'the experts at Areva understand the problem but, "the company's management is not going along". '

[bananas]

Nuclear dawn delayed in Finland
By Rob Broomby
BBC World Service, Olkiluoto, Finland
Wednesday, 8 July 2009

<snip>

Now, the safety regulator is questioning the designs for the reactor's nerve centre - the Instrumentation and Control system.

STUK - the Finnish safety regulator - has shown signs of irritation with the French company Areva who want to build many of Europe's future reactors.

For Jukka Laaksonen, director general of STUK, getting the instrumentation and control right is absolutely critical to the safety of the plant.

He says the experts at Areva understand the problem but, "the company's management is not going along".

<snip>

That's what happened with Bhopal and Challenger - the experts warned about the problem, but management didn't care.

[NNadir]

1. Really? That's what happened at Bhopal?

How many posts, exactly, have you written about chemical control systems at Chemical Plants?

Bhopal killed way more people than Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, dissolved them while they were still alive.

When was the last time you came here to obsessively demean every chemical plant on earth with Picayune little paranoid innumerate rhetoric?

Do you know what they made at Bhopal?

No?

Methyl isocyanate. Know what it is?

You don't?

Well, it would be a lot to expect an anti-nuke to know a shred of science, wouldn't it?

Like the stuff used in fertilizer, sort of like the stuff used to make fertilizers to fuel the biofuels industry...

Nuclear energy doesn't need to be perfect to be better than all the stuff that dumb fundie anti-nukes don't care about. It merely needs to be better than all the stuff that dumb fundie anti-nukes don't care about.

[TheMadMonk]

2. And strangely enough the standards of practice in the nuke industry ARE...

...better across the board than virtually any other industry.

[bananas]

4. Only because of whistle-blowers and "too much government regulation"

[bananas]

3. If you're a corporate shill, back criminal management over workers and engineers

...
Workers made complaints about the cuts through their union but were ignored. One employee was fired after going on a 15-day hunger strike. 70% of the plant's employees were fined before the disaster for refusing to deviate from the proper safety regulations under pressure from management.<3><18>
...
# Reports issued months before the incident by scientists within the Union Carbide corporation warned of the possibility of an accident almost identical to that which occurred in Bhopal. The reports were ignored and never reached senior staff.<2><17>

# Union Carbide was warned by American experts who visited the plant after 1981 of the potential of a "runaway reaction" in the MIC storage tank; local Indian authorities warned the company of problems on several occasions from 1979 onwards. Again, these warnings were not heeded.<2><17>
...

<snip>

In 1987, the Indian government summoned Warren Anderson, eight other executives and two company affiliates with homicide charges to appear in Indian court.<44> Union Carbide balked, saying the company is not under Indian jurisdiction.<44>

Beginning in 1991, the local authorities from Bhopal charged Warren Anderson, who had retired in 1986, with manslaughter, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Anderson has so far avoided an international arrest warrant and a US court summons. He was declared a fugitive from justice by the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal on February 1, 1992 for failing to appear at the court hearings in a culpable homicide case in which he was named the chief defendant. Orders were passed to the Government of India to press for an extradition from the United States, with whom India had an extradition treaty in place. The Bhopal Medical Appeal believe that "neither the American nor the Indian government seem interested in disturbing him with an extradition". Some allege that the Indian government has hesitated to put forth a strong case of extradition to the United States, fearing backlash from foreign investors who have become more important players in the Indian economy following liberalization. A seemingly apathetic attitude from the US government, which has failed to pursue the case, has also led to strong protests in the past, most notably by Greenpeace. A plea by India's Central Bureau of Investigation to dilute the charges from culpable homicide to criminal negligence has since been dismissed by the Indian courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of the decision of the lower federal courts in October 1993, meaning that victims of the Bhopal disaster could not seek damages in a US court.<40>

Meanwhile, very little of the money from the settlement reached with Union Carbide went to the survivors, and people in the area feel betrayed not only by Union Carbide (and chairman Warren Anderson), but also by their own politicians.<1><2> On the anniversary of the tragedy, effigies of Anderson and politicians are burnt.

<snip>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster