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by morning_gelato
2023 days ago
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I was thinking of Copenhagen Atomics' Waste Burner design where they describe their passive walk-away safety features as "Prime minister safety" [1]. > The CA Waste Burner has a set of systems governed by the laws of physics that cannot be overruled by humans, and which will cause the reactor to shut down safely if something goes wrong...This means that operators are not required to watch for alarms and act in accordance. The CA Waste Burner must be able to automatically shut down before any human can react to an alarm and choose what to do. If human action were ever required for operation, other than during startup procedures, then we would consider it a design failure... [1] https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-101126-3.00023-3 |
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This is really good, but humans have an amazing knack for messing stuff up and I really hope corners aren’t cut building and maintaining it.
What comes to mind is the situation in Japan where workers inadvertently had some material go critical, and while this was being investigated it was found that they were carrying waste uranium and nitric acid around by hand in buckets.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20263-japans-record-o...