[ApolloFortyNine]

>But this is exactly the point. Catastrophes like Fukushima are practically always a combination of individual deficiencies in design, process, and operator errors. Designs can be improved, processes adapted, and people trained better, but that will not prevent accidents from happening. This is mostly because human imagination is limited and humans are fallible, and what‘s not covered by the previous two is lack of knowledge & understanding.

>I work in aerospace operations

It's odd you say this, since the entire aerospace industry exists because people at the time were willing to put up with the risks until we got where we are today.

[fbender]

If you talk space, the difference is that all relevant people were and are aware of the risks and do their job despite them. And they do their job in such a way that the risk is always minimized (through extensive preparation, Monitoring, …), you can handle a situation immediately or even recover from it (e.g. redundancy; failure detection, isolation, & recovery mechanisms; etc) and learn from it (post-mortem processes). Everything and everyone breathes risk awareness.

If you are talking aeronautics, the situation is fundamentally similar but also the scales are very different (also in terms of operating personnel vs. throughput). But more importantly, society in the majority seemed to have accepted a level of risk even though we know for sure that the next catastrophic event could happen any moment.