm
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was "surprised" to find a large hole
eroded almost all the way through the six-inch-thick steel reactor
vessel of a plant in Ohio. They also found cracking of a type they've
never seen before in nozzles in a reactor in South Carolina. Both
problems could have eventually lead to a loss of cooling water, if they
hadn't been caught.
"If this occurred in Russia, we would be saying it could never happen
here." -- former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Commissioner Victor
Gilinsky.
Obviously there are some shortcomings in the design and maintenance of
nuclear power plants. You have to wonder what else is happening in
there that they haven't expected, and hence haven't thought to look
for. That combined with the fact that we *still* don't have a good
place to put the waste from nuclear reactors doesn't give me a warm
fuzzy about Bush promoting construction of more of them.
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| 66 responses total. |
rcurl
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response 1 of 66:
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May 7 17:46 UTC 2002 |
The problem was discovered and there were no leaks of radiation. It is not
likely a leak would have been catostrphic anyway, because of all the other
protective features and detectors. Component failure is an inherent part
of engineering systems and it is impossible to ever design anything that
can NEVER fail. I would not call the subject corrosion problem an example
of "shortcomings in the design and maintenance of nuclear power plants",
but just the expected unexpected, from which better designs evolve.
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tpryan
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response 2 of 66:
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May 7 17:58 UTC 2002 |
There's these caves in Aghanistan that we seem to currently
have control of.
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jazz
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response 3 of 66:
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May 7 18:27 UTC 2002 |
Even with those caveats, I'm not sure that nuclear power is less
dangerous than coal. We're just more acclimated to coal pollution and coal
mining accidents.
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gull
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response 4 of 66:
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May 7 18:43 UTC 2002 |
Re #1: Yes, but would the backup systems have functioned? You'll recall
Three Mile Island, a "can't happen" situation where most of the backup
systems failed to operate. By the time it all settled out, they were
relying on *one* coolant pump with no backup remaining if it had failed.
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rcurl
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response 5 of 66:
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May 7 19:10 UTC 2002 |
I recall there was some operator error at 3-Mile. This is not true
in this case. It was soley an engineering near-failure. That's why
they have all the precautions and inspection protocols, which worked.
In my opinion, nuclear power is much more dangerous than coal, but
because of the waste problem, which not even Yucca Mt, or even a
better facility, can completely resolve.
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slynne
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response 6 of 66:
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May 7 19:15 UTC 2002 |
I think they found that the operator error at 3-mile island was due to
the bad design of the engineers. You know, putting controls in odd
places and such. In fact, wasnt it 3 mile island where they put the
Heinekin tap on a knob because it was too similar to another knob that
did an opposite function?
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rcurl
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response 7 of 66:
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May 7 19:41 UTC 2002 |
According to http://www.barc.ernet.in/webpages/rca_india/reactor.html all
the automatic safety systems functioned properly until operators turned
off the main coolant circulation pumps manually - operator error.
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slynne
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response 8 of 66:
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May 7 21:08 UTC 2002 |
I am sure that a lot of people think that the problem was bad design.
If you are going to design something with human operators, you have to
design the thing for the human operators. In other words, the plant
might have been a good design from an engineering point of view but
apparently it was a horrible design in other ways that contributed
directly to the disaster.
Dr Donald Norman said the following at
http://www.cooltown.com/mpulse/0901-norman.asp
"The Three Mile Island nuclear power incident occurred, and I got
called in. They wanted to see what was the matter with their operators.
Could we perhaps train them better? I discovered, much to my surprise,
that if they had set out to design a plant to cause errors, they could
not have done a better job."
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rcurl
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response 9 of 66:
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May 7 23:09 UTC 2002 |
One often discovers that by accidents occurring. It is often only "bad
design" in hindsight. Consider air bags and small women and children.
It was bad design but this was not discoverable except by tests and
not everything can be tested in advance. If someone had vociferously
claimed that 3-Mile was badly designed in advance of the accident, but
nothing was done about it, then one can point the finger at bad design.
Pointing fingers at it after the fact isn't much different than confirming
what contributed to the accident and is hollow rhetoric. The simple
action to take is Fix It.
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mdw
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response 10 of 66:
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May 7 23:32 UTC 2002 |
I think in the case of the controls for 3 mile island, it was just plain
bad design. There was enough human factors research done before the
fact that there was no question but that it *could* and *should* have
been better designed. Quite a bit of research was done during ww2, for
instance, when it was well known that human lives might depend on split
second decisions made by people in stresful situations. It doesn't take
much imagination to realize the same might be true in a nuclear reactor.
Unfortunately, nobody knows of any good way to build this kind of
imagination into nuclear power plant design before the fact. The best
solution people have found so far is an open design process where
everything happens before the public eye. At least, it seems to work
with software, and we kinda do it with building design. Nobody wants to
do this with nuclear power, because this increases the perceived risk of
a terrorist incident. Unfortunately, nuclear power is not really one of
those things that one wants to discover the bad problems the hard way.
Our current system, involving miles of secret paper work, does seem to
work *slightly* better than the soviet method, which seems to have
simply not valued safety at all. Our current system has yet to come up
with a solution for fuel disposal however, and given that's where the
worst of the safety issues arise, that suggests we, as a race, aren't
really mature enough yet for nuclear power.
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gull
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response 11 of 66:
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May 8 01:20 UTC 2002 |
I agree with #10. I'm of the opinion that no more nuclear plants should be
built until we've solved the waste problem.
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bru
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response 12 of 66:
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May 8 02:51 UTC 2002 |
Has the navy ever had a nuclear power accident? Their operators are well
trained, and the design uncomplicated.
What if every car we drove was designed by a committee and built to its own
design? D you think we would have any really good working cars?
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other
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response 13 of 66:
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May 8 03:33 UTC 2002 |
re: component failure. The problem is not that components fail. That's
a given. The problem is that "a large hole eroded almost all the way
through the six-inch-thick steel reactor vessel" before it was noticed.
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senna
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response 14 of 66:
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May 8 03:58 UTC 2002 |
We need better power sources if we expect to be able to maintain current
lifestyles, because the ones we have now aren't cutting it.
The waste problem may take a few years, but I have an idea: Space.
Specifically, Space as the medium through which the waste travels on its way
toward the sun where it really can't do much damage.
To say that such a possibility is a few years away would be to understate the
issue in a way comperable to stating that Bill Gates has some "spare change."
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rcurl
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response 15 of 66:
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May 8 04:35 UTC 2002 |
Re #10: it was not a matter of "split second decisions" at 3-Mile. All
the safety interlocks worked and then the operators turned off the main
cooling pumps - for 8 hours before the core melted. What was missing there
was knowledge or, if you wish, a further interlock that would have
warned of the folly of that, given everything else. What happened was
the problem went beyond the several levels of automatic safety interlocks,
and was then on its own....in the hands of insufficiently trained
operators (who apparently did not call for a second opinion). This is the
sort of things like trains being shunted to the wrong tracks or pilots
deciding to land under very poor conditions, etc. It was not an engineering
failure per-se.
Re #13: the corrosion through six inches of steel is nothing unusual given
the cause, which was cracking of some tubes that passed through the shell.
This permitted a very small, and undetected leak, which slowly ate away at
the steel. There are thousands of similar corrosion problems occurring
annually in the chemical industry, almost none of which lead to any
disaster, and this corrosion problem also did not lead to a disaster. (The
cracking of the tubes was detected in a similiar reactor elsewhere, and
all similar reactors were shut down for inspection, which found the
problem elsewhere. This is a normal inspection and maintenance process.
The anti-nuclear bunch does, of course blow anything like this all out of
proportion. The danger of nuclear power lies elsewhere, not dominantly
with the engineering and maintenance, which has never caused a problem,
with the possible exception of the original experimental Fermi reactor,
where a flow deflector broke loose and the consequences of that were not
anticipated.)
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bdh3
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response 16 of 66:
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May 8 06:36 UTC 2002 |
re#12: The USNAVY has never had an 'accident' involving a nuclear
reactor. They've have plenty of accidents where
nuclear weapons were 'involved' in that they were burned in a fire
or dropped or crushed, but none came even close to detonating and
few if any resulting in any radiation leakage - and those at
insignificant levels (on par with having yer teeth x-rayed at the
dentist). I think the USAIRFORCE has had more accidents involving
nuclear weapons than the NAVY. THe Navy reactors are designed to
be ultra safe, indeed one of the 'problems' is that they are so
very easy to 'scram' which causes a lot of noise - something the
'squids' like to avoid at all costs. Unfortunately, the navy
designs are too uneconomical for civilian use even to this day.
They are small, mostly mechanical, and labor intensive, and
extremely stable and safe to operate - they just cost too much
to use to generate consumer electricity. The civilian nuke plants
don't produce cheap enough electricity to allow for a profit. It
takes clever accounting methods and government bail-outs to allow
commercial operation of them in the first place and as others have
noted above the problem of nuclear waste has yet to be solved.
Before russ (and his other 'r' dopple-gaanger) chime in, there *are*
modern designs that *in theory* could provide economical safe
electricity. But they are smaller and require a number of them
before the economics become profitable and nobody wants to live
near one (NIMBY strikes again) so they aren't likely to happen.
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mdw
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response 17 of 66:
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May 8 06:39 UTC 2002 |
If it wasn't ever a matter of split second decisions at TMI, then it's
even more amazingly bad controls design that resulted in the problem.
If TMI were a fully-automatic plant designed to run by itself, then I
would agree it was not a design problem: but it's not: the human
operators are clearly an integral part of the system, and a failure of
the humans to do the right thing through shear animal stupidity is just
as much a failure of the system, and of the engineering, as if a horse
pulling a carriage were to accidently fall off a road dragging the
carriage with it. If the engineers who designed TMI did not consider
the needs of the human operators (and in hind-sight it would seem they
did not), then this is still a design failure, quite separate from any
failings of the operators themselves (and from what you're saying, it
sounds like their training had yet more issues.) It's pretty common for
massive failures to have multiple "faults" with lots of finger pointing
-- and TMI is certainly no exception. If anything, TMI highlights our
difficulties in managing systems that involve both humans, and the risk
of unlikely but massively expensive failures.
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slynne
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response 18 of 66:
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May 8 14:28 UTC 2002 |
re#9: How can one "Fix It" if one wont admit that there are design
problems? Of course everything cant be anticipated before something
happens but from what I understand, a lot of the problems at TMI could
have been avoided if the engineers had consulted an Industrial
Psychologist. Obviously they just didnt think about that which actually
really isnt their fault since it isnt their job to think about that.
Nevertheless, whoever was in charge of that project should have thought
of that and didnt.
One good thing about TMI is that it did bring about substantial changes
in other nuclear plants which makes them more safe which is the idea
after all.
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gull
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response 19 of 66:
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May 8 14:45 UTC 2002 |
Re #14: What happens if you have a launch failure while you're boosting all
that highly toxic waste into space? You've effectively created a very large
"dirty nuke". Winds aloft would do a great job of distributing the fallout
over a wide area. It'd make Chernobyl look like a minor accident.
(And you *will* have a launch failure, eventually. I don't think there are
any launch vehicle designs that haven't exploded at least once.)
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rcurl
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response 20 of 66:
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May 8 17:26 UTC 2002 |
Re #17: Marcus makes a very forced argument. No engineering system has
ever been built, including all safety interlocks and so forth, that
a human cannot defeat by sheer stupidity or lack of knowledge or training,
or just be being tired, or on drugs, or whatever. Why are 40,000 people
per year killed in automobile accidents? None would be if Marcus' arguments
were implemented. Very few of those deaths are caused by strictly engineering
failures in the designs of the vehicles. Poeple are responsible for most
of the accidents, and people were responsible for the 3-mile incident.
It is certainly true that often another level of engineering is added
after a serious accident. I am not sure what was done after 3-mile, but
clearly all that was needed was a warning or interlock that prevented
cooling from being shut down while core temperature was rising. But given
all the safety interlocks that were present and worked, a lot of thought
had gone into the possible failure causes....but (at least) one got
missed. That's how we learn to decrease the probability of future
accidents.
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mcnally
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response 21 of 66:
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May 8 18:45 UTC 2002 |
re #20: Marcus is presenting an argument which has been proferred by
many experts in the field of human factors engineering, people who
are generally quite worth listening to. The fact that Rane is resorting
to a reductio ad absurdum argument in an attempt to discredit it says
considerably more about Rane than it does a about Marcus' position or the
arguments supporting it.
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slynne
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response 22 of 66:
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May 8 19:18 UTC 2002 |
I think Rane is just one of those people who cant admit it when he is
wrong or at least I dont recall any time he has admitted that he was
wrong even when it has been shown by others. Interestingly this is also
true of jp2 but taht more obvious because jp2 is wrong more often.
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rcurl
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response 23 of 66:
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May 8 19:19 UTC 2002 |
You are grossly overstating your case. I would always agree that
engineering design includes human factor engineering. However that
has limitations as does the physical engineering itself, simply because
not *everything* can be thought of in advance. There would be no need
for any testing of engineering systems, including human factor aspects,
if that were the case. And all the testing that is done is still not
capable of addressing every possible contingency.
The question here is, what precisely led to the failure of the operators
to respond correctly to the developing problem. Only when that is
known can one say whether it was inherent in the design, physical or
human factor, or in training, or in human failure.
The professional conclusions I have seen published are that it was
operator error. If you have information that explains the causes of
operator error, please present it.
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slynne
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response 24 of 66:
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May 8 19:37 UTC 2002 |
I havent ever seen any professional conclusions that say it was only
operator error.
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