On Sat, 28 April 2001, "James S. Smith" wrote:

Perhaps you just need some properly built nuclear plants. :) Ontario has

New nuclear plant design has some interesting differences from the old plants. What caused these changes? Of course, there were several incidents which woke people up. But another change also occurred. Nuclear engineering fell out of favor among college students. There were fewer youngsters entering the industry after TMI, so the average age of nuclear engineers has increase. With age comes wisdom, or just senility? Older designs were "big" in every sense of the word. If you can only build one plant, you better make it the biggest plant you can. Old designs reflected a deep belief that you could maintain control. Control systems kept the system safe. The engineers were smart people, and had confidence in their ability to engineer their way out of trouble. Is this an error of youth? A young driver believes he can control the car in any situation, an older driver keeps the car out of situations requiring control beyond his ability. What does this have to do with network operators? With the downturn in the high-tech job market, and the apparent end of the 21-year old CEO getting $100 million in venture capital, will we see a similar increase in the average age of network engineers? And with the increase in age, will we see more conservative network operations coming out of companies? Or will we adopt the extreme slow conservatism of the telephone industry? Sometimes you need to accept some risk in order to innovate. If you never deploy something until it is perfect, it will take a very long time.