When I hear debates about AI safety, I’m reminded of my time working in nuclear.
I was fortunate to learn from some of the best in the industry—Brew Barron, Maria Korsnick, Steve Miller, Carey Fleming, and Chris Crane—and had the privilege of sitting in CENG board meetings often hosted right on nuclear sites like Calvert Cliffs and Nine Mile Point.
In nuclear power, safety isn’t just a priority; it’s the license to operate. One accident could end the entire industry.
How do we manage it?
By design: built-in redundancy, redundancy of the redundancy, passive safety systems, and emergency drills.
By culture: nuclear operators don’t see themselves as competitors when it comes to safety. They share best practices through INPO (Institute of Nuclear Power Operations). If one plant slips, say, a single OSHA recordable or a capacity factor below top quartile, INPO dispatches the best team from a ‘competitor’ plant to dig into the root cause and help their peers back to top quartile performance.
The result? Nuclear is consistently the safest industry. Safer than airlines. Safer than oil & gas. Safer than cruise ships. And far safer than healthcare, where medical errors cause ~250,000 deaths annually in the U.S. alone.
There’s perhaps a lesson here for Gen AI: in the race for adoption and market share, collaboration on safety, even among fierce competitors, might be the way forward.
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I was fortunate to learn from some of the best in the industry—Brew Barron, Maria Korsnick, Steve Miller, Carey Fleming, and Chris Crane—and had the privilege of sitting in CENG board meetings often hosted right on nuclear sites like Calvert Cliffs and Nine Mile Point.
In nuclear power, safety isn’t just a priority; it’s the license to operate. One accident could end the entire industry.
How do we manage it?
By design: built-in redundancy, redundancy of the redundancy, passive safety systems, and emergency drills.
By culture: nuclear operators don’t see themselves as competitors when it comes to safety. They share best practices through INPO (Institute of Nuclear Power Operations). If one plant slips, say, a single OSHA recordable or a capacity factor below top quartile, INPO dispatches the best team from a ‘competitor’ plant to dig into the root cause and help their peers back to top quartile performance.
The result? Nuclear is consistently the safest industry. Safer than airlines. Safer than oil & gas. Safer than cruise ships. And far safer than healthcare, where medical errors cause ~250,000 deaths annually in the U.S. alone.
There’s perhaps a lesson here for Gen AI: in the race for adoption and market share, collaboration on safety, even among fierce competitors, might be the way forward.
________________
♻️ Share this with your network
➕ Follow me Benoîte Yver for more.
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