The return of nuclear power

Welcome to the 46th edition of Safe For Work.

In Safety News

• OSHA issued new ARC flash safety guidelines for the first time in 20 years

• How mining impacts worker’s well being

• AI Robots went rogue and escaped

Safe For Work Podcast

Episode 8 explores how AI is transforming industries like mining & manufacturing, from preventing accidents to early disease detection. This isn't science fiction—it's happening now.

Atomic Brothers

Matt Cantor

There is an argument starting in the play-room-- there are always arguments starting in the play-room, lately, now that the boys are old enough to be walking around, toddling around, and doing things with their stubby little fingers, picking things up and moving them-- and of course saying things.

“It’s mine!” says Michael.

“No, it’s mine!” says Henry.

This is just how it’s been going with everything-- everything has been “mine!” and then “no, mine!”-- it was that with the teddy-bear, and then the ball, and then the toy racecar-- and now, this-- and it’s going just the same with this as it went with those. Michael takes hold of one side of the plutonium atom, and Henry takes hold of the other, and they both begin to pull, as hard as they can. This is the new big shiny thing, and neither one of them is letting go until it’s theirs and only theirs.

Gensville, Tennessee does its best to be a forward-thinking place. They talk about themselves being a forward-thinking place-- that’s what the mayor is always saying. All the citizens, for instance, when they are setting up electrical utilities for where they live, are given the option of where, exactly, they want their power from; they can choose to buy power from the coal plant down the river, or from natural gas, or from solar-panels, or from the wind-farm a few miles to the East, or from either of the nuclear plants to the North and South of town. That’s how people talk about it, and nearly everybody chooses one of those nuclear plants, along with maybe solar or wind-- Gensville, Tennessee is a forward-thinking place, after all, and what’s more forward-thinking than working to save the planet?

That’s how they talk about it.

What people don’t talk about-- or not so much-- is how annoying it is, having the service-trucks always rolling around everywhere, on all the roads, in and out of traffic, double, triple-parked, cherry-pickers hard at work connecting disconnecting wires here and there. What people don’t talk about because they don’t entirely understand it or because they imagine that people from outside of town don’t care about it all that much or because they know that nothing can really be done is the fact that the town of Gensville, Tennessee has more than just two nuclear plants-- it has two entirely separate power-grids, completely disconnected from each other.

If you buy your electricity from Gensville General Nuclear, your house gets connected up to the Northern power-grid, and any solar or wind or anything else comes from the panels or turbines that are connected to that power-grid. If you change your mind and decide to purchase your electricity from Gensville Atomic Energy instead-- maybe because the prices are lower, or the service is more consistent-- or maybe because that’s what Henry Jigg comes on TV five times a day to tell you-- then the service truck comes to your house and it double-parks right there on the street and it probably blocks your neighbor’s driveway, and the men go up in the cherry-picker and they very carefully-- very, very carefully-- disconnect your domestic power-line from the Northern power-grid, and hooks you up instead to the Southern power-grid, with its own set of telephone-poles several feet to the left or right or usually the South of the Northern ones. If you change your mind again after that and decide that you’d like to go back to buying from Gensville General Nuclear-- maybe because Gensville Atomic Energy doesn’t properly dispose of its waste or doesn’t pay its workers fairly or doesn’t meet National safety standards-- or maybe because all that is what Michael Jigg comes on TV five times a day to tell you-- then the service truck comes back to your house again and this time they might accidentally back into your nice hedges or knock a few bricks out of your front wall-- and definitely make you late for work-- as they carefully, carefully-- very carefully, carefully-- go up in the cherry-picker and disconnect your domestic power-line from the Southern power-grid and reconnect it to the Northern one.

And on and on. On and on.

Michael and Henry are pulling and pulling, back and forth, on the poor little atom-- or big, it’s big for an atom, but it’s little for everything else, and it really can’t take much more of this; could you?

Their father is in the other room, hard at work on some blueprints. He hears them fighting--

“Let go, you stupid dumb-face!”

“No, you let go, you stinky butt-ears!”

He hears them, but he doesn’t really process them. His blueprint-brain filters them gently into the rest of the background noise of the neighborhood-- birds chirping, lawnmowers mowing lawns, the cherry-picker outside switching the house’s domestic power-line from the Southern grid to the Northern one. Michael and Henry’s father has heard enough of what Walter Hartt has to say about Yancy Hartt’s Gensville Petrochemical Energy on the radio today-- he’s been convinced-- he’s made up his mind, and he’s a forward-thinking person, isn’t he?

Michael and Henry are pulling and pulling and pulling at the atom, pulling and pulling-- and it’s poor little protons and neutrons are getting stretched farther and farther apart, just barely holding on like the crumbs of a caramel-taffy cookie-- farther

And

Farther

And

Farther

Until

Pop!

Snap!

Bam!

What a world!!

There’s something else that the people in Gensville, Tennessee never talk about, because they don’t know about it, aside from maybe just one or two of them. They don’t talk about the two mansions at the Northern and Southern edges of town, up on the twin hilltops, staring each other down across the gathered suburbs and little mom-and-pop shops. The people know about the mansions themselves, obviously-- they can be seen from practically anywhere, both of them, so high and large. And of course the people know who lives in each mansion-- that much is also obviously. Obviously, Henry Jigg lives in the mansion to the South, right next to the nuclear power-plant that he owns. And obviously, Michael Jigg lives to the North, next to his own power-plant-- how could it be any other way?

But here’s the part that nobody knows:

Whenever there’s a bad storm, and one of the power-grids goes down-- the one in the South, for instance; the mansion in the North goes dark, and Michael Jigg knows to call his brother on the phone.

“Are you alright?” he asks. “Is everything okay?”

And maybe it is or maybe it isn’t.

SFW Films presents: Guardian Angel

In a world where an advanced design system quietly oversees every detail of an industrial facility, a human architect teaches it to protect workers in ways they’ll never notice—saving lives in the process. 

Adapted from the short story in issue 36.

See you next week as we enter the final month of the year and look into the future of energy, engineering and safety.

Stay safe.