Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

22Brittle Powerprovided the same wrong indication of a liquid level;• wiring errors copied consistently onto wiring diagrams;•supposedly independent equipment all being water-damaged from beingstored together outdoors;•redundant machines all disabled by the same contaminated lubricating oil;•independent pumps whose inlet strainers all became clogged by the samekind of debris;•redundant pipes which all froze because the thermostat on one protectiveheater had been miswired; and• common-mode failure so peculiar that its origin was never discovered. 7Another instance concerned control rods, which are driven into a reactorcore to blot up excess neutrons and damp down the nuclear reaction, or drivenout of the core to let the reaction speed up. Unfortunately, the control rodsmoved out when commanded to move either in or out, because their twophase,three-wire drive motor, after one wire became disconnected, could startup on the remaining phase, a possibility which its designers had not expected.It turned out, however, that the windings of the drive motor were interactingwith the windings of another motor, belonging to a cooling blower, thathad been wired in parallel with them. In yet another case, relays designed tobe fail-safe—opening if their power failed—stuck shut because of sticky paint.Similar relays had proven highly reliable for thirty years, but investigation disclosedthat new staff at the manufacturer’s new plant had put the paint onthicker. 8Unpredictable interactionsHow could a twenty-nine-cent switch, burned out by improper testing,cause grotesque failure to cascade throughout the Apollo Thirteen spacecraft,so crippling it that the three astronauts barely coaxed it back to Earth? 9 Thatspacecraft was designed with the utmost care by highly qualified people whotried as hard as they could to make it reliable. They knew exactly what wasin the blueprints, and the blueprints showed the way the spacecraft had beenbuilt. Unfortunately, “when one of the … oxygen tanks blew up[,] it developedthat there were ‘relationships among the gears’ which the designersknew nothing about.” 10 Likewise, in 1980, as simple an initiating event asdropping a wrench socket down an Arkansas missile silo led to the explosiveejection of a megaton-range Titan warhead into a nearby field.The complexity of even the most advanced technical systems, however, isdwarfed by that of biological and social systems, as a simple example illus-