A consistent and reliable reactor design that can be mass produced and deployed quickly across the globe is the holy grail that eludes the nuclear industry. However, as we’ve noted before, the nuclear industry seems to have managed to establish consistent and reliable methods in the ways it conducts itself.

Take a look at Hitachi and its admission that records about the welding in two nuclear reactors under construction in Japan were falsified by sub-contractor. Records about the substandard quality of the welding were changed or erased.

Substandard welding? Falsified records? It’s all very familiar. Remember the substandard welding uncovered at Finland’s OL3 reactor? Remember the poor inspection and supervision of welding at the site? We had to rely on whistleblowers to find that out. Remember workers at the UK’s Sellafield nuclear plant falsifying plutonium safety records?

It’s the same tricks, the same methods, the passing of blame, and the attempts at cover-up. Is this all written down somewhere in a how-to guide? Or does the industry simply attract the kinds of people who are comfortable doing these kinds of things around something as potentially dangerous as nuclear power?