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> The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police themselves. The same way the FAA allowed

by ElFitz 5y ago

> The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police themselves. The same way the FAA allowed airplane manufacturers to decide wether their planes needed re-certifying when they changed them, and allowed them to certify themselves? Because that's also how we got the Boeing 737 Max.

roenxi 5y ago
And if we held cars to the same safety standard as the 737 Max actually achieved, I suspect nobody would be allowed to drive. The odds of something going wrong were only just on the wrong side of 1 in a million. You're talking about a lapse in safety relative to an industry that is 2nd only to Nuclear power in doing no harm. In absolute terms they were still reasonably safe.
- ElFitz 5y ago
  Where did I say, or even hint, that the entire aerospace industry is unsafe? What I did say, is that this approach seems remarkably similar to the process that is both partially credited with the 737 Max issues, and one of the reasons some other countries' regulators refused to trust the FAA's later decisions regarding that plane. > You're talking about a lapse in safety relative to an industry that is 2nd only to Nuclear power in doing no harm. Yes, and that’s why when evaluating the use of a safety process in one, it is both relevant and interesting to look at the impact some conceptually similar process had on the other's safety record. Regarding the cars analogy… really?
542354234235 5y ago
>Because that's also how we got the Boeing 737 Max. You mean the plane that was grounded for having 4 accidents per 1 million flights? Do you mean the industry with 1 fatal accident for every two million flights? An industry so safe that most people have a higher likelihood of dying on the drive to and from the airport than on their flight? If that is your nightmare scenario of safety failure, I’ll happily take the FAA model of safety. Speaking of comparisons, how many people do coal plants kill every year with fly ash, just as a matter of course and not even as a safety failure? We aren’t comparing nuclear power risks to nothing.
- ElFitz 5y ago
  Oh, certainly, it is much safer than most things. But there still are huge conflicts of interest in self-certifying equipment, wether it’s an airplane or a nuclear power plant. In this case, following the crashes, the FAA's safety model is one of the reasons the EASA refused to delegate safety approval to the FAA on that specific plane. Clearly signalling they consider Boeing, the FAA and the FAA's safety model to be untrustworthy. I really don’t see why a process that is considered untrustworthy in the aerospace industry should be applied to nuclear power plants. Now, to be clear, if some US airline's plane full of US citizens suffers some malfunction due to some design defects and crashes in the middle of the US because some government agency in the US decided to trust some US plane manufacturer to certify itself, it’s sad, but it’s a US problem for the US people. I really couldn’t care less. Same with US power plants. Should a US nuclear power plant suffer catastrophic failure because some US regulator couldn’t learn from the FAA's mistake and decided to trust some US power plant operators with their own inspection, it would be a problem for the people living in and around the US. Regarding the totally unrelated coal plants tangent and the blatant attempt to change the topic, I don’t care either. Over here, considering the dangers they pose, it’s been decided they should be entirely phased out over the next year. You seem to be operating under the assumption that I am somehow against nuclear power, or consider it inherently too dangerous. I am not, and I do not. I’d even go as far as to say I consider it to be one of our best bets in facing climate change, air pollution, and our need to quickly and drastically lower global greenhouse gases emissions. [1]: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
  - ElFitz 5y ago
    Can’t edit anymore, but that link was left by mistake.

by ElFitz 5y ago

roenxi 5y ago

And if we held cars to the same safety standard as the 737 Max actually achieved, I suspect nobody would be allowed to drive. The odds of something going wrong were only just on the wrong side of 1 in a million. You're talking about a lapse in safety relative to an industry that is 2nd only to Nuclear power in doing no harm. In absolute terms they were still reasonably safe.

ElFitz 5y ago
Where did I say, or even hint, that the entire aerospace industry is unsafe? What I did say, is that this approach seems remarkably similar to the process that is both partially credited with the 737 Max issues, and one of the reasons some other countries' regulators refused to trust the FAA's later decisions regarding that plane. > You're talking about a lapse in safety relative to an industry that is 2nd only to Nuclear power in doing no harm. Yes, and that’s why when evaluating the use of a safety process in one, it is both relevant and interesting to look at the impact some conceptually similar process had on the other's safety record. Regarding the cars analogy… really?

542354234235 5y ago

>Because that's also how we got the Boeing 737 Max. You mean the plane that was grounded for having 4 accidents per 1 million flights? Do you mean the industry with 1 fatal accident for every two million flights? An industry so safe that most people have a higher likelihood of dying on the drive to and from the airport than on their flight? If that is your nightmare scenario of safety failure, I’ll happily take the FAA model of safety. Speaking of comparisons, how many people do coal plants kill every year with fly ash, just as a matter of course and not even as a safety failure? We aren’t comparing nuclear power risks to nothing.

ElFitz 5y ago
Oh, certainly, it is much safer than most things. But there still are huge conflicts of interest in self-certifying equipment, wether it’s an airplane or a nuclear power plant. In this case, following the crashes, the FAA's safety model is one of the reasons the EASA refused to delegate safety approval to the FAA on that specific plane. Clearly signalling they consider Boeing, the FAA and the FAA's safety model to be untrustworthy. I really don’t see why a process that is considered untrustworthy in the aerospace industry should be applied to nuclear power plants. Now, to be clear, if some US airline's plane full of US citizens suffers some malfunction due to some design defects and crashes in the middle of the US because some government agency in the US decided to trust some US plane manufacturer to certify itself, it’s sad, but it’s a US problem for the US people. I really couldn’t care less. Same with US power plants. Should a US nuclear power plant suffer catastrophic failure because some US regulator couldn’t learn from the FAA's mistake and decided to trust some US power plant operators with their own inspection, it would be a problem for the people living in and around the US. Regarding the totally unrelated coal plants tangent and the blatant attempt to change the topic, I don’t care either. Over here, considering the dangers they pose, it’s been decided they should be entirely phased out over the next year. You seem to be operating under the assumption that I am somehow against nuclear power, or consider it inherently too dangerous. I am not, and I do not. I’d even go as far as to say I consider it to be one of our best bets in facing climate change, air pollution, and our need to quickly and drastically lower global greenhouse gases emissions. [1]: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
- ElFitz 5y ago
  Can’t edit anymore, but that link was left by mistake.