Freedom for Fission

[MarathoN]

But wouldn't that mean you die as well?

[Calum]

some sacrifices have to be made somewhere, and the preservation of human life at all costs is not in my opinion the top priority. This is complicated by the natural animal reaction to try and preserve your own personal life at all costs.

[muzzy]

Chernobyl was a piss-poor design as well.  It had no fail-safes on it.

I'll just have to comment on this one. Chernobyl HAD failsafes and safety systems. They had all been INTENTIONALLY turned off prior to the accident, because the safety systems wouldn't allow performing the experiment they were doing. And it just happens that the experiment was known to be dangerous by designers of the plant, and it was strictly against the safety code to perform a lot of the things that were done that day.

Go on, look up the net about it, you'll find that they were performing an experiment there, the staff on-site didn't have a clue about technical details of how the plant worked and didn't know about how to safely operate it. The design had some "counter-intuitive" details, which were properly documented and had safety systems so nobody could screw up, but they broke the rules, multiple times, and turned off most of the safety systems of the plant to proceed.

"Human error" is a polite way to put what happened as a result. Some jerk wanted to try out something with a live plant, and didn't bother to do the paperwork to get the experiment approved by people who understood stuff. Ofcourse, he probably knew it wouldn't be approved because it broke several safety regulations, and that's why they proceeded with it...

As long as workers are properly educated about the plant operations and safety, such events aren't going to happen again.

[Refalm]

As long as workers are properly educated about the plant operations and safety, such events aren't going to happen again.

That was never the problem in Chernobyl.

The city was a paradise, looked more like a west European city than a Russian one.
If an employee fucked up, they would be fired. And since unemployment doesn't exist in communism, they would get a new job in Siberia.

[Jenda]

If an employee fucked up, they would be fired.

I seriously doubt that. Everyone has a job because nobody gets fired. It always worked like that here, during communism.

[worker201]

What muzzy said is true.  Except it ought to be mentioned that the people doing the experiment with the failsafes off had never been to Chernobyl before that day.  I believe they were execs from another nuclear power station, which was of a different design.  This is why I advocated studying France in an earlier post - all their nuclear plants are the same.  This standardizes behavior and regulations, making things much safer.