When I was just a kid, someone said that I was a cynic. I got a dictionary and looked up the word. Turns out that it comes from an ancient Greek school of philosophy. These Cynics felt that human institutions were perfectible but they had not been perfected yet and they offered constructive criticism. Over the centuries, institutions who do not like to be criticized even when it is justified, distorted the meaning until the present day when the word has overtones of bitterness and harsh criticism.
The reason that I bring up this personal story is that it reflects how I feel about the global nuclear industry. The institutions that design, build, own, manage and regulate the global network of commercial nuclear reactors may be perfectible but they certainly have not achieved perfection yet. As with all institutions, they are prone to become self-centered and self-serving. Corruption is an ever present danger in any industry that is regulated by government. Owners who feel that they are immune to the human and environmental damage that may be caused by their industries are tempted to cut corners, bribe officials, ignore regulation, etc. in the pursuit of profits. Here are a few examples from this year.
In April, South Korean prosecutors charged four executives of the Korean Hydro and Nuclear Power with bribery. The charges were related to a lobbyist who collected six hundred thousand dollars from various suppliers to the Korean nuclear industry. The lobbyist guaranteed the suppliers that he could obtain contracts for them from friends in the industry. Although the whole idea of lobbying government officials is questionable, this clearly crossed the line from lobbying to bribery.
Taiwan impeached four senior executives at the state-owned Taiwan Nuclear Power Company and the former Bureau of Energy director-general in June. The charges were related to procurement corruption that inflated the cost of orders by six billion dollars over what was actually required. Other officials are expected to face impeachment over similar charges.
In June, Data Systems & Solutions, a company that provides reactor integrity solutions and reactor support services in the US and Europe, agreed to pay a eight million eight hundred thousand dollar fine for bribing officials at a Lithuanian nuclear power plant. The bribes were paid in order to obtain contracts for design, installation and support of instrumentation at the Lithuanian plant. The U.S. Department of Justice objected to a clear pattern of illegal activity that extended over years.
Some of these cases are excused by the industry on the grounds that they are rare and did not endanger the public. Unfortunately, they are not all that rare and it is difficult if not impossible to know how much they may have endangered the operational integrity of commercial reactors. I remember hearing a lecture by Robert McChesney in which he said that it was common knowledge in the media industry that it was not safe to write about corporate corruption. The unspoken rule was that if you had to write about it then you always said that the problems were related to “a few bad apples” and were not fundamental to the system.
From Nuclear-News.net:
