[richlevy]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Don't know about you, but I am in favor of nuclear energy.

In theory, I am too. Unfortunately, I also worry about nuclear power in the hands of these guys or these guys.

I'm all for private ownership and the free market. Unfortunately, the free market is not always free. In the worse case, a company can negligently kill or injure thousands of people and avoid responsibility. Any attempt to hold them accountable financially would be met with cries of 'tort reform' and finding any one individual criminally responsible in a corporation is difficult.

The buck never seems to stop anywhere. Forgetting 3 Mile Island for a moment, tell me who was responsible for the 1994 blackout. Was it the control room staff, the repair teams, or the executives who were tasked with making sure enough money was spent to make sure that they were properly trained and equipped?

In many ways the CEO of First Energy knew before the blackout that he would never be personally accountable for any failure, so when he and his board were looking at budgets and making cuts, they probably didn't have a 'worst case' mentality. They were operating focused on budgets, not safety. This is the kind of mentality that put too few lifeboats on the Titanic.

Do I want him and his buddies in charge of a nuclear reactor in my back yard? Not unless Congress passes a law that he and his family have to live within 10 miles of it.

o nobody's surprise, the final report on the blackout released by a U.S.-Canadian task force Monday puts most of blame for the outage on Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp., faulting poor communications, inadequate training, and the company's failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines.

A silent failure of the alarm function in FirstEnergy's computerized Energy Management System (EMS) is listed in the final report as one of the direct causes of a blackout that eventually cut off electricity to 50 million people in eight states and Canada. The alarm system failed at the worst possible time: in the early afternoon of August 14th, at the critical moment of the blackout's earliest events. The glitch kept FirstEnergy's control room operators in the dark while three of the company's high voltage lines sagged into unkempt trees and "tripped" off. Because the computerized alarm failed silently, control room operators didn't know they were relying on outdated information; trusting their systems, they even discounted phone calls warning them about worsening conditions on their grid, according to the blackout report.