Based on all the needless lost of life caused by exploding bridge consoles every time a ship was so much as spat on, circuit breakers were apparently either outlawed or lost to history. When do you think this occurred?

My bet is that they were erased from history by time travelling Borg around the time of the post-atomic horror.

Or maybe console design was farmed out to the Pakleds...

I thought they were overloading plasma conduits, otherwise you really shouldn't get that level of pyrotechnics.

They were outlawed at the same time as circuit breakers were removed from Seaview, Moon Base Alpha and any other number of shows trying to create drama

Not just that but any kind of surge in the plasma system would produce a similar effect. Regardless of weather the consles use plasma, even if they use good old AC scavanged from the plasma somehow, a plasma surge would create a surge in the convertor which would produce an overload in the consle. Givne the viloance where talking lightning bolt levels of excess energy. No amount of circuit breakers will prevent that.

LOL. Circuit breakers aren't the only problems,good thing OSHA is a few centuries extinct...

Circut breakers weren't outlawed, in fact Star Fleet instituted the new system of making consoles explode so the ship engineering repair crew could find the problem console more easily.

Circuit breakers are banned in case the Borg assimilate them and become unstoppable.

*spits on a borg armada*....*sees armada go up in sparks and explosions*

The console, and/or the ensign manning it, is the circuit breaker. When it blows, replace and reset it.

There is, actually, a very reasonable explanation for this.

Take for example the humble transporter. Staple of the series, used in basically every episode, requires mind-bogglingly exorbitant amounts of power.

Take for example the computations involved. If we assume that all the data for the location of one atom in your body can be stored in a single 1 page document, it would take 909 petabytes (one petabyte = one million gigabytes) to catalog your entire body. And that's not really even including the 90 Trillion organisms that need to go with you. Think about it this way, all of Facebook, pictures, stupid statuses, cartoon cows and all, takes up about 40 petabytes.

Theres also the fact that you contain absurd amounts of energy too. The energy stored inside you can level a continent. Remember the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima? How much material do you think actually blew up? Less than a gram. Once you were converted into energy, half the problem would be keeping you from erasing everything within sphere the size of Texas.

So assuming you can get your 909 petabytes and apocalypse scale rear to where you want to go (and that's an exercise in and of itself) there's the problem of putting your energized self back together.

Well we've been doing that for years, but the problem is it only works for very small things. So what power would it take to make a cheeseburger? According to the scientist Kirk McDonald:

So in other words, if you weighed 200 pounds, it would take the combined power of 3,200 suns to reassemble you.

But Star Trek transporters are shown to be capable of moving more than one person, so for an entire away team with equipment and clothing, it would easily take 10,000 suns.

And that's not including warp drive, tractor beams, life support, deflector shields, impulse drive, sensors, replicators, weapon systems and lights.

Federation issue Circuit Breakers work very well.