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I'm not sure you can assign blame to the safety test in precipitating the disaster (perhaps this wasn't even your intention). The overarching theme in the examp

I'm not sure you can assign blame to the safety test in precipitating the disaster (perhaps this wasn't even your intention). The overarching theme in the examples you mention is that the weakness was always there, safety test or not. I'd posit that Chernobyl would've happened eventually for example. It was a design with unstable boundary conditions operated in an environment of secrecy and disregard for safety. That's basically a situation where disasters are guarantee to happen. Nobody knows anything, the default operating procedure is to withhold crucial information and everyone is working under a "don't question your orders" mindset.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
It could have happened but they did blatantly disregard a lot of safety procedures in the name of the test. I should hope that would but be done during normal operation. Ps I read the book from Adam Higginbotham, I didn't just watch the show :) He also said it would have happened eventually but I doubt it would have in normal operation. In a power loss situation similar to what they were testing perhaps...
jjk166 5y ago
No, Chernobyl was only possible because so many design features specifically meant to prevent exactly this scenario were deliberately disabled, and then on top of this many more failures both technological and human had to coincide. Seriously, if you did not know it really happened, the reports would read like bad fiction given the huge numbers of obviously bad decisions and ridiculously improbable coincidences.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Fukushima Daiichi only needed a giant wave though.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    Fukushima Daiichi was a dramatically less severe disaster
- short_sells_poo 5y ago
  Again I'd posit that those steps were a consequence of a much deeper rooted issue. Yes the people doing the test were directly responsible by virtue of being in the control room at the time and making these decisions but in a culture of secrecy and bootlicking, what else do you expect? We can argue about technicalities all day long, but in my mind Chernobyl had the following critical issues: - The crew was kept deliberately in the dark about the weaknesses of the design. - The crew had the ability to disable all the safety measures and bring the reactor into a very unstable condition. Are you seriously going to place the main blame on the crew? They were pawns who made bad decisions in an environment where they were missing crucial information. In my mind, the buck stops with the people in power who discouraged the questioning of superiors, encouraged checkbox ticking exercises and withheld information by default.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    It wasn't a culture of secrecy and bootlicking though. These weren't pawns following flawed orders at gunpoint, these were knowledgeable engineers acting on their own volition. I am unequivocally putting 100% of the blame on the controllers who were well aware of how their reactor worked, who disregarded the test plan, who knowingly ignored countless warning signals going off as they repeatedly disabled more and more safety systems. Chernobyl was not the result of some arcane and unforeseen design flaw which surprised the operators, it took hours of manual labor to shut off the cooling lines and raise the control rods, putting the reactor into a state it was clearly never designed to be in. The controllers weren't under immense pressure to conduct this test, in fact the test was never approved, and was delayed because of its low priority. Anyone with two braincells to rub together should have said "hey all the people who were supposed to be doing this test aren't here, the reactor is acting so weird that we're struggling to even get the right starting conditions, the grid operator doesn't want us to run the test right now, we've tested this before and it didn't work, countless warnings are going off, this test was never approved to begin with, and there isn't actually any reason to do the test right now, let's postpone it." It's easy to say "of well they never should have been able to do this in the first place" but what does that actually look like? Reactor controllers need to be able to control the reactor. There are many reasonable scenarios where any given valve or control rod would need to be manipulated, and a long list of scenarios where you don't want to limit the options of engineers to avert a disaster. Having trained engineers be free to access what they need to but putting warning indicators in place to alert them about potentially hazardous actions is the right option. You could shift authority to other people, but at some point you have to trust that whoever it is you have placed in control of this thing will make reasonable choices. The secrecy and the bootlicking came after the reactor blew up. Yes, had the soviet government been transparent people could have been evacuated faster and workers trying to tame the reactor could have been better equipped. The number of casualties could have been reduced, but the disaster still would have happened. Everything is ultimately rooted in deeper issues. But none of those deeper issues made this disaster inevitable. The world is full of secretive bootlickers who have never pulled 94% of a reactor's control rods out. Secretive bootlicking does not necessitate nor encourage control rod removal. At the very worst, secretive bootlicking might prevent someone who was already going to remove a bunch of control rods from reconsidering that decision, but something else had to cause that decision to be made in the first place. That's not to say that addressing these issues can't be beneficial, and many changes were indeed implemented after the disaster, but the fact remains that this disaster didn't have to occur.
chasil 5y ago
I remember from the HBO series that the final design error was the graphite-tipped control rods. The graphite accelerated the reaction, which jammed the rods and prevented them from being fully inserted. Had the rods not been constructed with reaction accelerants, the disaster might not have been so severe.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

It could have happened but they did blatantly disregard a lot of safety procedures in the name of the test. I should hope that would but be done during normal operation. Ps I read the book from Adam Higginbotham, I didn't just watch the show :) He also said it would have happened eventually but I doubt it would have in normal operation. In a power loss situation similar to what they were testing perhaps...

jjk166 5y ago

No, Chernobyl was only possible because so many design features specifically meant to prevent exactly this scenario were deliberately disabled, and then on top of this many more failures both technological and human had to coincide. Seriously, if you did not know it really happened, the reports would read like bad fiction given the huge numbers of obviously bad decisions and ridiculously improbable coincidences.

raxxorrax 5y ago
Fukushima Daiichi only needed a giant wave though.
- jjk166 5y ago
  Fukushima Daiichi was a dramatically less severe disaster
short_sells_poo 5y ago
Again I'd posit that those steps were a consequence of a much deeper rooted issue. Yes the people doing the test were directly responsible by virtue of being in the control room at the time and making these decisions but in a culture of secrecy and bootlicking, what else do you expect? We can argue about technicalities all day long, but in my mind Chernobyl had the following critical issues: - The crew was kept deliberately in the dark about the weaknesses of the design. - The crew had the ability to disable all the safety measures and bring the reactor into a very unstable condition. Are you seriously going to place the main blame on the crew? They were pawns who made bad decisions in an environment where they were missing crucial information. In my mind, the buck stops with the people in power who discouraged the questioning of superiors, encouraged checkbox ticking exercises and withheld information by default.
- jjk166 5y ago
  It wasn't a culture of secrecy and bootlicking though. These weren't pawns following flawed orders at gunpoint, these were knowledgeable engineers acting on their own volition. I am unequivocally putting 100% of the blame on the controllers who were well aware of how their reactor worked, who disregarded the test plan, who knowingly ignored countless warning signals going off as they repeatedly disabled more and more safety systems. Chernobyl was not the result of some arcane and unforeseen design flaw which surprised the operators, it took hours of manual labor to shut off the cooling lines and raise the control rods, putting the reactor into a state it was clearly never designed to be in. The controllers weren't under immense pressure to conduct this test, in fact the test was never approved, and was delayed because of its low priority. Anyone with two braincells to rub together should have said "hey all the people who were supposed to be doing this test aren't here, the reactor is acting so weird that we're struggling to even get the right starting conditions, the grid operator doesn't want us to run the test right now, we've tested this before and it didn't work, countless warnings are going off, this test was never approved to begin with, and there isn't actually any reason to do the test right now, let's postpone it." It's easy to say "of well they never should have been able to do this in the first place" but what does that actually look like? Reactor controllers need to be able to control the reactor. There are many reasonable scenarios where any given valve or control rod would need to be manipulated, and a long list of scenarios where you don't want to limit the options of engineers to avert a disaster. Having trained engineers be free to access what they need to but putting warning indicators in place to alert them about potentially hazardous actions is the right option. You could shift authority to other people, but at some point you have to trust that whoever it is you have placed in control of this thing will make reasonable choices. The secrecy and the bootlicking came after the reactor blew up. Yes, had the soviet government been transparent people could have been evacuated faster and workers trying to tame the reactor could have been better equipped. The number of casualties could have been reduced, but the disaster still would have happened. Everything is ultimately rooted in deeper issues. But none of those deeper issues made this disaster inevitable. The world is full of secretive bootlickers who have never pulled 94% of a reactor's control rods out. Secretive bootlicking does not necessitate nor encourage control rod removal. At the very worst, secretive bootlicking might prevent someone who was already going to remove a bunch of control rods from reconsidering that decision, but something else had to cause that decision to be made in the first place. That's not to say that addressing these issues can't be beneficial, and many changes were indeed implemented after the disaster, but the fact remains that this disaster didn't have to occur.

chasil 5y ago

I remember from the HBO series that the final design error was the graphite-tipped control rods. The graphite accelerated the reaction, which jammed the rods and prevented them from being fully inserted. Had the rods not been constructed with reaction accelerants, the disaster might not have been so severe.