Commercial nuclear power has increasingly been in the news lately. Westinghouse has received various approvals from the NRC for its new “advanced” design, Toshiba’s trying to get a small reactor going in Alaska, and general oil supply issues have brought nuclear back to the table again. It’s been nearly 30 years since Three Mile Island, 20 years since Chernobyl, and Americans’ fear of all things nuclear is starting to fade. We’ll probably see new licenses in the next year and construction of new reactors starting before the decade is out.
So I figured I might as well go ahead and get my position down on paper, because people have asked about it in the past.
I spent a few years working in nuclear power plants all over the country. I went into the industry agnostic about nuclear, and came out against it.
The reason I ended up against it is that I found that about 90% of the workers inside really had no idea what they were doing. About 10% of the workers did understand the technology that they were responsible for, and that 10% was feverishly running around trying to correct the mistakes of the 90%.
I felt that I was one of those 10%. Specifically, I would review the results of maintenance work that others had done days earlier and find that it had been done wrong (e.g. “oh crap, his analysis is wrong, that equipment is about to fail”). Faced with a huge number of these situations, I’d have to pick my battles about which equipment to send a crew in again to rework. Or spend even more time and rework it myself. Some problems I just had to let go.
Of course, you see incompetence like this in any industry or workplace, but in nuclear energy, the worst case failure scenario is truly terrible. If you have worker incompetence at a restaurant, or phone company, or auto factory, the worst case failure is far more limited in the damage that it does. And of course these failures happen every day, but hardly ever make the news.
Now, on the other side of the table you’ve got the massive potential of nuclear energy, which of course was originally “clean*, plentiful energy too cheap to meter”. So you’ve got a huge risk and a huge reward, and in the middle you have human beings running the enterprise, and therein is the problem: human nature. It’s human to be incompetent, have nepotism in the workplace, be laggard in firing poor workers, have lapses of memory or judgment, and so forth.
Communism held a lot of promise in its ideals of equity and efficient use of resources, but failed in the face of the inate human qualities of greed and selfishness. Nuclear power promises cheap and clean* energy, but fails in the face of the inate human quality of fallibility.
High risk and high reward, with man in the middle. I don’t trust the private sector to ever get that to work right.
Spring is approaching, and the radio tower at work is still up, so I thought maybe we’d be getting a bonus year of 
I think they were trying to discourage nesting activity so that they don’t run into trouble later this spring when they get around to finally taking down the tower.
Sadly, this will probably only push TPTB to get that tower down pronto. The hawks will probably find a new place to nest in the tall trees nearby, but it’ll take a couple years before the nest successfully produces chicks — first year nests usually fail, from what I’ve read.