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The US Chemical Safety Board

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The Federal agency responsible for investigating chemical and petrochemical accidents in the United States is the Chemical Safety Board ( link ). The mission of the Board is described in these terms: The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the agency�s board members are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The CSB�s mission is to �drive chemical safety change through independent investigation to protect people and the environment.� The CSB�s vision is �a nation safe from chemical disasters.� The CSB conducts root cause investigations of chemical accidents at fixed industrial facilities. Root causes are usually deficiencies in safety management systems, but can be any factor that would have prevented the accident if that factor had not occurred. Other accident causes often involve equipment failures, human errors, unforeseen chemical reactions or other hazards. The agency does
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Testing the NRC

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Serious nuclear accidents are rare but potentially devastating to people, land, and agriculture. (It appears that minor to moderate nuclear accidents are not nearly so rare, as James Mahaffey shows in  Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima .) Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are disasters that have given the public a better idea of how nuclear power reactors can go wrong, with serious and long-lasting effects. Reactors are also among the most complex industrial systems around, and accidents are common in complex, tightly coupled industrial systems. So how can we have reasonable confidence in the safety of nuclear reactors? One possible answer is that we cannot have reasonable confidence at all. However, there are hundreds of large nuclear reactors in the world, and 98 active nuclear reactors in the United States alone. So it is critical to have highly effective safety regulation and oversight of the nuclear pow
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Hegel on labor and freedom

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Hegel provided a powerful conception of human beings in the world and a rich conception of freedom. Key to that conception is the idea of self-creation through labor. Hegel had an "aesthetic" conception of labor: human beings confront the raw given of nature and transform it through intelligent effort into things they imagine that will satisfy their needs and desires. Alexandre Koj�ve's reading of Hegel is especially clear on Hegel's conception of labor and freedom. This is provided in Koj�ve's analysis of the Master-Slave section of Hegel's Phenomenology in his  Introduction to the Reading of Hegel . The key idea is expressed in these terms: The product of work is the worker's production. It is the realization of his project, of his idea; hence, it is he that is realized in and by this product, and consequently he contemplates himself when he contemplates it.... Therefore, it is by work, and only by work, that man realizes himself objectively as man. (Koj
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The sociology of scientific discipline formation

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There was a time in the philosophy of science when it may have been believed that scientific knowledge develops in a logical, linear way from observation and experiment to finished theory. This was something like the view presupposed by the founding logical positivists like Carnap and Reichenbach. But we now understand that the creation of a field of science is a social process with a great deal of contingency and path-dependence. The institutions through which science proceeds -- journals, funding agencies, academic departments, Ph.D. programs -- are all influenced by the particular interests and goals of a variety of actors, with the result that a field of science develops (or fails to develop) with a huge amount of contingency. Researchers in the history of science and the sociology of science and technology approach this problem in fairly different ways. Scott Frickel's 2004 book  Chemical Consequences: Environmental Mutagens, Scientist Activism, and the Rise of Genetic Toxicol
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Pervasive organizational and regulatory failures

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It is intriguing to observe how pervasive organizational and regulatory failures are in our collective lives. Once you are sensitized to these factors, you see them everywhere. A good example is in the business section of today's print version of the New York Times , August 1, 2019. There are at least five stories in this section that reflect the consequences of organizational and regulatory failure. The first and most obvious story is one that has received frequent mention in Understanding Society , the Boeing 737 Max disaster. In a story titled �FAA oversight of Boeing scrutinized", the reporters give information about a Senate hearing on FAA oversight earlier this week.  Members of the Senate Appropriations Committee questioned the process of certification of new aircraft currently in use by the FAA. Citing the Times story, Ms. Collins raised concerns over �instances in which FAA managers appeared to be more concerned with Boeing�s production timeline, rather than the saf
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Soviet nuclear disasters: Kyshtym

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The 1986 meltdown of reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was the greatest nuclear disaster the world has yet seen. Less well known is the Kyshtym disaster in 1957, which resulted in a massive release of radioactive material in the Eastern Ural region of the Soviet Union. This was a catastrophic underground explosion at a nuclear storage facility near the Mayak power plant in the Eastern Ural region of the USSR. Information about the disaster was tightly restricted by Soviet authorities, with predictably bad consequences. Zhores Medvedev was one of the first qualified scientists to provide information and hypotheses about the Kyshtym disaster. His book Nuclear Disaster in the Urals was written while he was in exile in Great Britain and appeared in 1980. It is fascinating to learn that his reasoning is based on his study of ecological, biological, and environmental research done by Soviet scientists between 1957 and 1980. Medvedev was able to piece together the extent
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Safety and accident analysis: Longford

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Andrew Hopkins has written a number of fascinating case studies of industrial accidents, usually in the field of petrochemicals. These books are crucial reading for anyone interested in arriving at a better understanding of technological safety in the context of complex systems involving high-energy and tightly-coupled processes. Especially interesting is his Lessons from Longford: The ESSO Gas Plant Explosion . The Longford refining plant suffered an explosion and fire in 1998 that killed two workers, badly injured others, and interrupted the supply of natural gas to the state of Victoria for two weeks. Hopkins is a sociologist, but has developed substantial expertise in the technical details of petrochemical refining plants. He served as an expert witness in the Royal Commission hearings that investigated the accident. The accounts he offers of these disasters are genuinely fascinating to read. Hopkins makes the now-familiar point that companies often seek to lay responsibility for a
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