point to ponder...

[acroyear]

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Imperial Oil - Cringely on technology:

Remember at Three Mile Island the reactor operators were taught how to pass the license test, not how the reactor actually worked, so when they were faced with unknown conditions they made uninformed — and bad — choices. The same sort of behavior seems to be happening in the current oil spill. We have already in this accident a record of people guessing too often when they should have known.

Comments

[ren-tigger.livejournal.com]

I fear I must disagree with what appears to be an un-researched observation about 3 Mile Island. The knuckle dragging oxygen thieves at TMI were all well trained in the nuclear industry, not just licensed monkey's. How do I know they were qualified, because I am/was a nuclear engineer in my foolish youth with the exact same education as they had. Which means I can bore you to death with details of polyboron and negative heat coefficients.
Sadly that makes 3 Mile Island a worse incident in what was allowed to occur. These QUALIFIED poo flinging monkeys IGNORED several alarms that were going off warning them of the problem, assuming they were false positives and instead of verifying said fact, they took time to finish their coffee, fill up and finish another cup before they even went to check/reset the alarms. 3 Mile Island could have been easily prevented had the union protected brain dead techs made the slightest effort to check the alarms.
What that means is I Cringely has just lost validity points since it appears he does not research before he posts. Kind of makes the rest of his article less credible since who knows what was researched vs. posted just because it sounds good.
And to substantiate my comments, I know about the TMI incident first hand since while I was studying to be a nuke, one of the union worshipping knuckle draggers came in with his tail between his legs to educate us on why all alarms must be taken seriously.
And I always toss this in, no one died at or because the TMI incident.
Sorry for the spout, I just hate when people skew history for their own benefit. (Not you J, I mean Cringely.)