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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> nuclear plants run by for profit organisations, where cutting corners will at some level be appreciated to ensure the bottom line

How does that explain the inept handling of Chernobyl?

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Cutting corners was appreciated to meet arbitrary plans and quotas. The failure mode wasn't that different.

Personal profit, zealotry, career seeking, incompetence, design flaws, political agenda. This also includes the design phase. The RBMK reactor was an irresponsible design from the onset, even without the unknowns.

Graphite moderated reactors are prone to graphite cracking, as also evidenced by UK's AGR reactor fleet. Maybe pebble bed reactors are safer, because new pebbles are continuosly fed in and the spent ones are extracted for reprocessing. We'll se how the HTR-10 and the HTR-PM fare.

From what i know about this accident, the profit in this case was not to loose face for the higher ups running the plant.

Good luck designing and operating a complex, dangerous system with purely altruistic, utterly selfless people.

> Good luck designing and operating a complex, dangerous system with purely altruistic, utterly selfless people.

I know you're beeing sarcastic, but you just have to run it by the book. No need to be a saint.

What I'm saying is a proper organization takes advantage of peoples' base motives, instead of trying to defy them.

Free markets work so well for that reason.

I don't think this works in any savety relevant industry or there are not many proper organizations. Most regulations are a response to accidents.

Lawsuits and loss of reputation has halved the value of Boeing from the 737MAX mistakes.

Yet, no one personally responsible has suffered in the slightest.

I think one of the test pilots was brought up on charges for lying to the FAA. There may be others. I haven't followed that aspect that closely.

All who owned stock in the company had that cut in half. Lots more lost their bonuses. The CEO lost his job.

Golden parachute. Millionaires losing bonuses or equity never need to tighten their belts. Almost everybody who lost equity had no say.

The test pilot would be covering for a person actually responsible. Charges were probably to force fingering that person. But if that person wasn't charged, then it is all just business expense.

The losses are borne by pension funds.

Did “profit” just get redefined?

I know nobody likes the wiseass but

Profit = to gain an advantage from something: profit from sth/doing sth I profited enormously from working with her.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/prof...

The handling, as in, the reaction once the top officials actually understood the magnitude of the situation, was nothing short of spectacular.

No expence was spared cleaning up the mess, removing top layer of soil at a massive scale and enclosing the failed reactor in sarcofagus. This expence and reputation damage contributed considerably to bringing the end of USSR.

You've got to keep in mind how little was known about lethality and handling of radiation back then, compared to today. In fact good chunk of today's knowledge comes from Chernobyl.

While we learned a lot from Chernobly, the culture back then was already very fearful of nuclear.

I mean more like having tools and equipment to handle the situation that previously simply didn't exist.

From hazmat suits to robots, what was avaliable was extremely basic.

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