Reddit reviews Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies
We found 15 Reddit comments about Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Princeton University Press
You might dig into Normal Accidents, a meta analysis of disasters. It's a staggering overview of million-dollar disasters.
The Wiki summary is also good. He describes the formula for a disaster as a complex, tightly coupled system where failures can lead to catastrophes. (As opposed to, say, a complex, tightly coupled system for allocating resources to farmers.)
If this is interesting to you, I recommend the book "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691004129
If you’re genuinely curious, Normal Accidents has a whole chapter devoted to maritime accidents. It isn’t the most engaging read, but it certainly does provide a good perspective on high risk technologies.
I recommend the book Normal Accidents. The author covers some well known accidents (Bhopal and Challenger disasters), and some not-well known accidents (like the Vajont Dam disaster) and how for many accidents, a series of events have to line up like cherries on a slot machine.
http://www.amazon.com/Normal-Accidents-Living-High-Risk-Technologies/dp/0691004129
In the case of dam failures, we've been building gravity dams for more than 2000 years. If you think we'd understand them by now and that no more of them would fail, then you'd be wrong. We've been building petroleum refineries for more than a century. If you think we'd understand them by now, and that no more of them would burst into flames, then you'd be wrong.
They have some good points. Similar points were made by Charles Perrow in this excellent book.
However we have a lot of experience running first and second generation reactors, we had enough statistics to see which things break and we have experience of running large scale industry where each accident results in much more lives lost then Fukushima (and even comparable with Chernobyl): commercial air travel. Thanks to good practices and improved design accident rate in commercial travel is enormously better now then in, let's say, 1960s. Safer nuclear power is possible and even the way it was run before (including Chernobyl and Fukushima) it is historically much safer then any credible alternative, such as coal or natural gas.
there are 3-4 books that I keep at least 2 copies on-hand of, because they are informative and I like giving them to people with no expectation of giving them back.
Ok this sounds like I am talking about religious texts - they aren't. They are:
- Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies
- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
- The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing
- The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns (Little Books. Big Profits)
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The first two are must-reads for engineers working in any kind of system, be it computers, electronics, mechanical, or people systems (project management, etc)
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The last 2 I tend to recommend to people who think that reasonable investment awareness and decisions requires a lot of specialized knowledge and attention
Based on the preliminary report, this is a pretty simplistic way of looking at the situation. After disengaging the electric trim, the pilots found the manual trim was incapable of correcting the problem. (This may or may not have been due to the speed of the aircraft.) At that point, there may have been no good decisions.
I'm not saying that pilot error might not have been involved, but let's not smear these people until the final report is out. Sometimes when things go wrong, there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
Personally, I think this just might have been a Normal Accident.
This book, Normal Accidents discusses the social side of technological complexity and risk. Has some bearing on the failure behind the technology here, I think.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is almost literally poetry. He won the Pulitzer for this book, and rightly so. That guy can write.
Dark Sun also by Richard Rhodes, talks about the development of the hydrogen bomb. It's actually better than The Making of The Atomic Bomb in terms of prose style, the depth of technical information, and the intimacy of the historical accounts.
Rhodes went on to write several other books on the topic. They're all excellent, as is his Holocaust book Merchants of Death.
Chernobyl 01:23:40 A redditor ( /u/R_Spc ) turned a post on Chernobyl into a book on the Chernobyl meltdown. I read his AMA a while back and bought it. I thought it was really good.
Normal Accidents is kind of peripheral to the topic, but also brilliant.
Oh, and there's this shudder.
> What else are you interested in?
The Eastern front of WWII (The Forgotten Soldier) and Stalin (The Court of the Red Czar) are both gold mines of grim fuckery, if that's the sort of thing you're into. Histories of technology (Masters of Doom) and science (The Strangest Man, about Paul Dirac) are fun to me as well.
I think we're on the same page. If you've got any ideas on those lines, I'm open to suggestions?
According to this article, 1) modern nuclear power plants are incredibly expensive, and 2) "For nuclear power to have a high impact on reducing greenhouse gases, an average of 12 reactors would have to be built worldwide each year until 2030, according to the Nuclear Energy Agency at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Right now, there are not even enough reactors under construction to replace those that are reaching the end of their lives."
Another issue: it takes a tremendous amount of water to cool the reactors. If we scale up to the number of plants we would need to make an impact on global warming, might this not have a major impact on ground water, waterways, etc.?
Another problem is that nuclear power only deals with electricity generation, but a great deal of greenhouse emissions comes from other energy uses, such as heating and cooling (which mainly come from natural gas).
This article points out that even France has run up against major limitations, most notably during the 2003 heat wave. Because of increased energy use coupled with a drought, nuclear plants were forced to dump overheated water into the rivers that they use as a source for cool water. The result was very damaging to the flora and fauna. The lack of water also led to them having to shut down plants. France ulitmately had to import 2,000 megawatts of electricity a day.
I don't think it is fair to dismiss the objections relating to proliferation and accidents, especially if we were to create as many plants as would be necessary to combat global warming. The US is a massively large country with many areas prone to earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. Not to mention that many high population areas already have major water problems.
Contractors cut corners when building places (just look at Boston's Big Dig). Would every plant be safe from terrorists using an airplane as a missile. Just because France hasn't had a major disaster, doesn't mean that they won't. You might want to check out Charles Perrow's book, Normal Accidents.
Given the cost (monetary for us today, as well as the potential problems we will pass on to future generations), why not take the money and go all out on solar and wind?
It appears that no IFBR have even been built. It's rare that any new magic bullet solution lives up to its promise. I'm not surprised that people are incredulous.
Note: All edits have been made before any comments have been posted (if anyone cares to comment).
Let me hit you with a different angle. These aren't about distillation, but they will give you a good feel for what's on the line if you go into industry. It's hard to get your head around, but your title comes with a certain amount of people blindly trusting you, and so that responsibility has to be carried with the hard knowledge of just how fast and bad things can fail if you don't have your bases covered.
And as a small treat, I will leave a related quote taken from my third recommendation, which is much less ChemE specific but is still great, fun reading for anyone, not just engineers:
Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down, Gordon
"In the course of a long professional life spent, or mis-spent, in the study of the strength of materials and structures I have had cause to examine a lot of accidents, many of them fatal. I have been forced to the conclusion that very few accidents just 'happen' in a morally neutral way. Nine out of ten accidents are caused, not by more or less abstruse technical effects, but by old fashioned human sin - often verging on plane wickedness. Of course I do not mean the more gilded and juicy sins like deliberate murder, large-scale fraud or Sex. It is squalid sins like carelessness, idleness, won't-learn-and-don't-need-to-ask, you-can't-tell-me-anything-about-my-job, pride, jealousy and greed that kill people."
- J.E.Gordon, Structures
https://www.amazon.com/Normal-Accidents-Living-High-Risk-Technologies/dp/0691004129
Great book on technology; technologies at one point will fail, and computer error / mechanical issues will be blamed as "human error", while in fact its' technology that failed.
http://www.amazon.com/Normal-Accidents-Living-High-Risk-Technologies/dp/0691004129
Normal Accidents. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691004129/ The idea is that the complex systems we build become effectively impossible to manage change or resolve unanticipated failures. I think about it every time management wants to "just route this traffic over this link instead" or "can't we just do ____?" Take a step back and anticipate the consequences and the whack-a-mole situation you may be creating.
Okay, lets get started!
is too vague for me to know what the hell you are talking about. Despite what you and the Italian government may think it is never possible to actually predict an earthquake.
But, thanks the the constant and consistent due diligence of the nuclear power community, they turned out to be flukes, rather than the norm.