The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico and the huge oil spill that resulted has led to a predictable reaction from many liberals — curses directed at profit-obsessed transnational corporations, calls for introducing exorbitantly high taxes on offshore drilling and appeals to abandon hydrocarbons completely and live in harmony with nature.
In reality, however, many technological disasters are not the result of negligence, ignorance or malice but are the consequence of highly complex technologies in unexplored areas that often have unpredictable results. ?
We often believe that if something is created by man, we know exactly how it will perform. But this is far from true.
There were several other major disasters prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union that were caused by negligence and stupidity — for example, the Alexander Suvorov ship tragedy. On June 5, 1983, the ship’s crew inadvertently attempted to pass under a low section of a bridge spanning the Volga River, tearing away the upper deck and claiming the lives of 177 people.
But Chernobyl was a different disaster. What proved fatal for the Chernobyl reactor was something known as the “end effect.” This is when the reactivity of the reactor undergoes a short-term increase instead of the anticipated decrease. One good analogy is if you press down on a car’s brake pedal and instead of slowing the vehicle it causes a brief surge in speed because of a freak situation in which the pedal’s position suddenly changed.
The same thing is true of BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The drilling platform was equipped with every imaginable safeguard, and although the particulars of what actually happened are still unknown, it was clearly something that nobody had ever anticipated. Of course, some might argue that there should have been 33 levels of emergency response safeguards on the platform instead of only three. But in reality, nobody ever has that many backups in place.
There will always be sequences of events that are impossible to prevent because of the enormous complexity of the technical systems used — in the same way that it is impossible to predict an earthquake with 100 percent certainty.
There are a huge number of liberals, nature lovers and entrenched opponents of technological progress who are always eager to say offshore drilling and nuclear power plants should be banned because our ancestors got by quite well without them. What’s more, they didn’t pollute the oceans or die from radiation exposure.
But if we go as far back as our hunter-gatherer ancestors who lived in harmony with nature, few lived to 40, they were defenseless against epidemics and occasionally ate human flesh.
A modern individual living in a technologically advanced society lives longer and better than the typical caveman. Think of unpredictable catastrophes like the oil spill as a “tax” that we have to pay for technological progress.
Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.