Jun 25, 2018
Louis Bertrand is a long time resident of Durham Region, east of Toronto, home to 9 currently working CANDU reactors. His background is electrical engineering, specializing in electronics and firmware, the software that gives electronic devices their smarts. He currently is a full time professor in the School of Science and Engineering Technology at Durham College, in Oshawa. He will be presenting as an intervenor at the public hearings for the Pickering nuclear station re-licensing application.
Pickering CNSC public hearing agenda
Written submissions for download
Webcast of Live hearings - Week of June 25th
Location of
hearings
Louis
Bertrand on Facebook
Louis Bertrand on
Twitter
Tuesday is Rally Day!
12:30-1:30 approximately. Whenever the lunch break is called for by
Mr. Binder, head of the hearing tribunal
Facebook event
page
The Ontario Clean Air
Alliance promotes safer and cleaner alternatives to generation
by fission or by combustion. They have commissioned studies into
the effects of a Fukushima
scale accident at the Pickering site, as well as studies
challenging the accepted notions about nuclear power in
Ontario.
Dr. Nancy Leveson has studied software safety and proposes an
approach informed by system science to analyze the root causes of
accidents, and hopefully prevent them. Of particular interest is
her analysis of the fatal overdoses by the Therac-25, a radiation
therapy machine produced in the 1980s by Atomic Energy of Canada
Ltd. (AECL). Even if you don’t follow the details of the software
flaws, the story is quite dramatic. This was a wake-up call to the
medical industry that software safety cannot be analyzed the same
as hardware - scroll to the bottom of the page and look for The
Therac-25 Accidents. The other popular paper is “High Pressure
Steam Engines and Computer Software”, making the point that
technology often moves ahead faster than scientific understanding,
and bad things happen.
http://sunnyday.mit.edu
Dr. John Downer
Disowning Fukushima - Managing the credibility of nuclear
reliability assessment in the wake of disaster
And
In the Shadow of Tomioka - On the institutional invisibility of
nuclear disaster
Charles Perrow made a career of explaining why catastrophic
accidents like airliner crashes and nuclear plant meltdowns should
be considered normal.
The following two articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
are a harsh look at the denial surrounding Fukushima and the
nuclear industry in general
Nuclear denial - From Hiroshima to Fukushima
And
Fukushima and the inevitability of accidents
Email Louis Bertrand - louis@bertrandtech.ca