Re: Fear, etc.

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 12:53 PM 2/14/00 -0600, you wrote:
>
>Having said that, performing 
>unnecessary surveys, sampling ground deposition .. that's not 
>educating.

Actually it IS educating the public. The public never hears the corporate
VP of Nuclear who says that if doing a few dollars worth of useless
monitoring will get the plant back on line and making money a day sooner,
then get to it! The public will only know that 1) someone outside the
nuclear plant company wanted the monitoring done, and 2) the plant agreed
to do it, which will be loudly applauded by the requestor. The idea that
the monitoring really got done solely for the purpose of shortening the
outage will get no public notice at all. 

However, I have also seen such a corporate VP later faced with a much
larger request for unecessary monitoring, and when he balked, the
willingness to do the previous monitoring was used against him. Short-term
decisionmaking almost always has consequences down the road, but most
managers regard those consequences as someone else's problem, not theirs.
That usually leaves us trying to clean up the mess.

And if we try to characterize that previous monitoring as unnecessary and
"we went along with it only because it was cheaper at the time," we will
just make ourselves look even worse. "Blaming it on the previous
administration" rarely impresses anyone.

It really seems to be a problem of health physics decisions being made by
corporate bean-counters, people whose success or failure is evaluated by
income generated and profitability. And I have no idea how to change that -
the VP who is judged by this quarter's profits will make decisions to
maximize this quarter's profits. S/he is just living up to the expectations
of higher management.

Bob Flood
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
bflood@slac.stanford.edu
(650) 926-3793

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