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Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies: Difference between revisions
Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (view source)
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An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable laws. | An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable laws. | ||
:— {{author|Ambrose Bierce}}, {{br|The Devil’s Dictionary}}}} | :— {{author|Ambrose Bierce}}, {{br|The Devil’s Dictionary}}}} | ||
{{quote|Humans in general do not reason well (even experts can be found to make simple mistakes in probabilities and interpretation of evidence); heroic effort would be needed to educate the general public in the skills needed to decide the complex issues of risk. | |||
:— {{author|Charles Perrow}}, ''Normal Accidents'', Chapter 9}} | |||
This is one of those “books that will change your life”. Well — that ''should'' change lives — that it was written in 1984 — {{author|Charles Perrow}} passed away in 2019 — and it isn’t on the bookshelf of every [[thought leader]] in the land suggests that, maybe it hasn’t: that the irrationalities that motivate so much of what we do are more pervasive than plainly written common sense. | This is one of those “books that will change your life”. Well — that ''should'' change lives — that it was written in 1984 — {{author|Charles Perrow}} passed away in 2019 — and it isn’t on the bookshelf of every [[thought leader]] in the land suggests that, maybe it hasn’t: that the irrationalities that motivate so much of what we do are more pervasive than plainly written common sense. | ||
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The classic case of such a tightly-coupled system is a nuclear power plant. Perrow was an accident investigator at the Three Mile Island incident. The early part of his book contains a fascinating blow-by-blow account of how TMI unfolded and how close it came to being catastrophically worse than it was. | The classic case of such a tightly-coupled system is a nuclear power plant. Perrow was an accident investigator at the Three Mile Island incident. The early part of his book contains a fascinating blow-by-blow account of how TMI unfolded and how close it came to being catastrophically worse than it was. | ||
Yet while there were no fatalities, it is premature to conclude that the technology is therefore safe. | Yet, while there were no fatalities, it is premature to conclude that the technology is therefore safe. | ||
{{Quote|“Large nuclear plants of 1,000 or so megawatts have not been operating very long—only about thirty-five to forty years of operating experience exists, and that constitutes “industrial infancy” for complicated, poorly understood transformation systems.”}} | {{Quote|“Large nuclear plants of 1,000 or so megawatts have not been operating very long—only about thirty-five to forty years of operating experience exists, and that constitutes “industrial infancy” for complicated, poorly understood transformation systems.”}} | ||