Happy Anniversary
On this day 22 years ago, the V.I. Lenin Memorial Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station exploded.
The accident always fascinated me, though the reasons has morphed over the years. The scale of the disaster is the most obvious, as are the repurcussions to the nuclear energy industry and global energy supply at large.
The issue of operational design, user interface design, and human systems all played a role in the accident. As I've gotten older, the 'human systems' part of it is particularly intriguing. How many of you technical people have been through some sort of failure that brought a computer system down? Ever studied all the little things that went wrong in creating that downtime? I have.. and I'm always humbled to think that nuclear plant operations are not that much different than anything else you and I do. A system of procedures, steps, checks.. all of which could interact in such a way as to produce an error.
The worst consequences of a 'mistake' I make might bring a website down. If I'm working on a large enough site, maybe a bit of lost revenue. Or perhaps information theft. It pales in comparison to rendering a stretch of the planet permanently uninhabitable and poisoning thousands of people for a generation or two.
If the wiki article is right, Chernobyl suffered 3 accidents, something I didn't know until today. A partial meltdown in 1982, the famous accident in 1986, and a fire in 1991. What always blew my mind is that the plant continued to operate until the early 2000's.
The accident always fascinated me, though the reasons has morphed over the years. The scale of the disaster is the most obvious, as are the repurcussions to the nuclear energy industry and global energy supply at large.
The issue of operational design, user interface design, and human systems all played a role in the accident. As I've gotten older, the 'human systems' part of it is particularly intriguing. How many of you technical people have been through some sort of failure that brought a computer system down? Ever studied all the little things that went wrong in creating that downtime? I have.. and I'm always humbled to think that nuclear plant operations are not that much different than anything else you and I do. A system of procedures, steps, checks.. all of which could interact in such a way as to produce an error.
The worst consequences of a 'mistake' I make might bring a website down. If I'm working on a large enough site, maybe a bit of lost revenue. Or perhaps information theft. It pales in comparison to rendering a stretch of the planet permanently uninhabitable and poisoning thousands of people for a generation or two.
If the wiki article is right, Chernobyl suffered 3 accidents, something I didn't know until today. A partial meltdown in 1982, the famous accident in 1986, and a fire in 1991. What always blew my mind is that the plant continued to operate until the early 2000's.