Safety
on the Cheap
Robert Reich
Mar 16, 2011 12:12PM
Can we
please agree that in the real world corporations exist for one purpose, and one
purpose only — to make as much money as possible, which means cutting
costs as much as possible?
The New York Times reports that G.E.
marketed the Mark 1 boiling water reactors, used in TEPCO’s Fukushima
Daiichi plant, as cheaper to build than other reactors because they used a
comparatively smaller and less expensive containment structure.
Yet American safety officials have long thought the smaller
design more vulnerable to explosion and rupture in emergencies than competing
designs. (By the way, the same design is used in 23 American nuclear reactors
at 16 plants.)
In the
mid-1980s, Harold Denton, then an official with the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, said Mark 1 reactors had a 90 percent probability of bursting
should the fuel rods overheat and melt in an accident. A follow-up report from
a study group convened by the Commission concluded that “Mark 1 failure
within the first few hours following core melt would appear rather
likely.”
Sound
familiar?
The
National Commission appointed to investigate the giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last April recently concluded that BP
failed to adequately supervise Halliburton Company’s work on installing
the well.
This was
the case even though BP knew Halliburton lacked experience testing cement to
prevent blowouts and hadn’t performed adequately before on a similar job.
In short: Neither company bothered to spend the money to ensure adequate
testing of the cement.
Nor did
Massey Energy spend the money needed to ensure its mines were safe.
And so
on.
Don’t
get me wrong. No company can be expected to build a nuclear reactor, an oil
well, a coal mine, or anything else that’s one hundred percent safe under
all circumstances. The costs would be prohibitive. It’s unreasonable to
expect corporations to totally guard against small chances of every potential
accident.
Inevitably
there’s a tradeoff. Reasonable precaution means spending as much on
safety as the probability of a particular disaster occurring, multiplied by its
likely harm to human beings and the environment if it does occur.
Here’s the problem. Profit-making corporations have
every incentive to underestimate these probabilities and lowball the likely
harms.
This is why it’s necessary to have such things as
government regulators, why regulators must be independent of
the industries they regulate, and why regulators need enough resources to
enforce the regulations.
It’s
also why the public in every nation is endangered if the political clout of its
biggest corporations — BP, Halliburton, Massey, G.E., or TEPCO
— grows too large.
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