Northeast Utilities Company adopted an ambitious new competitive
strategy in the mid-1980s, seeking to become the low-cost supplier
in New England electric power markets bracing for deregulation.
...Given its high-cost nuclear facilities, doing so required a
corporate turnaround. For a decade Northeast faced increasing
public and employee resistance to cost cutting at its nuclear
plants. Though management achieved many of its goals, curtailing
outlays on nuclear operations meant high risk that the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission would close the plants because of frequent,
prolonged outages. This is just what happened in 1996. Did
management's deliberate cost-containment strategy take nuclear
operations to an inevitable regulatory shutdown, and if so, why?
Was it the pursuit of executive compensation tied to cost
containment that caused undue risk of regulatory shutdown? Paul
MacAvoy and Jean Rosenthal describe ten years of corporate
performance preceding the shutdown, detailing aggressive executive
decisions, mounting regulatory actions in response to increasingly
severe operational failures, and--at the same time--overall
improvement in corporate earnings, stock prices, and executive pay
packages. They relate the complexities of managing declining
nuclear plant operations under ever more pressing budgetary
targets. Their discussion of the increasing risk of outages raises
the issue of the tradeoff of profit and conservative management of
hazard operations. All the more timely in light of the massive 2003
East Coast blackout, Corporate Profit and Nuclear Safety represents
a powerful and cautionary commentary on industrial practices that
goes to the heart of effective corporate governance.
Learning from Fukushima began as a project to respond in a helpful way to the March 2011 triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown) in north-eastern Japan. It evolved into a ...collaborative and comprehensive investigation of whether nuclear power was a realistic energy option for East Asia, especially for the 10 member-countries of ASEAN, none of which currently has an operational nuclear power plant. We address all the questions that a country must ask in considering the possibility of nuclear power, including cost of construction, staffing, regulation and liability, decommissioning, disposal of nuclear waste, and the impact on climate change. The authors are physicists, engineers, biologists, a public health physician, and international relations specialists. Each author presents the results of their work.
This book—the culmination of a truly collaborative international and highly interdisciplinary effort—brings together Japanese and American political scientists, nuclear engineers, historians, and ...physicists to examine the Fukushima accident from a new and broad perspective. It explains the complex interactions between nuclear safety risks (the causes and consequences of accidents) and nuclear security risks (the causes and consequences of sabotage or terrorist attacks), exposing the possible vulnerabilities all countries may have if they fail to learn from this accident. The book further analyzes the lessons of Fukushima in comparative perspective, focusing on the politics of safety and emergency preparedness. It first compares the different policies and procedures adopted by various nuclear facilities in Japan and then discusses the lessons learned—and not learned—after major nuclear accidents and incidents in other countries in the past. The book's editors conclude that learning lessons across nations has proven to be very difficult, and they propose new policies to improve global learning after nuclear accidents or attacks.
Since the dawn of the Atomic Age, nuclear experts have labored to
imagine the unimaginable and prevent it. They confronted a
deceptively simple question: When is a reactor "safe enough" to
adequately ...protect the public from catastrophe? Some experts sought
a deceptively simple answer: an estimate that the odds of a major
accident were, literally, a million to one. Far from simple, this
search to quantify accident risk proved to be a tremendously
complex and controversial endeavor, one that altered the very
notion of safety in nuclear power and beyond. Safe Enough?
is the first history to trace these contentious efforts, following
the Atomic Energy Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
as their experts experimented with tools to quantify accident risk
for use in regulation and to persuade the public of nuclear power's
safety. The intense conflict over the value of risk assessment
offers a window on the history of the nuclear safety debate and the
beliefs of its advocates and opponents. Across seven decades and
the accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, the
quantification of risk has transformed both society's understanding
of the hazards posed by complex technologies and what it takes to
make them safe enough.
Twenty-five years after the Chernobyl explosion, disaster struck once again after a tsunami overwhelmed the considerable safety measures at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan. However, ...Fukushima had in place a solid containment structure to reduce the spread of radiation in the event of a worst-case scenario; Chernobyl did not. These two incidents highlight the importance of such safety measures, which were critically lacking in an entire class of Soviet-designed reactors.
This book examines why five countries operating these dangerous reactors first signed international agreements to close them within a few years, then instead delayed for almost two decades. It looks at how political decision makers weighed the enormous short-term costs of closing those reactors against the long-term benefits of compliance, and how the political instability that dominated post-Communist transitions impacted their choices. The book questions the efficacy of Western governments' efforts to convince their Eastern counterparts of the dangers they faced, and establishes a causal relationship between political stability and compliance behavior. This model will also enable more effective assistance policies in similar situations of political change where decision makers face considerable short-term costs to gain greater future rewards.
This book provides a valuable resource for postgraduate students, academics and policy makers in the fields of nuclear safety, international agreements, and democratization.
Giant fusion project in big trouble Clery, Daniel
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
07/2024, Volume:
385, Issue:
6704
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
ITER operations delayed to 2034, with energy-producing reactions expected 5 years later
ITER operations delayed to 2034, with energy-producing reactions expected 5 years later
Much more than a technical book. Erik’s work is a well documented journey into the multiple interactions between safety, work and human nature. A timely contribution to vindicate human beings and ...their variability from the one sided focus on the evils of human error. A groundbreaking look at ‘the other story’ that will certainly contribute to safer and more productive workplaces.
Dr Alejandro Morales, Mutual Seguridad, Chile
Safety needs a new maturity. We can no longer improve by simply doing what we have been doing, even by doing it better. DR Hollnagel brings forth new distinctions, interpretations, and narratives that will allow safety to progress to new unforeseen levels. Safety-II is more than just incident and accident prevention. A must read for every safety professional.
Tom McDaniel, Global Manager Zero Harm and Human Performance, Siemens Energy, Inc., USA
This book shows how the bankruptcy of the central state of Japan has led to increased burdens on the population in the post-nuclear tsunami era, and the ensuing dangerous ionization of the population ...now reaching into the future.
The Chernobyl disaster has been variously ascribed to human error, reactor design flaws, and industry mismanagement. Six former Chernobyl employees were convicted of criminal negligence; they ...defended themselves by pointing to reactor design issues. Other observers blamed the Soviet style of ideologically driven economic and industrial management. InProducing Power,Sonja Schmid draws on interviews with veterans of the Soviet nuclear industry and extensive research in Russian archives as she examines these alternate accounts. Rather than pursue one "definitive" explanation, she investigates how each of these narratives makes sense in its own way and demonstrates that each implies adherence to a particular set of ideas -- about high-risk technologies, human-machine interactions, organizational methods for ensuring safety and productivity, and even about the legitimacy of the Soviet state. She also shows how these attitudes shaped, and were shaped by, the Soviet nuclear industry from its very beginnings.Schmid explains that Soviet experts established nuclear power as a driving force of social, not just technical, progress. She examines the Soviet nuclear industry's dual origins in weapons and electrification programs, and she traces the emergence of nuclear power experts as a professional community. Schmid also fundamentally reassesses the design choices for nuclear power reactors in the shadow of the Cold War's arms race. Schmid's account helps us understand how and why a complex sociotechnical system broke down. Chernobyl, while unique and specific to the Soviet experience, can also provide valuable lessons for contemporary nuclear projects.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has developed regulations regarding the siting and design of nuclear power plants (NPPs) that are aimed at addressing various natural hazards, including ...flooding. Flood barriers are designed to prevent water from entering NPP areas containing structures, systems, and components (SSCs) important to safety. The barriers are used at NPPs along with drains, sumps, pumps, valves, plugs, and site grading as part of the plant flood protection features that protect SSCs from experiencing external or internal flooding and mitigate the effects of flooding on NPP operations. The performance of flood protection features, including flood barriers at NPPs, has been an ongoing concern. Domestic and international operational experience provides clear indications that flood barrier performance has significant safety implications, especially for aging NPPs. The observed deficiencies show that flood barriers should be designed and installed properly, then adequately tested, inspected, and maintained in order to ensure that they perform their intended functions during flooding events. This paper reviews available information related to flood barriers employed at U.S. NPPs and provides an overview and categorization of NPP flood barriers. It identifies potential domestic and international flood barrier testing facilities, including operating and decommissioned U.S. NPPs. Finally, this paper presents the technical and logistical considerations that should be made when developing specific testing strategies and protocols for flood barriers, such as the selection of flood barriers, test locations, testing approach, performance criteria, and testing parameters.
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