Thunderdome: And What About Nuclear Waste?

Someone has written that the off-shore oil drilling regulatory process is broken.

Indeed? Did it ever work? Or was it merely a vast pile of paperwork created for the illusion of due diligence? A mighty barrel of couvre-cul as I myself would say in my own French patois ( a barrel of cover-ass ). 

The SEC did not work, nor did the commercial rating agencies. The FAA did not work back in 2008, so it had to ground American Airlines while it caught up on 8 years of neglect. The Bureau of Mines? I don't know; won't know for a hundred more deaths or so.

The regulatory process will not work in a society that rewards lack of oversight more than oversight, nor will it work when those overseen are the ones who will eventually reward the overseers. It is a ludicrous spectacle, and anyone knows it can't work.

Every regulatory agency that has an economic affect on businesses is under suspicion, and furthermore is probably ineffective for the very same reasons: we have a government on the take from the Congress down to the lowest level bureaucrat.

Besides all this, there is now a finite probability - the real worst case scenario - that the spill will not be fixed, even with the new well being drilled to intercept it.

The point of the title of this post:  another threat that is "regulated", and which probably will also surprise us in the near future. Nuclear thing, climate things, chemicals leaching from plastics, genetically-modified food ... all the things whose regulation businesses have been whining about and that they have spent lobbying money on are going to haunt us soon. Most regulators have seen their jobs as smoothing the way for business, not protection of the citizenry. All our efforts are as ineffective as the reforms of Diocletian in arresting the decline of Rome.

It is going to happen quickly. See how quickly the environmental catastrophes happen? And a fix is only maybe a coin toss at best: 50-50; maybe less. No one has a clue, really. What's next? Will we have time to catch our breath between disasters?
I don't think so.