The Chalk River Reactor makes isotopes, not electricity. It also sells reactors and services. It is owned and operated by AECL, which has little if anything to do with the Province of Ontario. I know people who work there in operations. I’m pretty sure they are in a union. If they are, I’m reasonably certain that the union would have better sense than to make claims that they are not competent to make. Our PM should have the same good sense.
Risk management tends to be a highly technical subject that employs probability models to assess risks. The basis of risk management is that everything fails given enough time. Anything that is complex has many components and each is subject to failure from many causes, and each has its own unique durability. All of these things taken together become a map of many disasters and routes to each that are waiting to happen. The only thing known for sure is that eventually a disaster will happen no matter what is done; maintain the dickens out of it and it will still end in disaster sometime.
What can be known (in terms of probability) are intervals of time that that it is very likely there will be a disaster and also the risk of being wrong. Managers make choices of designing sewer systems that are expected to overflow and flood every 20 years (a fairly common value) or allocate land for residential sub-divisions next to flood plains that are expected to flood every 100 years. The consequences of both these examples are not catastrophic and so substantial risks of being wrong are acceptable (being wrong means that the true intervals are shorter than estimated).
That basically is how it works. Managers of a risk prone facility get to say how often it’s acceptable to have a disaster and how likely it’s acceptable for them to be wrong. It is the nature of probability solutions (or at least those based on Classical Inference) that disaster in the very next instant is just as likely as a disaster an instant before the end of the estimated time interval. Seem non-sensical, but that's probability for you. So, I wonder what the time interval is that is acceptable for a melt down of a nuclear reactor to occur. Is a thousand years good enough, and who wants to be wrong anyway? Oh well, who cares, I’m just one of the people that fills the set of’ nobody really lives up there anyway.’
In the world of probability, every thing and every instant is a roll of the dice. It is easy enough to hop on the band wagon if our PM and say it calls for leadership, there was really no risk, it was all the result of those Liberal appointments anyway and we have to save all those lives that depend on those isotopes. Because the consequences of a reactor accident are catastrophic, a risk management model would provide for a very long interval with little chance of being wrong. In such a model, the probability of an accident at any given time is small. A small probability yes, but restarting the reactor was never the less a roll of the dice and a departure from the estimated risk management model.. A forced restart likely would have added slightly to the risks.
The world of probability is mind numbing, yes, and something nobody want to hear about yes? That’s why we have regulatory agencies that presumably employ people who are competent to assess and manage risks. But, our PM took that responsibility himself, and neither ne nor his advisors are almost certainly not competent to do so. The roll of the dice was a popularity contest. Remember New Orleans and the American hurricane. Remember the Prez and his Brownie who was doing a hellveofa job? Same deal here; we just didn’t have a Canadian meltdown. It’s called shooting craps. Sometimes you loose. Crap. Our PM. Leadership isn’t about rolling dice. Any idiot can do that.
:lol::lol::angryfire:
