I have some thoughts over at Popular Mechanics, that arose from last week’s suborbital researchers’ conference in Boulder.
[Update a few minutes later]
Wayne Hale (who I was privileged to finally meet in person last week in Boulder) has some thoughts on “human rating.” I like his last quote. It reminds me of another one: “Every time they performed an investigation of the accident, all of the paperwork was found to be in order.”
SpaceX replaced aluminum nuts with steel because they found out from experience (losing demo 1) that corrosion trumps weight in the safety department. Experience is the key word because it’s impossible to anticipate all possible dangers. It’s ironic that (millimeter = 0.254 inch) slipped into an article on safety. Usually these things are discovered after the fact and that’s why it’s important to have a history of flight and be reluctant to make changes where human lives are at risk. You wouldn’t have wanted humans with the first test of the Merlin 1C for example.
The paperwork represents what they’ve found, not what they haven’t yet found.
Rand,
Reading Wayne’s article made me realize that safety standard compliance is just not an issue in the nuclear power world. We have reams of NRC regulations based in IEEE/ASME/ANI/SAE standards and independent QA folks who do not budge one inch on compliance with these regs/standards.
safety standard compliance is just not an issue in the nuclear power world. We have reams of NRC regulations based in IEEE/ASME/ANI/SAE standards
What proportion of the costs of nuclear power are due to these safety standards? How can you not consider costs an issue?
That’s all we need, for the suborbital business in the next thirty years to have the same history as nuclear power in the U.S. during the last thirty years.
Googaw, I’m not sure why the moderation software is tagging your posts as spam, but you might want to use a more normal-looking email address, instead of random letters (e.g., googaw-at-gmail.com).
> == “Every time they performed an investigation of the accident, all of
> the paperwork was found to be in order.”
I was on the space station Freedom program and theres was a manager who read the info on quality circles and TQMS processes and decided it meant that as long as all the paperwork was in order, the results must be a properly working system. So he shut down the SIL (systems integration lab) and had the testing group focused on verifying the descriptions of the fixes corresponded to the descriptions of the changes. If they did – it could be fielded without testing. If not, the system was to be held back until the paperwork could pass inspection.
Yeah, that didn’t end well either. It was why the space station freedom program was quietly terminated and the program turned over to Boeing to manage.
What proportion of the costs of nuclear power are due to these safety standards? How can you not consider costs an issue?
They are a major part of the costs. Every safety related component must have traceability back to the melt at the steel mill. We have QA holds at every step to ensure rigid adherence to the codes. Part of the problem with nuclear in the 70’s was that we tried to build way too many plants at the same time, and there just was not enough trained experienced people to go around at all the sites. That’s the reason we cannot build 100 plants in the next 20 years despite the wishes of certain politicians. There just is not enough trained craft (welders, pipfitters, electricians, etc), engineers, and project management people to build more than 2-3 plants at any one time. We will be starting at Vogtle 3&4(GA), South Texas Project 3&4, and VC Summer 2&3 (SC) first. With these three, we can get a big enough pool of trained people that us old farts left over from the first nuke era can get trained to take on the other 10-12 projects being planned right now.