Well, the problem is not in the current reactor designs. Those are as good as it gets.

The problem is in the reactor designers who consistently fail to recognize that the humans who implement the designs are completely faulty material. Humans screw up. Every reactor failure that has ever occurred is because humans screwed up. There is no possible way any of today's nuclear reactor designs can be made safe, because the ingenuity with which humans can screw up is astronomical while the designs of safety mechanisms are necessarily more finite.

I would like to hear more about thorium reactors. But India is working on those and here in the USA there is a tremendous NIH problem. Which is another form of humans screwing up.

IMO, the problem is that the Republicans who are politically savvy are seeking to become governors or powerful legislators at the State level because they have sense enough to stay away from the national scene. At the national level, Republican politics is a chaotic whirlpool of tea partiers, evangelicals, super-capitalists, anti-thises and anti-thats that will suck under anyone who can actually DO politics, and will toss some random joker up to the top to be the next candidate.

I would like some kind of Phoenix Party to rise from the ashes of the Republican Party. But I don't think that is going to happen. I think America is going to become a one-party system with jumble of political clowns on the other side of the aisle for perhaps a decade. It will probably take that long for the clowns to destroy the remaining infrastructure that the GOP had put together between its re-emergence in the early 1900s and 1980.

Of-course you are absolutely 100% correct, which was my first comment on this topic before the one you replied to. But my first comment appears to be extremely unpopular here.

But on a serious note, I think we probably have the technology now to make both pilot and cockpit redundant, and probably even allow someone outside the aircraft to land the thing, when something really bad happens. It seems to me the only major obstacles to developing this are human and institutional inertia. This would be a fundamental change in all kinds of roles.

And I hope my sense of humor in the last post does not offend anyone. What happened to that A320 was a gruesome tragedy. There should be no denial about that.

Pilot B: Ground control, Pilot A isn't letting me take my turn!

Ground Control: You two had better learn how to play nice together! Now, Pilot A, you let Pilot B take his turn, just like we all agreed before you took off.

Pilot A: But but but...

Ground Control: Don't make me have to take it away from both of you! You know how your boss gets when I have to tell him about something like that.

Yeah that could be a problem. Maybe the airlines could screen pilots for adult behavior.

Intelligence officials were, behind the scenes, questioning whether the benefits of gathering counter-terrorism information justified the colossal costs involved. Then Snowden went public and essentially forced the agency's hand.,

So they could have said, "OK, you know what, you're right. The benefits of this program are outweighed by its costs, the American people have a right to be involved in the decision about surveillance, and we are going to shut the program down." They would have been the bigger men, demonstrating that standing united is more important than ego.

But instead, they cried, "NO! If it's your idea, if you're trying to force us to stop, well then FUCK YOU! We'll do what we want, whether you like it or not! YOU CAN'T TELL US WHAT TO DO!" Like a petulant child throwing a temper tantrum. Can't back down from a fight, that might make them look like they don't have a giant chip on their shoulders.

In case of thie flight, it would have helped if the captain had a code that would have opened the door regardless of it being locked from the inside. But then the copilot might have just killed him first, before diving the plane to the ground.

Now that airliners are becoming fly-by-wire machines, how hard would it be to add a second cockpit?

Think of turning an A320 or a 787 into a drone, with the pilot and copilot in separate drone control compartments perhaps with one at the nose of the plane and the other at the tail. In a situation like this last one, the remaining sane pilot would request that ground control lock out the controls of the crazy one. If ground control judged that both pilots were incapacitated, then a drone control station on the ground could take over flying the plane. This design would also discourage hijacking, provide better redundancy of some critical systems, and in some worst case scenarios, allow a ground control officer to land a plane whose pilots had both become unconscious, as in a sudden decompression incident.

It undoubtedly would take years to adapt current drone technology, pilot training, and airframe design to make the best use of this approach. That is all the more reason to get Boeing, Airbus, and the rest of the industry working on this.

We are all pretty good at fighting yesterday's battles. This happened in Europe, but in the USA there was time people could fly with only a ticket and not any ID, they could bring their guns with them too. Now you cannot have a gun, the cockpits are locked with farely strong doors because everybody is scared of terrorists, they didn't even have an axe on board, just a crowbar. Apparently the captain tried breaking the door with a crowbar, I wonder if he tried breaking the wall beside the door. Flying is completely fucked up, TSA harasses you and then you don't know if a psychotic pilot will kill you anyway.

How about TRYING FREEDOM for a change? Bring your ticket, allow people to take their guns with them and keep axes on board while removing insane cockpit doors?

Sure, everything can still go wrong, at least you are not just a sardin in a can, hoping not to be eaten this time around.

Have you ever tried to reason with a PHB? Especially when your argument, however correct and well-supported, doesn't come from someone who has that specific responsibility?

Yeah. Like I'd ever be caught DEAD or ALIVE in Arizona. Life is too short for that.

Wow, that works for pretty much anything US Federal Government-controlled/regulated.

Strat

I, for one, welcome the new word "fatly" into the world of English discourse...

The word appears to follow the rules of English word-making. It is also highly visual and conveys its imagery in a succinct yet easily digested way to probably all speakers of English, no matter how weak their grasp of the language might be.

Shakespeare would have been proud of this word. This is one he could have easily used, had he but thought of it first.