Sabin_Stargem: I have an interest in reading about
disasters of bureaucracy and design.
Have you read any books on Chernobyl? That covers both criteria.
Design - When designing something like a nuclear power plant you want to build in some fail safes, that is a mechanism that when it fails does so in the safest possible position. Think of a dead man's switch, someone has to actively hold that switch down or it snaps back to the off position; it fails "safe". In the case of a nuclear reactor, if the core goes critical you want a way to shut down the reaction and flood the chamber with water as quickly as possible. This is why nuclear power plants have huge water towers right next to the reactors, the emergency shutoff switch also opens the valve and gravity does the rest. The Chernobyl plant kept it's water away from the reactor, in an emergency they would use electric pumps to deliver the water. Where do these pumps get their power from, why the reactor of course! So their plan was, in the event of a core meltdown, to use the electricity being generated by the critical reactor to power the pumps and flood that same reactor with water. Hopefully this would work long enough for someone to power up some gas powered backup generators that would then take over pump duty.
Bureaucracy - There was no guarantee that this Rube Goldberg inspired series of safety mechanisms would even work, so it would need to be tested. And what better way to test the safety on a nuclear reactor than to intentionally cause a melt down and see what happens? Which is exactly what they did, several times. It never worked but they kept tweaking the process to trying again. Now keep in mind, this was not a testing facility. All this time Chernobyl was a fully functioning power plant providing electricity to several cities in Russia, it just didn't have a fail safe system that actually worked. When that fateful, and final, test was run there was an extra variable. The day before the safety was to be tested again Kiev was experiencing power failures. The Chernobyl plant was tasked to deliver the much needed power to the city so they spun up all the reactors to generate full power. In the past they had always performed their test on a "cold" reactor, that is one which had been completely shut down for a few days. If the safety mechanisms didn't work it would be much easier to back down a cold reactor than one that had been running at full power all night long. Ideally they should have rescheduled the test, but to a bureaucrats that was the scheduled date so they did it anyway.
I don't have any specific book titles to give you, but there are several that go into detail of who did what, what orders were given and a distinct timeline of everything that went wrong.
