I'm submitting this based on the current top item "North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names" [0].
This accident was traced to a manager transcribing "inorganic absorbent" as "an organic absorbent". A more serious example of the need to have competent people with domain knowledge in the room and empowered when documents are written.
Not just when documents are written, but also when the practices they describe are implemented.
You don't need to know a lot of chemistry to realize that mixing organics with nitric acid is a bad idea. Why did none of the technicians doing the work say "hold on, this doesn't seem right"?
My guess, they were afraid to ruffle the feathers of their higher-ups. Yes, that's moronic, but this is the world we can find ourselves in IF the bosses are egotistical kingdom makers.
was an example of where that "empowerment" went wrong. It is usual for workers in Japanese factories to make continuous improvements in process for quality and cost and it is usually a good thing... but criticality accidents involve invisible dangers and "following procedures strictly" in that kind of work saves lives.
Notably Japan has been the world leader in nuclear accidents since the 1980s and some of that is that they kept working on things like fast reactors after many other countries quit and others that are cultural. For instance at American BWR reactors it is routine to test the isolation condenser whenever the reactor is shut down so everybody knew what it sounded like (LOUD!) when it worked but when somebody at Fukushima was asked if it was working they saw a little steam coming out the ports but had never seen it work before and didn't know what to expect.
I also want to put things in perspective: far, far more people are dying from fuckups with fossil fuels, but like "Florida man" (Florida has a law that crime reports must be published) we actually report and collect accidents involved in Nuclear production, so you can see every mistake. But you don't see mass protests because natural gas infrastructure failed in Texas and building pipes burst and people froze to death, including a young boy.
The main difference is that tiny mistakes in the nuclear industry can have massive consequences. A seemingly-trivial change can lead to continent-sized damages and permanent condemnation of city-sized areas of land.
Accidents in the fossil fuel industry are far more localized. Sure, you can blow up your own plant and kill a bunch of people, but it's not too hard to clean up the mess afterwards. Even something as horrific as the Deepwater Horizon disaster won't have much of a residual impact 10 years down the line.
> A seemingly-trivial change can lead to continent-sized damages and permanent condemnation of city-sized areas of land.
Chernobyl wasn't a "seemingly-trivial change" -- it was several successive groups all choosing to do the worse-possible thing, and it still killed and harmed fewer people than the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Let me rephrase that. People need to feel empowered to stop a potentially dangerous process. They definitely shouldn't be empowered to implement new dangerous processes without external review.
Or modify them. For instance the people at Tokaimura felt empowered to take steps to speed up the mixing, that, plus them mixing a higher enrichment blend led to disaster.
I'm surprised they made critical material purchasing decisions based on what some guy thinks he heard in a meeting, rather than official written documents written by and cross-checked by multiple engineers.
> I'm surprised they made critical material purchasing decisions based on what some guy thinks he heard in a meeting
Right? We don't store nuclear waste where I work ... BUT one time we needed to buy a bunch of ethernet cables, basically the same thing. We wrote down our requirements, came up with some options. The engineers evaluated the options before purchasing and checked what we received before installing it. There wasn't even a formal process, it's just ... how you do your job?
Obviously organizational dysfunction is a real thing, particularly at LANL, so I can definitely imagine how this sort of thing can fall through the cracks for various processes. But I feel like but requirements verification should be a rigorously enforced formal procedure before storing nuclear waste in perpetuity.
The difference is that in a large organization the people documenting the procedure, the people doing the procurement, the people receiving the order and the people packing the drums are all different people. Potentially in different buildings. You can't expect the original scientist who wrote the white paper based on experiments in a glovebox to be present every time they pack waste into drums.
There is almost never a single cause, here there was 12, it is often called the swiss cheese model. The root cause is a bad transcription, which probably happened many times, but for some reason, this time, all the safeguards failed. It happens sometimes, with catastrophic results. Hopefully, procedures will be adjusted, but in general, you can only minimize risks, not prevent catastrophic events entirely.
It was an expensive mistake, but thankfully, no one died.
Reminds me of the Starboard/Larboard nautical terminology.
That must have created many disasters over the years.
It took the British navy hundreds of years to rectify that one.
Thanks for highlighting that, I missed that in the video and was wondering why "anorganic" should be something different than "inorganic" (in my native German it's "anorganisch").
But still, I'm a bit alarmed that a trained nuclear technician would simply follow these instructions and mix organic material with acid without having any second thoughts about it...
I think it's worth remembering that this was a storage procedure that was also already abnormal/odd because of the specifics of the existing shielding. I think it's somewhat understandable for a technician to trust that the chemists know what they're doing in that kind of circumstance. If they had concerns, they may have even voiced them, but as is often the case, if the authority confirms that even though it's strange it's correct, it's not surprising that a technician would follow the directive. Even the authority figure may have verbally confirmed, "you said an organic absorbent??" "Yes, that's right, inorganic absorbent." Maybe even in a meeting that was meant to clarify written procedures.
Dictionaries are descriptive and do not prescribe what definition is correct. I am basing my definition on Norman Mailer's definition and I am defining "incorrect" as differing from a word's explicit definition. From the original definition: "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper". I can think of no clearer "factoid" than to justify a meaning that didn't exist until a dictionary published it.
In a broader sense, I am always entertained at how Americans will literally change dictionaries before admitting they used a word incorrectly. Sometimes it is tedious, but sometimes when they do it to scientific jargon, it risks muddying the waters of discourse about scientific phenomena with that from "pop science" definition. Psychology in particular is prone to this, with "learned helplessness" and "trauma bonding" being two phrases used incorrectly probably 9 out of 10 times I see them, to the extent that the fake meanings (which are always just the most literal interpretation of the phrase) are incorrectly being treated with the scientific basis of the originals despite having no real clinical evidence.
That's a super interesting hypothesis. From an information theory perspective, rarer tokens are more informative. Maybe this results in the caps lock tokens being weighted higher by the attention mechanism.
Interesting how the article only quotes part of the statement, leaving out "the FAA has been considering the use of Starlink since the prior administration to increase reliability at remote sites, including in Alaska".
Crusty it is. The fillet tool STILL totally sucks after 27 years, and I STILL frequently find myself needing to define surface geometry, fillet the surface, and use that to split the solid rather than just directly filleting the solid, in order to get the same type of fillet intersections that you get when you machine the part.
I keep a PowerPoint with screenshots of bizarre CATIA/ENOVIA error messages. It's up to 8 slides now, completely covered with errors. A few other highlights:
"As it was too important, the number of workspaces has been reduced."
"Primitive Value is not an AggrInstance"
"Instead of directly transforming an import, we recommend you apply the Add Position contextual command onto the solid. Then the required GSD transformation must be applied to the axis system of the Positioning Set. Do you want to go on with the transformation or quit the command and follow our recommendation? (Yes/No buttons)"
"A problem occurs during Process."
"Error: Error Stack is empty."
an empty dialog box with options of "OK" or "Cancel."
"An error condition has been detected, but no error information."
While performing a Surface to Surface analysis: Status: 104% complete, 1193hr 2min 46sec remaining.
"Cannot bitblt"
"Technological Package found use appropriate engine to handle it. It can not be saved as a File."
