Illusions of Safety

I found the paper by Dowell and Hendershot, "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Case Studies of Incidents and Potential Incidents Caused by Protective Systems," to be very thought provoking. As pointed out by the authors of that paper, installing a protective system can provide the illusion of safety without the reality of safety. In this white paper, I will present several incidents that I have come across in my own work where design errors or latent failures were introduced as a result of plant changes that were intended to be beneficial (mostly from the field of commercial nuclear power), and will give some observations on why such events occur and how they might be prevented.