• Question: Has anything ever gone wrong?

    Asked by anon-306262 on 13 Dec 2021. This question was also asked by anon-306574.
    • Photo: Jacob Moorman

      Jacob Moorman answered on 13 Dec 2021:

      Yes. Unfortunately people are not perfect and make mistakes, there have been 4 major nuclear accidents Windscale fire (UK) in 1957; 3 Mile Island (USA) in 1979; Chernobyl (Ukraine) in 1986 and Fukushima (Japan) in 2011. Thankfully these events are rare and safety is the number 1 priority for every single person within the nuclear industry. When an event like these does happen it provides a vital opportunity to learn from our mistakes. My company believes it is possible to achieve a target or zero accidents, zero incidents and zero harm (TargetZero).

    • Photo: Caroline Roche

      Caroline Roche answered on 14 Dec 2021:

      Yes, unfortunately even though everything is tested some things slip through. I’ve had equipment accidently moved during testing, luckily there was no one near by or in danger but it could have had serious consequences. There was an investigation and new procedures were put in place to try to make sure it didn’t happen again.
      It’s important that we learn from our mistakes so that near misses like mine don’t turn into big incidents like those Jacob described. (If you look at the Accident Triangle, you can see how they interact.)

    • Photo: Marianne Morris

      Marianne Morris answered on 15 Dec 2021:

      Yes, as with all things, people make mistakes, equipment fails, unexpected things happen that are beyond our control. Perfection is not something anyone can realistically achieve.

      As an industry, however, what we are really good at is putting multiple layers of protection in place so that if one thing goes wrong, the consequences aren’t generally severe. For a really big problem to occur, several independent things would need to go wrong all at the same time. We are also good at sharing and learning from experience. So even when we catch something before it goes wrong (a near miss), we still review the event and question what could we do differently to prevent that happening again.

    • Photo: Rea Kozlowski

      Rea Kozlowski answered on 16 Dec 2021:

      In case of nuclear power, Jacob mentioned the big events.

      In case of my work, regularly. For example today: I made some cement but apparently my mixture was to watery, and not the whole sample got stiff.

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