
III. The Effectiveness of Assessment
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Chernobyl is one of the many accidents that Reason studied. “The
ingredients for the Chernobyl disaster were present at many levels. There was a
society committed to the generation of energy through large-scale nuclear
power plants. There was a system that was hazardous, complex, tightly coupled,
opaque and operating outside normal conditions. There was a management
structure that was monolithic, remote and slow to respond. There were
operators who possessed only a limited understanding of the system they were
controlling, and who, in any case, were set a task that made violations
inevitable.”
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