ANALYSIS: A Nuclear Lesson for Oil?

Anyone who has followed the nuclear power industry over the last three decades has to have flashbacks watching the BP oil spill unfold.

We don’t yet know exactly what caused the accident now wreaking such havoc in the Gulf of Mexico – but anyone involved in the painful evolution of nuclear energy’s safety culture can outline the final report. It will finger a combination of human errors – both managerial and technical; a technology pushed into unknown territory without any comprehensive analysis of the potential failures, and profit pressures propelling everyone full-steam ahead.

Why am I certain? Because that combination seems to pop up wherever human beings push the high tech envelope and think they’ve finally gotten past those pesky laws of physics. Some areas we can expect to hear about:

'WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE'


First, it IS rocket science – but the failures were probably not.  As they say on Star Trek, the oil and gas extraction industries are literally going "where no man has gone before." Only a decade ago, drilling to 35,000 feet was the stuff of science fiction. The Deepwater Horizon reached that depth in the subsea well drilled just months before this tragedy.

But the failures will be far more mundane. Look at the issues already identified – engineering documents not updated to reflect actual rig configuration, one of the five blowout preventer rams left in test mode, an undetected or ignored (we don’t know which) leak in a hydraulic system powering another ram,  and whether the well bore concrete was allowed to cure long enough to develop full strength. No rocket...

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