@blatham,
blatham wrote:
Quote:The notion that government controls will eliminate all tragedies is absurd.
Indeed. Come to think of it, that's perhaps why I've never said such a thing.
Quote:How much better it would be if the government controlled the means of production?
Chernobyl.
No kidding. Or Three Mile Island. Or Fukushima.
Neither Three Mile Island nor Fukushima were at all comparable with Chernobyl, notwithstanding your ill-informed assertion that they were equivalent.
There were no fatalities and no detectable post event public health effects of any kind after Three Mile Island. No fatalities either at Fukushima, though it's too early to evaluate long term effects. Chernobyl involved about 100 short term fatalities, and several thousand entirely unnecessary cases of thyroid cancer due to the
government operators & regulators willful failure to notify the public, and implement the standard distribution of iodine pills to the surrounding population, to prevent the uptake of the radioactive iodine released. TMI involved some operator errors and some design deficiencies in instrumentation that contributed to them, but no violations of applicable regulations. Fukushima involved some design errors (emergency generators at ground level) and some violations of existing regulations ( excessive storage of spent fuel above the reactors) that directly contributed to the failure. However in both the post accident notifications and measures taken were timely and effective
- a stark contrast with the deliberate denial and deceptions and inept recovery measures of the Soviet operators and regulators.
The main difference was that both TMI and Fukushima were water moderated reactors enclosed in effective containment structures that prevented the release of significant contamination. Chernobyl was a carbon moderated reactor designed primarily for the production of plutonium - and it had no containment structure of any kind - nada, zilch -
design options for power reactors never implemented by any country other than the USSR .
The basic point here is once again you focus only on your favored abstractions of social, economic & political control, without troubling yourself in the least to understand - or take account of - the key physical facts attending these events. In short you, once again don't know what the **** you are writing about, apart from the half-baked political theories you get from your favored journalists, and which you use to evaluate everything, despite your lack of applicable knowledge and understanding.
I believe your "explanation" below amply confirms my observations here
blatham wrote:
But let's look at this:
Quote:What went wrong? Someone on the control side, I imagine, was either not doing their job or was paid to look the other way.
You're making my case here. You presuppose the
necessity of an external body doing quality/safety/honesty checks, controls and regulations. You presuppose this necessity because you understand that corporations/businesses (many of them, particularly large and powerful examples) cannot be counted on to do these tasks because their institutional goals - profit, growth, return to investors - often run exactly counter to larger community needs. If you are going to argue that a disaster resulting from a regulation not properly policed is primarily the fault of the regulating entity rather than the business interest which is guilty of failing to meet the regulations, you end up in a rather incoherent spot. Particularly if you hold that regulations ought to be minimized and if you hold that regulating entities, being government, ought to be reduced in size and effectiveness (which certainly is the reigning conservative theory).
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