Louis Bertrand P.Eng speaks about the Pickering nuclear power plant

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