If only there was a culture that had a centuries-old tradition of committing painful ritual suicide to atone for failures... I would totally trust those guys to safely run a nuclear plant...
The idea is really old. In the Code of Hammurabi, a builder whose building collapses and kills someone is killed. If the building kills a son, the son of the builder is killed.
Simply having it around as a cultural trope ain't gonna do it. I'm talking about a voluntary pledge that assumes the force of law.
Turn it around: if an engineer thinks he can build a perfectly safe nuclear plant, why shouldn't he pledge his life? Similarly, if an engineer thinks she can't build a perfectly safe nuclear plant, that there is a significant risk she'll have to kill herself and leave her children motherless, would she agree to build it?
You have to be careful, because if you make the punishment too harsh, you'll scare away a lot of competent people, but attract a lot of useless morons who think everything they do is golden.
I guess that's the joke but it isn't mine. I don't think understanding the joke makes me a bigot.
Fact is, seppuku is a part of relatively recent Japanese culture whereas it's not a part of European culture. In Europe suicide has been socially unacceptable since the fall of the Roman Empire.
When I was in school to be an Architect, I was told that if I designed something, and I put my signature on blueprints and the structure I designed was built and failed in any sense, it is me, and me alone who is responsible.
So in a sense, this idea (while not nearly as extreme as yours) actually exists today. Architects and Engineers regularly take risks when they attempt to create something new. When it doesn't work, they are usually held accountable:
it's a ridiculous suggestion because
1) the workers at nuclear plants already risk their lives to help out when it's out of control
2) nuclear is so expensive to clean up that they run for decades after the initial design, presumably many of the initial designers are dead, and every incremental change should involve a suicide pact?
Remuneration for such an undertaking would have to go up by a large multiple to make such work attractive.
>Remuneration for such an undertaking would have to go up by a large multiple to make such work attractive.
This is the point. The cost of operating the plant would have to take into account what are currently deemed externalities. If that turned out to make the plant too expensive to run, that's the market.
1. Why do you think this was an engineering failure and not a business/implementation failure? For instance, in that famous pedestrian bridge collapse (a pedestrian walkway in a hotel in I think Kansas City collapsed shortly after opening, killing and injuring an absurd number of people), the bridge was designed correctly, but a deviation from the design in construction led to a fatal flaw.
2. What do you consider "perfect"? A lot of things aren't engineered to be perfect, because that's expensive. Instead, a lot of questions -- like with sea walls -- resolve around things like "ten year storms", "hundred year winds", "thousand year earthquakes". It's very possible that the flaw in this design was considered, but it was concluded that it would take a once-every-thousand-years disaster to breach the sea wall and cause a problem. Everyone involved may have agreed that a 1% chance of failure of the lifetime of the plant was acceptable.
Everything is a cost-benefit analysis. At some point, risks are declared "small enough" and everyone agrees to move forward. In this case, a regulatory agency in Japan -- representing the interests of the government and people -- could very easily have signed off on the risk posed by the positioning of the generators.
And more importantly, just because a small risk ends up being realized doesn't mean we were wrong to take it in the first place. Negligence can cause accidents, and negligence can exacerbate accidents, but also sometimes shit happens. Wasting time, money, and people trying to shrink a one-in-a-million risk just because it happened once is stupid, and we do it all the time.
Third, an obligatory "do you even know how bad coal is?" A hundred thousand miners in the US died mining coal in the last century. 6000 died in China in 2004. "Oh no," you say, "nuclear is extra bad because it poisons places for hundreds or thousands of years!" Underground coal fires: a seam of coal exposed through mining can catch fire and burn underground forever. We have no way to put them out. The most famous of these is in Pennsylvania, where a town had to be abandoned because the coal mine underneath it was burning and releasing noxious gasses up to the surface, along with the occasional flaming sinkhole. The fire is expected to keep burning for hundreds of years. There are dozens or hundreds of fires like in the US, and dozens or hundreds more in China.
I wouldn't want to go swimming in that water released from Fukushima, and by all accounts radiation poisoning is a terrible way to day. But so is being crushed to death in a mine collapse, or slowly starving to death underground in the dark, or dying of the various cancers and ailments related to the carcinogens coal plants routinely belch out. Everything we do has risks, from driving to taking a shower to building power plants.
You are presenting a false dichotomy: the choice is not between a world with nuclear disasters and a world with no disasters. It is a choice between nuclear disasters and non-nuclear disasters. We should seek to minimize the chance of nuclear disasters, yes, but we shouldn't treat them as "special" just because they're "scary". We should weigh the risk of a nuclear plant against the risk of non-nuclear plants, fairly, and make the decision that saves the most lives.
It was not as you describe; the original design was absolutely not correct. The original design was additionally so difficult to implement in reality that one of the manufacturers of the structural parts proposed a design change - one that made the flaws of the original twice as bad - that architects approved without any actual review.
I've been there several times, since it's a popular spot for conferences - looking up at the doors to nowhere in the lobby atrium is haunting.
Yeah, re-reading the article the designer doesn't sound blameless.
I'm probably willing to let my claim stand without anecdote (deviations from design occur outside the engineer's control), but honestly it's the weaker point, so let it drop. The more important one is that engineers design within a set of constraints, and if these parameters are exceeded, it is not the fault of the engineer.
The roof of my house has a certain maximum load it is designed to carry. This load is mostly based on expected snowfall. Conceivably, in a year with exceptional snow fall the maximum load could be exceeded and the roof could collapse, killing my family and myself. However, I -- both through my representative government which makes the rules on minimum maximums and also through my decision to live in such a home -- have decided the risk is acceptable.
If the architect has not misrepresented the maximum load of my roof, why should he be held responsible if it collapses in unexpectedly extreme weather and kills me? If he should not be punished, why is nuclear special?
