Cringely looks back at his Three Mile Island memories — and draws some parallels:
Now nuclear energy can be mighty dangerous and is not something to be messed with lightly, but another irony in this story is that nuclear power is actually pretty simple compared to many other industrial processes. The average chemical plant or oil refinery is vastly more complex than a nuclear power plant. The nuke plant heats water to run a steam turbine while a chemical plant can make thousands of complex products out of dozens of feedstocks. Their process control was totally automated 30 years ago and had an amazing level safety and interlock systems. A lot of effort was put into the management of chemical plant startup, shutdown, and maintenance. The chemical plant control system was designed to force the highest safety. So when manufacturing engineers from chemical plants looked at TMI, they were shocked to see the low-tech manner in which the reactors were controlled and monitored. To the chemical engineers it looked like an accident waiting to happen.The folks at TMI did not really know how to manage the technology of a nuclear power plant, and that led to a huge mess. The same thing has now happened to our economy. Congress changed the banking and mortgage lending rules without regard to their purpose. Many firms bought derivative securities without the slightest thought to the math behind them or the risk they were incurring. Nuclear power plants run on a chain reaction process of atomic decay. Our government and investment community created a chain reaction of economic decay.
Chemical plants were better designed than nuclear power plants in part because Congress did not legislate how the chemical industry designed their plants. But more importantly most chemical firms of that era had CEO’s with engineering degrees. They had respect for the technology and the risk of misusing it. But that doesn’t make the chemical industry blameless. With the off-shoring of manufacturing a lot of chemical production is now being done in places where there is little respect for the dangers of technology. The chemical industry’s TMI was Bhopal. There will be more Bhopal’s coming because those companies are now being managed by bean counters, not engineers.