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How the next US nuclear accident could happen - by Hugh Gusterson
http://thebulletin.org/how-next-us-nuclear-accident-could-
How the next US nuclear accident could happen
Hugh Gusterson
06/30/2015 - 22:10
You learn a lot about a society from the way its accidents happen.
Safety analysts have found that Korean plane crashes were facilitated by a culture in which junior pilots do not challenge senior pilots, even when keeping quiet may result in their own deaths. Respect for elders, highly valued in Korean culture, can be a danger.
Meanwhile Sonja Schmid, in an excellent book on the 1986 Chernobyl disaster published earlier this year, has connected that fateful nuclear accident to a wider Soviet culture that insisted its own reactors not mimic American ones, and in which designers of nuclear power plants were siloed in a separate organization from the operators, whom they treated as a lesser breed with little need to understand in detail how their plants worked.
And what of the United States?
We can learn a lot about the potential for safety failures at US nuclear plants from the July 29, 2012, incident in which three religious activists broke into the supposedly impregnable Y-12 facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Fort Knox of uranium. Once there, they spilled blood and spray painted “work for peace not war” on the walls of a building housing enough uranium to build thousands of nuclear weapons. They began hammering on the building with a sledgehammer, and waited half an hour to be arrested. If an 82-year-old nun with a heart condition and two confederates old enough to be AARP members could do this, imagine what a team of determined terrorists could do.
We have a detailed understanding of this incident thanks to energetic reporting by Frank Munger, Dan Zak, and, finally, a recent tour de force account in the New Yorker by Eric Schlosser, who has established himself as the premier reporter on nuclear accidents waiting to happen. Their cumulative reporting suggests that the Achilles’ heel of US nuclear safety culture lies in a fondness for automated security technologies, the delegation of government functions to private contractors, and a predilection for hollow facsimiles of effective audit procedures.
<snip>
How the next US nuclear accident could happen
Hugh Gusterson
06/30/2015 - 22:10
You learn a lot about a society from the way its accidents happen.
Safety analysts have found that Korean plane crashes were facilitated by a culture in which junior pilots do not challenge senior pilots, even when keeping quiet may result in their own deaths. Respect for elders, highly valued in Korean culture, can be a danger.
Meanwhile Sonja Schmid, in an excellent book on the 1986 Chernobyl disaster published earlier this year, has connected that fateful nuclear accident to a wider Soviet culture that insisted its own reactors not mimic American ones, and in which designers of nuclear power plants were siloed in a separate organization from the operators, whom they treated as a lesser breed with little need to understand in detail how their plants worked.
And what of the United States?
We can learn a lot about the potential for safety failures at US nuclear plants from the July 29, 2012, incident in which three religious activists broke into the supposedly impregnable Y-12 facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Fort Knox of uranium. Once there, they spilled blood and spray painted “work for peace not war” on the walls of a building housing enough uranium to build thousands of nuclear weapons. They began hammering on the building with a sledgehammer, and waited half an hour to be arrested. If an 82-year-old nun with a heart condition and two confederates old enough to be AARP members could do this, imagine what a team of determined terrorists could do.
We have a detailed understanding of this incident thanks to energetic reporting by Frank Munger, Dan Zak, and, finally, a recent tour de force account in the New Yorker by Eric Schlosser, who has established himself as the premier reporter on nuclear accidents waiting to happen. Their cumulative reporting suggests that the Achilles’ heel of US nuclear safety culture lies in a fondness for automated security technologies, the delegation of government functions to private contractors, and a predilection for hollow facsimiles of effective audit procedures.
<snip>
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