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Remember, in the US it is a codified right to have a safe workplace. Meaning, employers have a legal responsibility to ensure risks to employee health are prope

by bumby 4y ago

Remember, in the US it is a codified right to have a safe workplace. Meaning, employers have a legal responsibility to ensure risks to employee health are properly mitigated. The article demonstrates a culture a LALN that doesn’t seem to do so, while the other DOE sites seem to do a better job.

kragen 4y ago
I don't think that LANL or any other DoE site approaches the level of risk of steel mills, farms, garbage trucks, and as you pointed out, construction sites. If there are people willing to undertake such risks to life and limb to grow food or collect garbage, why not to produce nuclear fuel? Of course it is important that those risks are within their control, not imposed on them by mismanagement or lack of information.
- bumby 4y ago
  I don't disagree that, in general, the risk is lower than many other jobs. But that missed the point. It also doesn't mean it would be okay for teachers to have an unsafe work environment, as long as it's safer than a steel mill. Those comparisons are poor measures because it's about mitigating the risk to a reasonable level. In the context of the article, risking a criticality event is not a reasonable level. Whether or not anyone is willing to take on additional risk also misses the point. Suppose I find people who are willing to live on an aquifer that is polluted by industrial waste because it's cheap land. Does that fact make it okay for the factory in your local area to disregard EPA regulations? I say no, because you have a codified right to certain standards of clean water. It's the same with safe job sites. You'll be able to find people on construction sites willing to work unsafe conditions; that doesn't alleviate their employer from legal responsibility. What the article is demonstrating is the inability of LANL to implement the proper mitigations, whether those are engineered, administrative, or protective equipment.
  - kragen 4y ago
    LANL has had three criticality accidents in 80 years, which have killed three people, two of them during WWII (after which things presumably improved) and the third in 01958. That's out of what is now 12000 people, which would lead you to expect about 40 deaths over that period of time, though presumably the workforce size has fluctuated over the years (but it was about 10000 by the end of 01946). I think that by any standard that's a reasonable level of risk. I don't hold with any of this "codified right" nonsense. What's right and wrong determines what the laws should be; the laws can't determine what's right and what's wrong. We have to determine what's right and what's wrong independently of the laws in order to figure out how they should be changed. Factories poisoning people was wrong before the EPA existed, is still wrong where the EPA doesn't have jurisdiction, and would still be wrong if the EPA allowed it.
    - bumby 4y ago
      I don't hold with any of this "codified right" nonsense. Forgive me, but the tone of this comes across like talking to someone from the sovereign citizen movement. Maybe you don't think workers have the right to a safe workplace, but the majority of US society does and has passed laws to ensure it. People don't believe in workers rights because there are laws; there are laws because people believe in workers rights. It's worth discussing if you think the law is wrong, but outright dismissing it as if it doesn't exist is a strange take. I hope for your sake you aren't a supervisor. So if I understand your position, it's that workers should not be guaranteed a safe workplace. You point out deaths, but overlook the other non-lethal incidents. So assume their bad practices lead to a criticality event that subjected other employees to radiation exposure. Employees that had no input into the decision or actions that lead to the risk. Is that ok in your opinion as long as the number of workplace injuries is below a threshold? Is your stance that the employer can just hand wave away any responsibility by essentially telling the employee "Welp, at least you're not working in a steel mill." By contrast, worker safety regulations define workers safety in this case on a radiation dose basis, irrespective of what goes on in a steel mill. I would say that's a much more objective measure of managing worker risk. The main point I'm making is that your comparison to the aggregate average workplace injury rate is the wrong perspective. The way organizations like OSHA look at employers is by comparing similar industries. So the safety record of a chemical processing plant isn't compared to something like a pharmacy because the nature of the risks are different. The article clearly states that LANL has a much worse safety record to comparable facilities. I agree that safety regulations can go too far, but you're selecting the wrong benchmark and using it to justify erosion away employee rights with a fairly subjective and arbitrary definition of what is determined reasonable risk.

by bumby 4y ago

kragen 4y ago

I don't think that LANL or any other DoE site approaches the level of risk of steel mills, farms, garbage trucks, and as you pointed out, construction sites. If there are people willing to undertake such risks to life and limb to grow food or collect garbage, why not to produce nuclear fuel? Of course it is important that those risks are within their control, not imposed on them by mismanagement or lack of information.

bumby 4y ago
I don't disagree that, in general, the risk is lower than many other jobs. But that missed the point. It also doesn't mean it would be okay for teachers to have an unsafe work environment, as long as it's safer than a steel mill. Those comparisons are poor measures because it's about mitigating the risk to a reasonable level. In the context of the article, risking a criticality event is not a reasonable level. Whether or not anyone is willing to take on additional risk also misses the point. Suppose I find people who are willing to live on an aquifer that is polluted by industrial waste because it's cheap land. Does that fact make it okay for the factory in your local area to disregard EPA regulations? I say no, because you have a codified right to certain standards of clean water. It's the same with safe job sites. You'll be able to find people on construction sites willing to work unsafe conditions; that doesn't alleviate their employer from legal responsibility. What the article is demonstrating is the inability of LANL to implement the proper mitigations, whether those are engineered, administrative, or protective equipment.
- kragen 4y ago
  LANL has had three criticality accidents in 80 years, which have killed three people, two of them during WWII (after which things presumably improved) and the third in 01958. That's out of what is now 12000 people, which would lead you to expect about 40 deaths over that period of time, though presumably the workforce size has fluctuated over the years (but it was about 10000 by the end of 01946). I think that by any standard that's a reasonable level of risk. I don't hold with any of this "codified right" nonsense. What's right and wrong determines what the laws should be; the laws can't determine what's right and what's wrong. We have to determine what's right and what's wrong independently of the laws in order to figure out how they should be changed. Factories poisoning people was wrong before the EPA existed, is still wrong where the EPA doesn't have jurisdiction, and would still be wrong if the EPA allowed it.
  - bumby 4y ago
    I don't hold with any of this "codified right" nonsense. Forgive me, but the tone of this comes across like talking to someone from the sovereign citizen movement. Maybe you don't think workers have the right to a safe workplace, but the majority of US society does and has passed laws to ensure it. People don't believe in workers rights because there are laws; there are laws because people believe in workers rights. It's worth discussing if you think the law is wrong, but outright dismissing it as if it doesn't exist is a strange take. I hope for your sake you aren't a supervisor. So if I understand your position, it's that workers should not be guaranteed a safe workplace. You point out deaths, but overlook the other non-lethal incidents. So assume their bad practices lead to a criticality event that subjected other employees to radiation exposure. Employees that had no input into the decision or actions that lead to the risk. Is that ok in your opinion as long as the number of workplace injuries is below a threshold? Is your stance that the employer can just hand wave away any responsibility by essentially telling the employee "Welp, at least you're not working in a steel mill." By contrast, worker safety regulations define workers safety in this case on a radiation dose basis, irrespective of what goes on in a steel mill. I would say that's a much more objective measure of managing worker risk. The main point I'm making is that your comparison to the aggregate average workplace injury rate is the wrong perspective. The way organizations like OSHA look at employers is by comparing similar industries. So the safety record of a chemical processing plant isn't compared to something like a pharmacy because the nature of the risks are different. The article clearly states that LANL has a much worse safety record to comparable facilities. I agree that safety regulations can go too far, but you're selecting the wrong benchmark and using it to justify erosion away employee rights with a fairly subjective and arbitrary definition of what is determined reasonable risk.