was an example of where that "empowerment" went wrong. It is usual for workers in Japanese factories to make continuous improvements in process for quality and cost and it is usually a good thing... but criticality accidents involve invisible dangers and "following procedures strictly" in that kind of work saves lives.
Notably Japan has been the world leader in nuclear accidents since the 1980s and some of that is that they kept working on things like fast reactors after many other countries quit and others that are cultural. For instance at American BWR reactors it is routine to test the isolation condenser whenever the reactor is shut down so everybody knew what it sounded like (LOUD!) when it worked but when somebody at Fukushima was asked if it was working they saw a little steam coming out the ports but had never seen it work before and didn't know what to expect.
alt Hacker News
The second accident here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents
was an example of where that "empowerment" went wrong. It is usual for workers in Japanese factories to make continuous improvements in process for quality and cost and it is usually a good thing... but criticality accidents involve invisible dangers and "following procedures strictly" in that kind of work saves lives.
Notably Japan has been the world leader in nuclear accidents since the 1980s and some of that is that they kept working on things like fast reactors after many other countries quit and others that are cultural. For instance at American BWR reactors it is routine to test the isolation condenser whenever the reactor is shut down so everybody knew what it sounded like (LOUD!) when it worked but when somebody at Fukushima was asked if it was working they saw a little steam coming out the ports but had never seen it work before and didn't know what to expect.