Another place this use case comes up is supercomputing. Not because of the unusual levels of radioactivity, but because of unusual numbers of processors. When you have more components, a single bit flip somewhere is increasingly likely. Resilience has been a research area in HPC for a while now, and people have looked at fault tolerant algorithms, redundancy schemes, faster checkpointing, and other ways to make sure your HPC application running on a million cores won't die because one core gets a bit flip.

So far this has luckily remained a research area in practice, because the vendors tend to do a good job of hardening their machines against errors as they get larger (most of the gloom and doom predictions take the error rates of current hardware and extrapolate). It will be interesting to see if it remains that way.

Relevant article: http://superfri.org/superfri/article/view/14