New century, same humanity on a collision course

Having become recently immersed in the paradigms of nuclear power generation, especially as they relate to "human performance," the author is somewhat aghast at the current trend in thinking: "we have finally figured out how to operate our equipment without failure-now we're going to do the same with the human." Human beings have always been the same, and will always be the same. We make mistakes. Interestingly, "honest" mistakes are the ones that we can do something about-we can actually prevent them. It's not honest mistakes that are the problem. It's the "dishonest" ones that are truly at the root of everything that goes wrong. We all do things we know we shouldn't do, many times per day. We've always been like this. We will always be like this. This paper, written by an outsider to the power generation industry, explores this reality, provides historical and practical evidence of its truth, and then draws some conclusions about how to approach these "human performance" problems.