The Shock of Recognition
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
We watch The Robe every Good Friday. Great stuff.
The actor, Jeff Morrow, who played the rough-hewn Centurion deserved a best supporting actor Oscar. Brilliant performance.
Folks, this relates to Don’s picture of all the ethics-compromised people around Christ as He is being nailed to the Cross.
In February of 2002, during an inspection of the reactor vessel head at the Davis Besse nuclear power plant, a hole the size of a grape-fruit was discovered at a CRDM nozzle going through inches of low alloy carbon steel down to the thin inconel stainless steel liner.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/brochures/br0353/index.html
Bear in mind that at pressurized water reactors like Davis Besse, the boron in boric acid dissolved within reactor coolant is used for core reactivity control so that control rods can be fully extended for a flat neutron flux and even fuen burnup during a two-year operating cycle. The inconel stainless steel liner is impervious to boric acid corrosion, but the low alloy steel of the reactor pressure vessel isn’t, so any boric acid leakage past the CRDM (control rod drive mechanism) seals on the reactor vessel head is a bad thing. Thus, in this event, (undetected leakage having already occurred) the only thing holding back the fires of creation was a slim sliver of inconel. Subsequent investigation revealed that this event could have been prevented by performing required inspections in previous outages. Unfortunately, the assigned system engineer and several other key people failed to do their jobs, and then lied about it. This being before politicization of the US DOJ, some of those individuals ended up spending time as federal guests. Here’s one of them:
https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2008/August/08-enrd-752.html
Bottom line: employees compromised their ethics and as a result we could have had a really bad nuclear accident. I would wager that in every single big technological accident – Deep Water Horizon, Boeing’s continuing software and structural failure problems with its aircraft, the 2023 Ohio train derailment, etc. – somewhere someone’s ethics got compromised. And sometimes innocent people die. This is why there are so many regulations in the nuclear power industry. Sadly, Tacitus’ proverb is still true today:
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.