Watched 7Mate program on Chernobyl’s nuclear plant number 4 meltdown. I remember it very clearly and also read several books about it. Very scary.
The program showed a key feature very clearly – the part that human nature played – how the men in the control room all had their own lives and personal agendas and ability or lack of it and hierarchies and egos.
I knew a man who was a process control engineer (the sort of job that manages these control rooms). At the time he was running the control centre in a paper mill but he could just as well have been running the control centre in a nuclear power plant. Things used to go wrong quite regularly and there was a lot of ‘flying by the seat of your pants’ to get it fixed. With a paper mill the only damage was a business cost overhead of down time but with a nuclear power plant it could have been far more serious.
Another heavy industrial plant I got to watch close up was CSBP in Kwinana where they manufacture fertiliser hydrochloric acid fluorosilic acid sulphuric acid ammonia cyanide… Heavy dangerous stuff. The Occupational Health and Safety stuff on that site was huge. They had their own nursing station fire engine ambulance and a fully trained set of people. There were two types of alarm signals – one to warn that there was a dangerous situation and the other to get out alive if you could. We were supplied with a full cover for our cars in the carpark in the daytime because of the dust that fell on them and there was a car wash we could put them through. Everyone wore hard hats goggles long sleeve gear full footwear. There were showers and procedures (20 minute cold shower) for dealing with acid spills. This was a seriously dangerous processes being managed with full procedures and attention. Even so in the year I worked there there were deaths. They had full risk management procedures for events such as an ammonia ship at the wharf exploding with damage circles for the areas it would take out. These were all associated with probabilities (tiny). This is real stuff but if it had been nuclear I would have been scared out of my brain. As it was the risk was just personal to my lungs and possible increased cancer risk. And it felt like a daring experience to work there. Very few people get to see inside big industrial plants to get any idea of just how dangerous some of the processes they are dealing with are and just what goes on and the fact that incidents happen. Regularly.