Fukushima
The root cause of the catastrophic failure of Fukushima:
- Because of the fears pushed by the anti-nuclear lobby
- This brought over-regulation to make safer something already safe
- The designs of power stations are fixed in time because of this over-regulation
- It takes 10+ years to get a design approved by regulators
- You cannot change any aspect of the design after approval
- This stifles any attempts at innovating and adapting the design and improving existing ones
- This forces operators to extend the life of old designs
- This prevents operators and designers to improve and upgrade designs with new ideas
- Innovation is therefore blocked, because of artificially imposed constraints
The Fukushima disaster was caused by a bad design (pumps in a basement) that was approved by regulators and could not be changed after the approval process.
If innovation was not blocked by regulations (brought by unfounded fears), the design could have been improved and issues fixed without going back to the process of a completely new design phase and approval process taking 10+ years.
To make an analogy: The software industry's agility process of self-improvement in almost real-time would not have been possible with this kind of over-regulation. We would not have seen computers, the internet, intelligent phones and so on.
The nuclear age could have seen innovations and we could have today “too cheap to meter” electricity around the world and improvements in the quality of life and the biosphere.
Fears and regulations by activists, lobbies and governments hungry with power have caused all those problems and failures to have a better life for all.
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