It's a key example, and is the same failure mode nuclear power has.
Nuclear power could be engineered to be at least as safe as (most) commercial flight.
But it won't be - and this is absolutely predictable. Because of politics and money.
There is no answer to this, except to fix politics and money and make them as safe as commercial flight.
That's a whole different scale of problem to fixing climate change.
IMO this isn't a utopian fantasy, it's absolutely critical for species survival. But it doesn't look as if we're going to be starting the process any time soon.
Exporting the same problems to Mars or upload space or wherever won't solve them either.
Right, fair question. I read "engineering failures" above, so I want to highlight that this isn't so much an engineering failure as it is a capitalistic failure driven by incestuous relationships in US aerospace.
I do totally agree this is a real risk for any ___domain, especially energy which has so much money flowing, but I just don't think "engineering" is actually the issue which these things fail under
We don't have any technical defense against institutional failure. In some places and times there are cultural defenses, but those are often seen to erode.
The best defense is not to need any. There is much less need to defend against institutional failure in the case of renewables, because the technical failures to guard against have limited impact, well constrained in cost, time and space.
Honestly, I’m not well educated on Chernobyl’s mode of failure or political incentive structures. I’d probably agree with your implication that if procedures can’t be followed consistently/successfully than that is exactly an engineering failure, but as I said I do not know this circumstance
Well there's one example! Why would you discount it?