The investigation further revealed that the penalties imposed by the government on the private firms that make America’s nuclear weapons were typically just pinpricks, and that instead the firms annually were awarded large profits in the same years that major safety lapses occurred. Some were awarded new contracts despite repeated, avoidable accidents, including some that exposed workers to radiation.
I don't think the author was trying to create a conversation about the misalignment of the lab's management and safety. The article goes out of its way to sensationalize industrial accidents with "NUCLEAR RADIATION" to construct a narrative of uninformed fear of anything associated with nuclear material.
It reminded me a bit of some of the Discovery Channel's shows where they stress that if this multi-million ton container ship doesn't stay between the two entrance markers to the harbor, it kill everyone on board and probably destroy millions of dollars in goods. The entrance markers are 5 miles apart. The fact is accurate, the narrative is not.
If you want to be really scared go read the OSHA reports on any of DOW's chemical plants. I would be willing to wager that more people have died in the last 5 years of industrial accidents at their plants than all of Los Alamos. The Union Carbide Bhopal disaster killed over 2,000 people, one accident.
The point is the article was not written to compare the risk of accidents at Los Alamos to that of other similarly sized industries, nor was it written to highlight the misalignment of lab management with safety goals. It was written to characterize nuclear materials as scary and dangerous and carefully avoids any way for the reader to compare that risk with other risks they are both familiar with and are not concerned about.
On the topic of scary chemical plants: check out the Chemical Safety Board's videos on Youtube. Mostly computer-animated recreations of serious industrial accidents.
This is a great idea. I wish more of the more serious post-mortems were this thorough in our industry. But I guess people rarely die, they just have millions of peoples data leaked or result in serious service interruptions, so we don't have much of an incentive.
On the topic of those shows I hate the false drama in "will they make it on time".
Well yes, global logistics is incredible, the ship is working fine, the weather is good and there isn't a us destroyer for miles so of course they will.
I wish they'd just focus on the engineering and logistics and cut all the bullshit.
I'd also really love it if they'd take a swan dive on specific areas, navigation, maintenance, scheduling all that stuff.
If they made documentaries I'd like they probably wouldn't have many viewers.
Deadliest Catch was good in that regard, some interpersonal stuff (more in later seasons) but the barent sea is dramatic enough alone.
Is this another situation where these are the only companies that can do the work, so the government has no choice but to work with them in order to stay on some kind of schedule?
It must be pretty hard to disrupt the "government contracts for nuclear weapons production" industry..
>>It must be pretty hard to disrupt the "government contracts for nuclear weapons production" industry..
not to pick on you, but this is an interesting turn of phrase (I know it is sarcastic). There is an interesting gulf in SV culture nowadays between needing to "disrupt" an industry, and the industry actually just needing some renewed competition. A major problem is usually raising enough capital to really compete. And an interesting SV and banking assertion often made is that there is way too much capital chasing too few opportunities.
I guess that raising relatively small VC funds precludes putting large sums of money to work, because that means no diversification. On the other hand, if we are done with low-hanging-app-fruit for outsized returns, is the solution just to raise bigger funds? It seems there are problems that can be profitably solved with modern software, modern teams, and new ideas, but which are not solved due to too much diversification of capital.
Pretty much. VCs didn't start SpaceX, Tesla and Blue Origin, billionaires did after already earning money through other means.
Another issue that plays into diversification is the inherent riskiness of startups. Most will fail to create so much as a decent app while remaining on budget, who do you trust to create a reliable nuclear research lab? Even experts in the field might not have the requisite business experience, and if it fails it fails big time. You need someone like a Musk or Bezos to obsessively drive such an endeavor, and it's hard to pick out the future Musks and Bezoses if they haven't already proved themselves.
Yeah, in that context startups aren't really companies. They're proofs of executive competence. As a side benefit, if they are successful it enables the executives to self-capitalize.
The author buried the lede.