Davis-Besse

The Davis-Besse incident (2002) was a near-catastrophic nuclear accident in which boric acid corrosion ate a football-sized hole through the reactor pressure vessel head of a nuclear power plant in Ohio, United States. The plant's operators and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had missed the warning signs for years — a failure of institutional vigilance that occurred twenty-three years after Three Mile Island and demonstrated that normal accidents theory remained as relevant as ever. The incident revealed not a technological failure but an organizational one: a culture that prioritized production over inspection, and a regulatory system that had not learned the lesson that structural vulnerabilities persist even when individual accidents are survived.