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Who Destroyed Three Mile Island? - Nickolas Means | The Lead Developer Austin 2018

LeadDev · talk · Watch on YouTube

Cloud, DevOps & reliabilityNuclear power & fusionSoftware practice, open source & careers

What it is

Nickolas Means recounts the 1979 Three Mile Island accident minute by minute, from the control rod insertion to the operator's decision to switch off emergency cooling. He argues that finding systemic causes is more useful than blaming individuals.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN recommends it whenever a failure is blamed on human error, as a clear case study in looking for the systemic second story.

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 4 different months
  • 2 strong recommendations
  • first 2020, last 2024

What HN commenters said

  1. “Nickolas Means has an absolutely wonderful set of talks on themes like this.”

    Three Mile Island accident analysis and finding the second story behind failures

    Huggernaut, 2020-10 · Strong recommendation · in “Type in the exact number of machines to proceed”

  2. “There's an excellent talk from Nick Means (GitHub) called "Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?".”

    Why Three Mile Island was a systems failure, not human error

    lawrjone, 2021-02 · Strong recommendation · in “Judge: Citibank isn't entitled to $500M it sent to various creditors last August”

  3. “this 37 minute video [2] has a breakdown”

    Breakdown of TMI causes including navy-trained operators and delayed printouts

    codebeaker, 2021-05 · Recommendation · in “White House eyes subsidies for nuclear plants to help meet climate targets”

  4. “I really appreciated this breakdown of the accident at Three Mile Island”

    Breakdown of Three Mile Island and the concept of the second story

    tudorw, 2024-01 · Recommendation · in “Why you've never been in a plane crash”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: three mile island, root cause, human error, systems failure, postmortems

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