My jaundiced view of civilian nuclear power is still colored by one of my most vivid experiences in the Navy nuclear reactor program. It came in the course of p

My jaundiced view of civilian nuclear power is still colored by one of my most vivid experiences in the Navy nuclear reactor program. It came in the course of prepping for the [chief] engineer's exam, after two years of sea duty running reactor plants aboard an aircraft carrier. That in turn had followed a year of intensive academic and practical nuclear propulsion training. Our "coaches," all senior nuke officers, had us work through the details of some what-if scenarios. Funny thing, we didn't seem to have covered those particular scenarios in our initial training. It was pretty scary; to this day I'm not convinced that conventional-design civilian nuclear reactors belong anywhere near population centers. What worried me wasn't the technology itself, but the human fallibility. In the Navy nuclear program, we had the occasional [foul]-up even though we were ferocious about doing things right. We used checklists for everything, even though we were required to have memorized practically every procedure, especially emergency procedures. (In an emergency, the first thing you did was to take the "immediate actions" to put the plant in a safe condition. The second thing you did was to get out the appropriate checklist and start working through it with your watch team.) We second-checked each other's work, and both the worker and the second-checker had to sign off on the work. Noncompliance with the prescribed safety procedures (and with the prescribed serious attitude) was guaranteed to get you in big trouble. The Navy systematically collected and disseminated lessons learned from throughout the nuclear fleet, and every nuclear ship's nuke operators routinely trained on those lessons. All this derived from the tone at the top, set early on by Admiral Rickover. Both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were caused (so far as is publicly known) by cascading human errors; apparently the same was true at Fukushima. I have no experience whatsoever in the civilian nuclear industry, but these accidents have reinforced my doubts about whether a civilian work force, even one heavily populated by ex-Navy types, can achieve the kind of zero-defect culture we strove for in the Navy.