Or so said author Terry Pratchett in a talk at a World Science Fiction convention. He was describing his experiences as Press Officer for some nuclear power stations. I haven't found an online reference to the talk (though I found this reference to "the Fred factor"). Here are two of the "Fred" stories that Terry told, as I recall them. I was neutral to positive on nuclear power before that talk. Afterward...
SF-fantasy author Terry Pratchett sometimes mentions in his bios that he's done things that people would find stranger than anything he writes about. Referring to his time doing PR for a nuclear power station, he has said that he would "write a book about his experiences, if he thought anyone would believe it". I was privileged to hear him talk about some of those experiences.
The problem with nuclear power, he said, was Fred. Fred was apparently a handyman they had working at one of the nuclear power stations. Suppose, Terry asked us, you were asked to connect three wires for three independent control systems for a nuclear power plant. Would you route them all through the same hole in a parking structure wall, with a sharp metal edge above them in the hole? Fred would. Fred did. And one auto accident caused... well, Terry left that to our imaginations.
If you had a bucket of radioactively contaminated water, Terry asked us, would you dump it down a toilet? Fred did. Fortunately, this was discovered before the cesspool was drained, so the spill was somewhat contained. Terry was put in charge of organizing the cleanup. He quickly had on site an emergency nuclear cleanup team and a crew of septic workers. But the septic workers said "I'm not touching that, it's radioactive!' and the nuclear cleanup workers said "I'm not touching that, it's sewage!" Eventually he got things sorted out so that the entire contents of the cesspool were transported to an incinerator, with people with Geiger counters stationed to pull out the actually radioactive chunks left over. He didn't mention whether anyone monitored the smoke from the incinerator.
I apologize if this diary seems flip after reading about workers in Japan getting serious beta-radiation burns on their feet from wading through water that nobody realized was contaminated, as the threat level ratchets up from Three Mile Island toward Chernobyl. But it's sometimes possible to ignore big events as being one-off -- it couldn't happen again, it was a freak accident! My point here is that it doesn't take a major earthquake and tsunami to create a major accident that affects an ever increasing area. Something will go wrong -- Fred is always around somewhere. And, of course, when the industry owns the regulators, problems are likely to be covered up instead of being dealt with. Yes, I've heard that there are inherently safe nuclear power technologies, but nobody will build them while they have an option to build the current kind, because that's cheaper.
So, the next time someone says that current nuclear power technologies are OK because a disaster like the one unfolding in Japan couldn't happen here, try telling them about Fred.