Press releases we didn’t feel like finishing: “Homer Formby Has an Engrained Love of Wood.”
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“The crisis over Iraq has reminded the U.S. of several things it has tried hard to forget since 1973,” writes James Krohe Jr. in Illinois Times (September 6-12), “that the world is still running out of oil, that what is left will be expensive to recover and often must be pumped from environmentally precious places, that if we don’t pay at the pump for the full costs of delivering oil safely we will pay it in other ways, with dead seals on Alaskan beaches or dead GIs on Saudi deserts. The year 1979 taught Europe and Japan the risks of foreign oil dependency, and both took steps to wean themselves by investing in efficiency improvements. Japan, for example, imports less than half the oil per dollar of GNP than it did in 1973. The U.S. has actually lost ground, and today imports over half its oil, more than ever before. The Europeans and Japanese had an enormous advantage over the U.S. in the 1980s, of course, since they had functioning national governments.”
Trouble. “In September 1989, Westinghouse found that someone had disabled a safety alarm in the P reactor [which produces tritium for nuclear weapons in Savannah, Georgia] because it was annoying.” The alarm goes off if the cooling-water pumps malfunction. “From interviews with plant staff, [U.S. Department of Energy investigators] found an attitude that the silenced alarm was not important, but rather a nuisance, and that many personnel responsible for responding to alarms ‘do not pursue the reason for the alarm as much as they try to silence the alarm.’” Real trouble: “To deal with the safety culture problem, Westinghouse is upgrading training and hiring new people from the outside who bring with them the commercial nuclear industry’s concept of safety culture” (U.S. General Accounting Office, “Nuclear Safety: Concerns About Reactor Restart and Implications for DOE’s Safety Culture,” April 1990).
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
