Japan-Style Nuclear Safety Errors Abound, Regulator Warns
Source: Bloomberg
Japan’s nuclear safety failures that led to last year’s disaster at Fukushima are being repeated in other countries that operate atomic reactors, according to France’s top regulator.
Nuclear safety focuses too much on technology and not enough on the human side of preventing accidents, Andre-Claude Lacoste, 70, the outgoing head of the French Autorite de Surete Nucleaire, said in an interview. France is the most dependent country in the world on nuclear power, which is produced from state-owned utility Electricite de France SA’s 58 reactors.
Regulators in some countries, which he declined to name, lack enough independence from industry and government to be able to identify nuclear safety shortfalls, Lacoste said. In some small nations, atomic experts regularly rotate between jobs at safety authorities, operators and research organizations, creating conflicts of interest and a deep-seated reluctance to raise the alarm about potentially dangerous situations.
“In some societies, solidarity between people is more important than transparency, and this means that errors aren’t questioned and are hard to correct,” said Lacoste, who has overseen French nuclear safety for two decades. “There are countries where transparency isn’t a virtue.”
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Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-29/japan-style-nuclear-safety-errors-abound-french-regulator-says
The US NRC is famous for succumbing to regulatory capture by industry.
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