RE: Anatomy of a nuclear woops.
02-04-2018, 07:27 PM (This post was last modified: 06-26-2019, 05:33 PM by Dartz.)
02-04-2018, 07:27 PM (This post was last modified: 06-26-2019, 05:33 PM by Dartz.)
From: Split-Personality
To: "The Glow in the Dark Brigade"
Subj: Anatonomy of an atomic fuckup Part the Final
And now to the part you've all been waiting for.
---
The residents of Frigga knew they'd had a serious accident. Stellviacorp likely had an inkling that something had happened. At least as much as anyone living on the station knew. Fenspace as a whole still knew little - a mixture of embarrassment and shame prevented more than rumours making it out. Members of Frigga's Volunteer Fire Brigade were honoured in that year's honours list for 'confronting an extreme hazard'. Still, it seemed like those involved agreed it was best for everyone if the rumours of the accident remained exactly that.
The station's council was keenly aware of the effect a radiological panic would have on the station's economy. The culture of secrecy insinuated itself through the station. It became the thing that was never mentioned - like so many uncomfortable realities in fandom - it was consciously ignored.
"There is no truth in Fandom. Only stories - only the comfortable narrative. The same stories we always hear. You blow a reactor up and somebody has to be responsible, somebody has to be blamed. It’s a comfortable story. Fen love that. You get your heroes and your villains. No matter the reality, we'd be the villains." Tatyana, 'Tasha' Toptunov - speaking with The Quibbler.
Therefore, outside of those directly involved, the only people who had any concept of how serious the accident had been were the crew of the Challenger. From there it went to the ARSC, who went to the Space Patrol - assuming something far more sinister had happened.
With the Jordan Waide incident in full swing on the other side of the system, only a few cool heads prevent a disastrous misunderstanding.
Now is time for investigation.
The ARSC despatches its best people. They request help, from leading experts from Earth to assist.
"The Institute was requested to take part, as it had no political links to any organisation involved. We could give our scientific verdict without outside influence. There were still politics of course but they were a different sort. The institute is also the one place in the universe which had prior experience with this type of thing. Today, I am deputy chief administrator of T-27 reactor project. However, my first assignment with the Kurchatov Institute was in Ukraine, in 1986, as a student under a radiochemist. " - Elena Zhakarov , deputy chief administrator, Kurchatov Institute. Interview with Russia Today.
The Kurchatov institute, with its own fusion research program, provides a neutral voice in exchange for a chance to learn lessons.
The majority of the physical evidence is either intensely lethal, or has been incinerated. Thirty seconds in the reactor chamber proper is a lethal dose for an unprotected human being. Radiation hardened machines instead are used scout out the wreckage. The robot travels through the concrete ruins, crawling over collapsed standpipes. An exocomp is found deceased in a side passage, followed by another. Rats litter the passage - dead from radiation, then sterilised beyond decay.
The reactor's turbomachinery has survived mostly intact, but it contains no clues. Inside the reactor hall, the remnants of the steel torus shell of the core - inches thick - lies buckled and bent, warped by the intense heat of the fire inside. The core has collapsed into itself, crushed by its own weight in the heat. Little of the reactor lithium, or graphite, is found. One of the steam separators has fallen, breaking the steam lines to the turbine. The pressuriser tank has breached. The main coolant pumps still stand clear of the wreckage, scorched but intact. Little else is identifiable.
Only when the robots make their way into the formerly flooded galleries is the reactor core found, still shimmering hot with decay. It looks like black, smooth glass - more like frozen oil. It flowed like water, insulated by vacuum, finding its way through the galleries and steamlines beneath the core finally, finally hardening in the access shaft dug by Frigga's mining team, leaving a black glass waterfall, frozen in place. The robot managed to send one grainy photograph before expiring.
The glass waterfall is the single most radioactive object in the universe - an entire reactor's worth of radiation, concentrated inside a concrete and stone tomb. It will remain detectively radioactive for millennia to come. When the earth, the sun and the moon are gone, it will remain as an eternal monument to humanity's ability to fuck up.
The investigation ultimately concludes that the most likely cause of explosion was the fracture of a water pipe within the reactor due to a combination of age, metal fatigue, neutron embrittlement, overpressure and thermal expansion. The straw which broke the atomic camel's back was likely a water hammer from the recovering circulating pumps fracturing a water channel. The fractured channel damaged the inner liner enough for reactor water to reach the lithium breeder blanket. A flash lithium fire fuelled by coolant water destroyed the core.
Simple.
But that's not why the accident happened.
This is where the report goes into fun territory. They have to start interviewing every single person involved in both accidents. And this, is where the recriminations and finger-pointing begin. Nobody wants to be left holding this hot potato. Nobody wants to be the person who blew up a nuclear reactor that was, supposedly, impossible to blow up.
"Those involved felt they would be held responsible for a disaster which, in their minds, they had actively prevented. The incident wasn't anybody's fault, but they'd be the ones to take the blame for it, and everyone would be punished in the court of misinformed public opinion." - ARSC report on the reactor core breach at Frigga 77.
Lensherr blames the operators.
"The operators had no real concept of the physics behind the reactor, or it's limitations, or why those limitations had to exist. Over the years they had simply figured out what worked and what didn't, regardless of whether to procedure had been approved or not. The core should have been shut down when it was clear that the magnet heating was not happening, but the operators overrode the company test procedure specification, based on their experience of the core. The failure was unexpected, but the test was continued long after it should have been stopped. It was the fault of the operators." - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, Tagesschau, Das Erste.
The Operators Blame Lensherr's system or the core itself
"Nothing seemed strange. Everything looked normal. The pressure sensors on the coils always stuck if the reactor had been running for a long time. The sensors always froze with the cold. This had happened a dozen times without ever causing a problem. We had O2 sensors to give a depletion warning in the vent compartment - they triggered later but were more reliable" - Keisuke Morita - Operations Officer Dayshift, Frigga. Statement to ARSC investigation.
"It's the system's fault really. When we tried to take manual control that second SCRAM from DSS kept forcing us to override on each command. If we managed to get control of the pumps, even a few seconds earlier, our accident, would've just been an annoyance. The system didn't let us do what we needed to do to save the core." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.
Frigga, Blames the Parliament.
"We proposed it as a budget item last year, but the Parliament shot it down. We had to keep the lights on. We had to meet production for Bristol, or they'd just use that as more leverage against us. You can't have a mine without power to run the machines. You can't have a settlement without Power. So we had to keep the cores running. We didn't have a choice." -Jet Jaguar, speaking with Maico Tange.
Meanwhile, the Parliament blames Frigga.
"The cost of rebuilding the Power grid on Frigga - compared to the value generated by the settlement was just too high to consider. How am I supposed to explain to my constituents in Tokyo that their government is spending this much of their money on an asteroid settlement that, quite frankly, has openly opposed the government on numerous occasions? There were more important things we could do with it. The cost of delays due to possible breakdowns on Frigga seemed insignificant" - Yuko Arimura, MP for Minister for Social Justice, speaking on VBC's 'Prime Time'.
The situation is beyond toxic, and begging for something to happen, somewhere. Eventually, something had to catalyse it. The investigators focus on Frigga itself and the mindset behind the test.
One common theme on Frigga, however, quickly emerges. In every interview, one line emerges in some form or another.
"We've always done it that way, or, that's always happened, and it never caused a problem before."
This may sound familiar to a lot of people out there familiar with the history space exploration.
"Safety procedures did exist, but were routinely bypassed or outright ignored based on 'operating experience' or 'operating necessity'. Known risks would be taken once, in a situation where maybe the consequences of not taking the risk would've been potentially worse. But then it'd happen again - and again after that, until eventually the risk became routine and was taken as a matter of course while forgetting it was ever a risk in the first place. Each time nothing happened further proved this was safe method." - ARSC report on the reactor core breach at Frigga 77.
This right here, is normalisation of deviation. It is insidious, and it is cancerous. It's either a consequence of complacency, or something, somewhere is driving it to happen. It's built into the culture.
"They started a test which relied upon an indicator they knew to be faulty. This is foolish! The test has already failed before it has even been begun if the one indicator it depends upon is faulty. The failure to understand this one basic fact is the root cause of the accident. The second, is that they embarked upon this test to see what would fail - rather than as an exercise in proving a system believed to be in good order. They knew they had problems and they started anyway." - Elena Zhakarov , deputy chief administrator, Kurchatov Institute. Interview with Russia Today.
"That's just the way things are here. We're ten years behind everyone else. And we've two years to catch up. We're running on a fraction of the budget, while trying to expand to meet next year, and the year after that, fighting infrastructure so old, parts of it aren't even made anymore. It means you need to think on your feet and figure out what works, and what'll keep working to get you to the next milestone. We don't have time to think about things like that - if it works, do it. Otherwise we fall behind." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, speaking on VBC's 'Prime Time'.
"Find a Part. Find a Body. Make it Work." Bao Chang, Frigga Third-Shift Engineering Team Lead, Statement to ARSC Investigation
We have all the conditions for a fully developed case of Go Fever. Someone, somewhere has to put the brakes on it before disaster strikes.
Instead, we have Baron Frigga.
"Sometimes, when you're in real danger of being left behind, and everyone else is spending as much on one thruster assembly as you are on the entire bloody program, sometimes you need to fool nature to have a chance at being successful. The only people who complain are the ones who don't need to do it anymore." -Jet Jaguar. Baron Frigga.
This was Jet, speaking after being caught running a full oxygen atmosphere in the RF-47 at a race last year. The warbirds class the RF-47 competes in requires competitors to maintain standard atmospheric pressure in the cockpit. It didn't specify the composition - since they assumed nobody'd be reckless enough to run pure oxygen at atmospheric pressure. Until Jet and Asagiri gave it a go, to remove the Nitrogen circuit from the RF-47 and save a hundred kilos of weight.
It's the first time in the series' history that a mandatory technical change was introduced between races. She was very nearly asked to leave because of it.
In 2025:
Frigga exceeded its ore production targets by 25%. To the point where the surplus could be sold on the spot market, to feed back into the station's budget.
Frigga moved up Three full points on the Federation's Planetary Development Index - the largest single move since the index was established.
Frigga expanded from a population of 26 - including catgirls, to a population of over 500.
Frigga had the smallest budget overrun of any Millennium settlement - as a percentage of total budget allocation.
"Progress on 77 Frigga has been remarkably quick since accession to Crystal Millennium. If this continues, 77 Frigga and Eleanor City (Formerly New Birmingham) are on course to grow into a major waystation in the Main Belt within the next few years. The local economy is beginning to flourish. Active trade is reducing import costs, while major infrastructure projects such as the Starlight Express, or tourist attractions such as the artificial hotsprings, raise the quality of life, while drawing a steady stream of curious visitors. That this has been achieved on the meagerest of budget allocations is all the more worthy of praise." - Federation Travel Times.
Not said, is that in the same period, Frigga had more accidents resulting in injury than most similar sized settlements would have in five years. With hindsight it now seems likely that a lot of important corners were being cut in the process. The rust has been painted over, rather than repaired.
"She's the person flying along between lanes on a motorcycle at full speed when all other traffic has stopped on the motorway, trying to catch up to the front and hoping nobody tries to change lane before she makes it." - Comment on Maico Tange's article.
You very quickly end up with an organisation where running rough-shod over the normal basic considerations of safety and security becomes the normal. You get to the point where nobody realises they are taking a risk at all.
In the end, nobody realised they were taking the biggest risk of all. One basic assumption, shared by the designers, builders, operators and politicians, has just been proved false - that a handwaved fusion reactor cannot explode.
But if we live in a world where doing the impossible is routine, how are we surprised that the impossible happens?
--
The report concludes after this, that the accident was ultimately the consequence of:
A reliance too much on past experience, rather than on present examination to determine if a course of action is safe. (It's never caused a problem before...)
A culture that fed off of 'Go Fever' to get results and reach milestones, without considering the real risks being undertaken. (Otherwise we fall behind...)
A crew who had no full understanding of the physics of what they were operating, or formalised operating procedures. (They had simply figured out what worked...)
An assumption that incidents and accidents could be handled before the situation got out of control. (We've been doing this for years...)
A reactor design that left little margin for error in the first place, with monitoring systems prone to ambiguity and error. (The sensors always froze...)
A political situation that prevented the necessary funding for maintenance and upgrades being released.(There were more important things we could do with it....)
A management culture that openly favoured risk taking to achieve results (Sometimes you have to fool nature...)
Motions of censure for 'hazarding a settlement' and 'orchestrating a cover up' have already been proposed for many of those involved at next year's convention. It seems likely most will lose their voting privileges for a few years, along with the usual disqualification from Convention high office. The Frigga Volunteer Fire Brigade - and many of those involved in works to control the reactor, have been proposed for this year's honours list. Some names manage exist on both lists. Such is the way with heroes and villains.
Whatever else was done wrong, one thing was done absolutely right - and one thing only ever needs to be done right to prevent disaster.
"The approach to nuclear safety, which also, in my opinion, applies to any technologically complicated or potentially dangerous object, must be made up of three elements:
-The First; to make the object, for example a nuclear reactor, as maximally safe as possible.
-The Second, to make the operation of the object as maximally reliable as possible, but 'maximally' can never mean 100 percent reliability.
The philosophy of safety demands the introduction of a third element, which admits that just the same, an accident will take place. " - Valery Legasov - Chief of Chernobyl Accident Commission. Dictated Memoirs.
The impossible accident happened. The reactor containment survived the explosion and withstood the fire. Radiation was vented harmlessly to space. Radiation - in dangerous quantities - never intruded upon the inhabited spaces of Frigga. Whatever mistakes were made, this one critical thing was done correctly.
The accident was contained for long enough for it to be stopped. And it was stopped not with another handwave, but with careful, competent thought, measured risk and daring action.
There is no Frigga disaster. No tomb of ghouls. There will be no memorial wall to the dead. What happened remained an 'accident'. The nearest of near misses - of the sort that most people would normally take as a learning experience.
However, there is one conclusion that cannot be escaped; nothing that was happening on Frigga, would be unusual in Fenspace. Outside of the really big places that've attracted people who might actually know what they're doing - there're many still winging it with a wave and a prayer.
We live in a society that's grown used to the assumption that reality can be cheated with a handwave. The difficulties nature throws our way can just be vanished and dealt with at the consequence of an inconvenient quirk. We're used to dealing with black-box systems that are at times unfathomable, but whose compliant performance must be assumed because our lives depend on it. It breeds a sort of arrogance - an assumption of our own mastery of a world and powers we don't really understand but that we've just sort of figured out.
And when those powers stop insulating us from reality and the limits of our own capabilities - where that handwaved safety net tears wide open - there will be consequences.
"I'm alive. But they had to replace everything in the process. Everything. My body. Half my mind. Even my face is just a replica on a biomimetic substrate. In some ways, I'm a ghost - an android built from a dead man. I remember my life - but it doesn't really feel like I was the person to live it anymore." - Marco Steelwing - Panzer Kunst Gruppe. Formerly of Frigga Second Shift Engineering team.
To: "The Glow in the Dark Brigade"
Subj: Anatonomy of an atomic fuckup Part the Final
And now to the part you've all been waiting for.
---
The residents of Frigga knew they'd had a serious accident. Stellviacorp likely had an inkling that something had happened. At least as much as anyone living on the station knew. Fenspace as a whole still knew little - a mixture of embarrassment and shame prevented more than rumours making it out. Members of Frigga's Volunteer Fire Brigade were honoured in that year's honours list for 'confronting an extreme hazard'. Still, it seemed like those involved agreed it was best for everyone if the rumours of the accident remained exactly that.
The station's council was keenly aware of the effect a radiological panic would have on the station's economy. The culture of secrecy insinuated itself through the station. It became the thing that was never mentioned - like so many uncomfortable realities in fandom - it was consciously ignored.
"There is no truth in Fandom. Only stories - only the comfortable narrative. The same stories we always hear. You blow a reactor up and somebody has to be responsible, somebody has to be blamed. It’s a comfortable story. Fen love that. You get your heroes and your villains. No matter the reality, we'd be the villains." Tatyana, 'Tasha' Toptunov - speaking with The Quibbler.
Therefore, outside of those directly involved, the only people who had any concept of how serious the accident had been were the crew of the Challenger. From there it went to the ARSC, who went to the Space Patrol - assuming something far more sinister had happened.
With the Jordan Waide incident in full swing on the other side of the system, only a few cool heads prevent a disastrous misunderstanding.
Now is time for investigation.
The ARSC despatches its best people. They request help, from leading experts from Earth to assist.
"The Institute was requested to take part, as it had no political links to any organisation involved. We could give our scientific verdict without outside influence. There were still politics of course but they were a different sort. The institute is also the one place in the universe which had prior experience with this type of thing. Today, I am deputy chief administrator of T-27 reactor project. However, my first assignment with the Kurchatov Institute was in Ukraine, in 1986, as a student under a radiochemist. " - Elena Zhakarov , deputy chief administrator, Kurchatov Institute. Interview with Russia Today.
The Kurchatov institute, with its own fusion research program, provides a neutral voice in exchange for a chance to learn lessons.
The majority of the physical evidence is either intensely lethal, or has been incinerated. Thirty seconds in the reactor chamber proper is a lethal dose for an unprotected human being. Radiation hardened machines instead are used scout out the wreckage. The robot travels through the concrete ruins, crawling over collapsed standpipes. An exocomp is found deceased in a side passage, followed by another. Rats litter the passage - dead from radiation, then sterilised beyond decay.
The reactor's turbomachinery has survived mostly intact, but it contains no clues. Inside the reactor hall, the remnants of the steel torus shell of the core - inches thick - lies buckled and bent, warped by the intense heat of the fire inside. The core has collapsed into itself, crushed by its own weight in the heat. Little of the reactor lithium, or graphite, is found. One of the steam separators has fallen, breaking the steam lines to the turbine. The pressuriser tank has breached. The main coolant pumps still stand clear of the wreckage, scorched but intact. Little else is identifiable.
Only when the robots make their way into the formerly flooded galleries is the reactor core found, still shimmering hot with decay. It looks like black, smooth glass - more like frozen oil. It flowed like water, insulated by vacuum, finding its way through the galleries and steamlines beneath the core finally, finally hardening in the access shaft dug by Frigga's mining team, leaving a black glass waterfall, frozen in place. The robot managed to send one grainy photograph before expiring.
The glass waterfall is the single most radioactive object in the universe - an entire reactor's worth of radiation, concentrated inside a concrete and stone tomb. It will remain detectively radioactive for millennia to come. When the earth, the sun and the moon are gone, it will remain as an eternal monument to humanity's ability to fuck up.
The investigation ultimately concludes that the most likely cause of explosion was the fracture of a water pipe within the reactor due to a combination of age, metal fatigue, neutron embrittlement, overpressure and thermal expansion. The straw which broke the atomic camel's back was likely a water hammer from the recovering circulating pumps fracturing a water channel. The fractured channel damaged the inner liner enough for reactor water to reach the lithium breeder blanket. A flash lithium fire fuelled by coolant water destroyed the core.
Simple.
But that's not why the accident happened.
This is where the report goes into fun territory. They have to start interviewing every single person involved in both accidents. And this, is where the recriminations and finger-pointing begin. Nobody wants to be left holding this hot potato. Nobody wants to be the person who blew up a nuclear reactor that was, supposedly, impossible to blow up.
"Those involved felt they would be held responsible for a disaster which, in their minds, they had actively prevented. The incident wasn't anybody's fault, but they'd be the ones to take the blame for it, and everyone would be punished in the court of misinformed public opinion." - ARSC report on the reactor core breach at Frigga 77.
Lensherr blames the operators.
"The operators had no real concept of the physics behind the reactor, or it's limitations, or why those limitations had to exist. Over the years they had simply figured out what worked and what didn't, regardless of whether to procedure had been approved or not. The core should have been shut down when it was clear that the magnet heating was not happening, but the operators overrode the company test procedure specification, based on their experience of the core. The failure was unexpected, but the test was continued long after it should have been stopped. It was the fault of the operators." - Kurt Meier - Nuclear Commissioning Engineer. Lensherr Power Systems GmbH, Tagesschau, Das Erste.
The Operators Blame Lensherr's system or the core itself
"Nothing seemed strange. Everything looked normal. The pressure sensors on the coils always stuck if the reactor had been running for a long time. The sensors always froze with the cold. This had happened a dozen times without ever causing a problem. We had O2 sensors to give a depletion warning in the vent compartment - they triggered later but were more reliable" - Keisuke Morita - Operations Officer Dayshift, Frigga. Statement to ARSC investigation.
"It's the system's fault really. When we tried to take manual control that second SCRAM from DSS kept forcing us to override on each command. If we managed to get control of the pumps, even a few seconds earlier, our accident, would've just been an annoyance. The system didn't let us do what we needed to do to save the core." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, statement to ARSC investigation.
Frigga, Blames the Parliament.
"We proposed it as a budget item last year, but the Parliament shot it down. We had to keep the lights on. We had to meet production for Bristol, or they'd just use that as more leverage against us. You can't have a mine without power to run the machines. You can't have a settlement without Power. So we had to keep the cores running. We didn't have a choice." -Jet Jaguar, speaking with Maico Tange.
Meanwhile, the Parliament blames Frigga.
"The cost of rebuilding the Power grid on Frigga - compared to the value generated by the settlement was just too high to consider. How am I supposed to explain to my constituents in Tokyo that their government is spending this much of their money on an asteroid settlement that, quite frankly, has openly opposed the government on numerous occasions? There were more important things we could do with it. The cost of delays due to possible breakdowns on Frigga seemed insignificant" - Yuko Arimura, MP for Minister for Social Justice, speaking on VBC's 'Prime Time'.
The situation is beyond toxic, and begging for something to happen, somewhere. Eventually, something had to catalyse it. The investigators focus on Frigga itself and the mindset behind the test.
One common theme on Frigga, however, quickly emerges. In every interview, one line emerges in some form or another.
"We've always done it that way, or, that's always happened, and it never caused a problem before."
This may sound familiar to a lot of people out there familiar with the history space exploration.
"Safety procedures did exist, but were routinely bypassed or outright ignored based on 'operating experience' or 'operating necessity'. Known risks would be taken once, in a situation where maybe the consequences of not taking the risk would've been potentially worse. But then it'd happen again - and again after that, until eventually the risk became routine and was taken as a matter of course while forgetting it was ever a risk in the first place. Each time nothing happened further proved this was safe method." - ARSC report on the reactor core breach at Frigga 77.
This right here, is normalisation of deviation. It is insidious, and it is cancerous. It's either a consequence of complacency, or something, somewhere is driving it to happen. It's built into the culture.
"They started a test which relied upon an indicator they knew to be faulty. This is foolish! The test has already failed before it has even been begun if the one indicator it depends upon is faulty. The failure to understand this one basic fact is the root cause of the accident. The second, is that they embarked upon this test to see what would fail - rather than as an exercise in proving a system believed to be in good order. They knew they had problems and they started anyway." - Elena Zhakarov , deputy chief administrator, Kurchatov Institute. Interview with Russia Today.
"That's just the way things are here. We're ten years behind everyone else. And we've two years to catch up. We're running on a fraction of the budget, while trying to expand to meet next year, and the year after that, fighting infrastructure so old, parts of it aren't even made anymore. It means you need to think on your feet and figure out what works, and what'll keep working to get you to the next milestone. We don't have time to think about things like that - if it works, do it. Otherwise we fall behind." - Tatyana 'Tasha' Toptunov, speaking on VBC's 'Prime Time'.
"Find a Part. Find a Body. Make it Work." Bao Chang, Frigga Third-Shift Engineering Team Lead, Statement to ARSC Investigation
We have all the conditions for a fully developed case of Go Fever. Someone, somewhere has to put the brakes on it before disaster strikes.
Instead, we have Baron Frigga.
"Sometimes, when you're in real danger of being left behind, and everyone else is spending as much on one thruster assembly as you are on the entire bloody program, sometimes you need to fool nature to have a chance at being successful. The only people who complain are the ones who don't need to do it anymore." -Jet Jaguar. Baron Frigga.
This was Jet, speaking after being caught running a full oxygen atmosphere in the RF-47 at a race last year. The warbirds class the RF-47 competes in requires competitors to maintain standard atmospheric pressure in the cockpit. It didn't specify the composition - since they assumed nobody'd be reckless enough to run pure oxygen at atmospheric pressure. Until Jet and Asagiri gave it a go, to remove the Nitrogen circuit from the RF-47 and save a hundred kilos of weight.
It's the first time in the series' history that a mandatory technical change was introduced between races. She was very nearly asked to leave because of it.
In 2025:
Frigga exceeded its ore production targets by 25%. To the point where the surplus could be sold on the spot market, to feed back into the station's budget.
Frigga moved up Three full points on the Federation's Planetary Development Index - the largest single move since the index was established.
Frigga expanded from a population of 26 - including catgirls, to a population of over 500.
Frigga had the smallest budget overrun of any Millennium settlement - as a percentage of total budget allocation.
"Progress on 77 Frigga has been remarkably quick since accession to Crystal Millennium. If this continues, 77 Frigga and Eleanor City (Formerly New Birmingham) are on course to grow into a major waystation in the Main Belt within the next few years. The local economy is beginning to flourish. Active trade is reducing import costs, while major infrastructure projects such as the Starlight Express, or tourist attractions such as the artificial hotsprings, raise the quality of life, while drawing a steady stream of curious visitors. That this has been achieved on the meagerest of budget allocations is all the more worthy of praise." - Federation Travel Times.
Not said, is that in the same period, Frigga had more accidents resulting in injury than most similar sized settlements would have in five years. With hindsight it now seems likely that a lot of important corners were being cut in the process. The rust has been painted over, rather than repaired.
"She's the person flying along between lanes on a motorcycle at full speed when all other traffic has stopped on the motorway, trying to catch up to the front and hoping nobody tries to change lane before she makes it." - Comment on Maico Tange's article.
You very quickly end up with an organisation where running rough-shod over the normal basic considerations of safety and security becomes the normal. You get to the point where nobody realises they are taking a risk at all.
In the end, nobody realised they were taking the biggest risk of all. One basic assumption, shared by the designers, builders, operators and politicians, has just been proved false - that a handwaved fusion reactor cannot explode.
But if we live in a world where doing the impossible is routine, how are we surprised that the impossible happens?
--
The report concludes after this, that the accident was ultimately the consequence of:
A reliance too much on past experience, rather than on present examination to determine if a course of action is safe. (It's never caused a problem before...)
A culture that fed off of 'Go Fever' to get results and reach milestones, without considering the real risks being undertaken. (Otherwise we fall behind...)
A crew who had no full understanding of the physics of what they were operating, or formalised operating procedures. (They had simply figured out what worked...)
An assumption that incidents and accidents could be handled before the situation got out of control. (We've been doing this for years...)
A reactor design that left little margin for error in the first place, with monitoring systems prone to ambiguity and error. (The sensors always froze...)
A political situation that prevented the necessary funding for maintenance and upgrades being released.(There were more important things we could do with it....)
A management culture that openly favoured risk taking to achieve results (Sometimes you have to fool nature...)
Motions of censure for 'hazarding a settlement' and 'orchestrating a cover up' have already been proposed for many of those involved at next year's convention. It seems likely most will lose their voting privileges for a few years, along with the usual disqualification from Convention high office. The Frigga Volunteer Fire Brigade - and many of those involved in works to control the reactor, have been proposed for this year's honours list. Some names manage exist on both lists. Such is the way with heroes and villains.
Whatever else was done wrong, one thing was done absolutely right - and one thing only ever needs to be done right to prevent disaster.
"The approach to nuclear safety, which also, in my opinion, applies to any technologically complicated or potentially dangerous object, must be made up of three elements:
-The First; to make the object, for example a nuclear reactor, as maximally safe as possible.
-The Second, to make the operation of the object as maximally reliable as possible, but 'maximally' can never mean 100 percent reliability.
The philosophy of safety demands the introduction of a third element, which admits that just the same, an accident will take place. " - Valery Legasov - Chief of Chernobyl Accident Commission. Dictated Memoirs.
The impossible accident happened. The reactor containment survived the explosion and withstood the fire. Radiation was vented harmlessly to space. Radiation - in dangerous quantities - never intruded upon the inhabited spaces of Frigga. Whatever mistakes were made, this one critical thing was done correctly.
The accident was contained for long enough for it to be stopped. And it was stopped not with another handwave, but with careful, competent thought, measured risk and daring action.
There is no Frigga disaster. No tomb of ghouls. There will be no memorial wall to the dead. What happened remained an 'accident'. The nearest of near misses - of the sort that most people would normally take as a learning experience.
However, there is one conclusion that cannot be escaped; nothing that was happening on Frigga, would be unusual in Fenspace. Outside of the really big places that've attracted people who might actually know what they're doing - there're many still winging it with a wave and a prayer.
We live in a society that's grown used to the assumption that reality can be cheated with a handwave. The difficulties nature throws our way can just be vanished and dealt with at the consequence of an inconvenient quirk. We're used to dealing with black-box systems that are at times unfathomable, but whose compliant performance must be assumed because our lives depend on it. It breeds a sort of arrogance - an assumption of our own mastery of a world and powers we don't really understand but that we've just sort of figured out.
And when those powers stop insulating us from reality and the limits of our own capabilities - where that handwaved safety net tears wide open - there will be consequences.
"I'm alive. But they had to replace everything in the process. Everything. My body. Half my mind. Even my face is just a replica on a biomimetic substrate. In some ways, I'm a ghost - an android built from a dead man. I remember my life - but it doesn't really feel like I was the person to live it anymore." - Marco Steelwing - Panzer Kunst Gruppe. Formerly of Frigga Second Shift Engineering team.
Oh sweet meteor of death
Fall upon us.
Deliver us in fire
To Peace everlasting.
Fall upon us.
Deliver us in fire
To Peace everlasting.