Jaczko Resigns!

[caraher]

8. I agree that the NRC shouldn't be a political football

However, the allusion to politics at Chernobyl has me a bit befuddled. What is the writer of the Forbes piece talking about? Who was the "political heavyweight in Chernobyl's control room?"

There's no doubt at all that the ill-advised test that led to disaster at Chernobyl was run in a manner that displayed a failure to understand the dynamics of the reactor. But everything I've been able to find trying to make sense of this throwaway line in an opinion piece suggests that the problem wasn't politics (in the usual sense) trumping engineers, but having engineers with one kind of expertise (electrical) running a test whose safe conduct required a different kind of expertise (reactor operation), exacerbated by details like a late start and a change in operator shifts. So on one hand there politics was involved in the way it frequently is whenever a "technological imperative" (in this case, to get the test done against some artificial deadline) comes into play; but on the other hand, it's not political in the sense that there was any kind of political struggle in the USSR that hinged in a meaningful way on whether or not the ill-fated test happened on schedule, or even happened at all.

I'm also curious as to exactly what Lt. Governor Scranton allegedly did to "interfere" in the control room at TMI. As far as I've been able to tell, all he did was visit the site and get annoyed when he learned that the utility had done some venting resulting in releases of radioactivity - an understandable annoyance after he'd given a press conference announcing there had been no releases, based on what he'd been told.