[sketerpot]

Thank you for clarifying my terse statement; I can see how it could be taken as knocking the operators, which was not what I meant at all. Of course, the operators weren't a bunch of dimwits -- they had seriously flawed information about what was going on in the reactor, and the error-reporting system wasn't designed to cope with the kind of cascading failure that they saw. I wasn't criticizing the operators, but rather their actions, and that wasn't their fault.

(I can't even conceive of a reactor operator who would just start randomly fiddling with valves. That's just so far removed from everything I know about them, it would be like a horse reciting Shakespeare.)