alt Hacker NewsI'm surprised they made critical material purchasing decisions based on what some guy thinks he heard in a meeting, rather than official written documents written by and cross-checked by multiple engineers.
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There is almost never a single cause, here there was 12, it is often called the swiss cheese model. The root cause is a bad transcription, which probably happened many times, but for some reason, this time, all the safeguards failed. It happens sometimes, with catastrophic results. Hopefully, procedures will be adjusted, but in general, you can only minimize risks, not prevent catastrophic events entirely.
It was an expensive mistake, but thankfully, no one died.
Reminds me of the Starboard/Larboard nautical terminology. That must have created many disasters over the years. It took the British navy hundreds of years to rectify that one.
> I'm surprised they made critical material purchasing decisions based on what some guy thinks he heard in a meeting
Right? We don't store nuclear waste where I work ... BUT one time we needed to buy a bunch of ethernet cables, basically the same thing. We wrote down our requirements, came up with some options. The engineers evaluated the options before purchasing and checked what we received before installing it. There wasn't even a formal process, it's just ... how you do your job?
Obviously organizational dysfunction is a real thing, particularly at LANL, so I can definitely imagine how this sort of thing can fall through the cracks for various processes. But I feel like but requirements verification should be a rigorously enforced formal procedure before storing nuclear waste in perpetuity.