THE VIDEO SHELF · incident analysis
Who Destroyed Three Mile Island? - Nickolas Means | The Lead Developer Austin 2018
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 HN readers recommended it
HN recommends it whenever a failure is blamed on human error, as a clear case study in looking for the systemic second story.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- LeadDev
- Topic
- incident analysis
- Format
- talk
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 4
- HN mentions in dataset
- 4
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2020–2024
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
Nickolas Means has an absolutely wonderful set of talks on themes like this. Particularly relevant here I think, is his talk: "Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?" - which goes through the events that occurred at the nuclear power plant, the systemic problems, and how to …
Huggernaut on Hacker News · 2020-10
In Type in the exact number of machines to proceedThere's an excellent talk from Nick Means (GitHub) called "Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?". Link: [VIDEO] One thing it discusses is how the alerts inside the control hub were so noisy, and were logged via a reasonably slow printer, that the alerts which suggested the …
lawrjone on Hacker News · 2021-02
In Judge: Citibank isn't entitled to $500M it sent to various creditors last AugustI'll have to dig up a citation. But the [] Three Mile Island accident was in part caused by (former) naval nuclear specialists making poor choices based on optimizing for the wrong things. My memory is fuzzy, but this 37 minute video [2] has a …
codebeaker on Hacker News · 2021-05
In White House eyes subsidies for nuclear plants to help meet climate targets
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.