Engineering Disasters

(Note: please don’t exceed 2000 words including citations.)
Engineering is often associated with objective and concrete facts; however, more subjective issues are equally critical, most notably professional ethics. The 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl has recently called attention back to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, an engineering catastophy that cost many lives and could have been avoided had the engineers and politicians involved employed ethical standards.

According to the Professional Engineers Act (1990), which has been adopted by the Professional Engineers of Ontario, there are five ethics that engineers must uphold (verbatim):

fairness and loyalty to the practitioner’s associates, employers, clients, subordinates and employees;
fidelity to public needs;
devotion to high ideals of personal honour and professional integrity;
knowledge of developments in the area of professional engineering relevant to any services that are undertaken; and
competence in the performance of any professional engineering services that are undertaken. (p. 28)
The goal of this essay is to determine whether applying an ethical code would have prevented the Chernobyl disaster. You will outline the context of the Chernobyl disaster. This includes establishing which engineering issues were involved and why the choices that eventually led to the disaster were made. This will require that you detail the potential motivations for and reasoning behind these decisions. You will then provide a similar summary/analysis to the Russian government’s response to the disaster.

You will then identify all the ethical issues involved. This can include the ethics outlined by Ontario’s Professional Engineers Act (1990), or other ethical standards you identify as being relevant, such as nonmaleficence (causing no harm), veracity/honesty, and fairness. You might also refer to the ethics codes of other professional engineering bodies. The essay will have an emphasis on duty to public welfare, and specifically the duty to protect public safety. Through an analysis, you will determine whether adhering to a specific set of ethics would have prevented the disaster, and if so, which ethics should have been implemented.