Chernobyl, engineering, and imagining the unimaginable

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away--scratch that. Back in the 1980s, a time my students consider concurrent with the Jurassic Era, my father was a safety and reliability consultant doing work for NASA and several U.S. government agencies. He couldn't tell us much about his work, but I do recall that he analyzed the safety hazards inherent in training firefighters to fight fires within airplanes and nuclear submarines. He was an expert at predicting every possible source of catastrophe and failure and uncovering all the ways whatever you were doing could damage, maim, or kill you. He was good at what he did, and many people valued his expertise.

But when Russia--then the USSR--came calling, he always said no. I don't know what he told his potential clients when he turned them down, but I distinctly recall what he told his family. First, because of some family history, he was afraid that if he went to the USSR they wouldn't let him come home. (Paranoid, maybe, but those were the times we were living in.) And second, he was dedicated to upholding strict standards of safety, but he had no confidence that the Soviets were similarly committed. "Look at Chernobyl," he said. "That's just the tip of the iceberg."

I thought of his words this morning when I read an article in the New York Times about the recent drone strike that cut a hole in the protective shell over the failed Chernobyl nuclear power plant. "For people of a certain age," says the article, "the explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, after years of heightened fears of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, was the stuff of nightmares."

Indeed it was--and, for some of us, still is. But what struck me most about the article is this paragraph:

"We did a lot of safety analysis, considering a lot of bad things that could happen," said Mr. Schmieman, 78, a retired civil engineer from Washington state who was a senior technical adviser on the project. "We considered earthquakes, tornadoes, heavy winds, 100-year snowfalls, all kinds of things. We didn't consider acts of war."

And there, in a nutshell, we see the problem inherent in the pursuit of safety. Even if you put the best minds in the world behind the task of predicting every imaginable problem, they're not going to be able to protect against the unimaginable ones.

Who imagines that any good can come from attacking a defunct and decaying nuclear plant? Where are the safety and reliability experts who could warn against such a rash act? Dad could drive me crazy sometimes with his detailed explanations about how every choice I made was bound to end in disaster, but if we don't have people like him taking the time to analyze potential hazards, who can we count on to keep the rest of us safe?

This, too, is the stuff of nightmares.