My guess, they were afraid to ruffle the feathers of their higher-ups. Yes, that's moronic, but this is the world we can find ourselves in IF the bosses are egotistical kingdom makers.
was an example of where that "empowerment" went wrong. It is usual for workers in Japanese factories to make continuous improvements in process for quality and cost and it is usually a good thing... but criticality accidents involve invisible dangers and "following procedures strictly" in that kind of work saves lives.
Notably Japan has been the world leader in nuclear accidents since the 1980s and some of that is that they kept working on things like fast reactors after many other countries quit and others that are cultural. For instance at American BWR reactors it is routine to test the isolation condenser whenever the reactor is shut down so everybody knew what it sounded like (LOUD!) when it worked but when somebody at Fukushima was asked if it was working they saw a little steam coming out the ports but had never seen it work before and didn't know what to expect.
I also want to put things in perspective: far, far more people are dying from fuckups with fossil fuels, but like "Florida man" (Florida has a law that crime reports must be published) we actually report and collect accidents involved in Nuclear production, so you can see every mistake. But you don't see mass protests because natural gas infrastructure failed in Texas and building pipes burst and people froze to death, including a young boy.
The main difference is that tiny mistakes in the nuclear industry can have massive consequences. A seemingly-trivial change can lead to continent-sized damages and permanent condemnation of city-sized areas of land.
Accidents in the fossil fuel industry are far more localized. Sure, you can blow up your own plant and kill a bunch of people, but it's not too hard to clean up the mess afterwards. Even something as horrific as the Deepwater Horizon disaster won't have much of a residual impact 10 years down the line.
> A seemingly-trivial change can lead to continent-sized damages and permanent condemnation of city-sized areas of land.
Chernobyl wasn't a "seemingly-trivial change" -- it was several successive groups all choosing to do the worse-possible thing, and it still killed and harmed fewer people than the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Let me rephrase that. People need to feel empowered to stop a potentially dangerous process. They definitely shouldn't be empowered to implement new dangerous processes without external review.
Or modify them. For instance the people at Tokaimura felt empowered to take steps to speed up the mixing, that, plus them mixing a higher enrichment blend led to disaster.
