Your usual fine work.
It is interesting to compare the aviation industry’s response to accidents and errors to other industries. In aviation, each “accident” is treated something to prevent in future, and having scrupulous and impartial oversight by the FAA means that the correct lessons get learned — mostly (though not always as this series shows).
Compare and contrast with banking. For a century, banking crises have been precipitated by the same thing — deeply irresponsible and often criminal behavior on the part of bankers. And yet the powers that be refuse to learn any sort of lesson from these failures — and the costs are immense. The Global Financial Crisis alone likely killed a lot more people than all the airplane crashes in history put together.
The financial industry is not alone in refusing to learn, of course. America‘s handling of utilities and infrastructure maintenance has been equally inept, costing consumers not just tens of billions of dollars, but in some cases their health or their very lives (e.g. Flint).
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Nuclear power is an interesting special case of “somewhat flawed” here. It has had its famous disasters and only learned slowly but is notoriously beset by excessive regulations, many not pertinent to safety, so that perfect compliance is nearly impossible. How did the FAA avoid this?
The big difference is I believe that pilots as a group have a huge influence within the FAA, and that keeps the regulation focused and clear, because they have a very strong personal interest in making sure that “the book” is short enough that they can learn it and execute it perfectly every time. Nuclear power plant operators do not have a similar sway within the NRC.
(But nuclear power still has an enviable safety record compared with fossil fuels, including Fukushima, Chernobyl and all the rest. My rough estimate is that nuclear power accidents have robbed people of 1 to 10 million years of life over the entire history of the industry, which is a lot, but consider that every year air pollution, mostly due to fossil fuels, kills as many as 9 million people per year, robbing them of on average 17 years of life, or about 150 million years of life per year. Nuclear power is 4% of the world’s total energy and fossil fuels 86% — if nuclear had the death rate of fossil fuels, you’d expect to lose seven millions years of life per year, and instead we lose between 30,000 and 300,000.
(Sorry, I’d always wanted to make that calculation. I still need to prove the “1 to 10 million years” part.)
