This document summarizes a talk given on lessons learned from the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It discusses how disaster investigations are used to allocate blame but may not necessarily change high-risk technology. There is ongoing dispute around lessons from Fukushima between regulatory agencies like the NRC and advocacy groups. The NRC concluded risks are low in the US, while others argue risks were underestimated. Getting beyond technical analyses, politics must be acknowledged in risk governance and some systems may have too much catastrophic potential to allow.

1. Fukushima, theView from America
Lessons Learned (and Unlearned) for Risk Governance
Temple University Japan
17 July 2015
Scott Gabriel Knowles
Drexel University
sgk23@drexel.edu @USofDisaster

2. PLAN of the TALK
I. Disaster Investigations in Perspective
II. Lessons in Dispute
I. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
II. Union of Concerned Scientists
III. American Society of Mechanical Engineers
IV. Greenpeace
III. Getting Beyond the Design Basis

3. Disaster Investigations in History
 Disasters bring the formlessness of risk
calculations into shape, in the faces of victims, or
the wreckage from a tsunami.
 Disaster investigations are venues through which
chronology, causality, and blame are allocated after
a disaster.
 Investigation is a normal outgrowth of the very
techno-scientific mode of thinking that brings high-
risk technological systems into existence in the
first place.
 Without an investigation the system that fails
cannot be redesigned and restarted.

4. Studying failure increases
our chances of success?
 Research indicates that simply acquiring post-
disaster technical knowledge is not the fast track to
changing a high-risk technological environment, or
reducing the risks it entails.
 First premise: technical disaster analysis is not
separate from politics (of any type).

5. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission and the Fukushima
Nuclear Disaster
“Design-basis events became a central
element of the safety approach almost 50
years ago when the U.S.Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC) formulated the idea of
requiring safety systems to address a
prescribed set of anticipated operational
occurrences and postulated accidents. . .
Frequently, the concept of design-basis events
has been equated to adequate protection, and
the concept of beyond-design-basis events
has been equated to beyond adequate
protection (i.e., safety enhancements).”
--US NRC

6. “Although complex, the current
regulatory approach has served
the Commission and the public
well and allows the Task Force to
conclude that a sequence of
events like those occurring in the
Fukushima accident is unlikely
to occur in the United States
. . .”
--US NRC

7. The new construct “extends the
design basis to consider all risks,
and includes rare yet credible
events . . . the new safety
construct [should] be based on
an all-risk approach . . .
Cliff-edge events–those for
which a small incremental
increase in severity can yield a
disproportionate increase in
consequences–should be
discovered and mitigation
approaches implemented.”
--ASME

8. Lessons in Dispute

9. Gregory Jaczko, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (US NRC) Chairman

10. “the nuclear power industry
has jumped into the breach,
proposing what it calls the
‘Diverse and Flexible Coping
Capability’ program, or FLEX,
as the foundation of its
Fukushima response. . . Some
nuclear plants have already
begun implementing the FLEX
strategy, which could make it
difficult for the NRC to impose
higher standards which FLEX
equipment might fail to meet.
The industry tail may be
wagging the regulatory
dog.”
--Union of Concerned
Scientists

11. “the Fukushima
Daiichi disaster has
demonstrated that
the safety claims of
the nuclear industry
and its national as
well as international
regulators are false.”
--Greenpeace

12. “The NRC’s failure to protect the public existed long
before Gregory Jaczko became the NRC chairman . . .
Congress should not be sidetracked into thinking he is the
source of the problem or that his removal would be the
solution.” --Union of Concerned Scientists

13. Getting Beyond the Design Basis
It is imperative that we see “lessons
learned” as part and parcel of larger
political processes whereby risks are not
assessed through some imagined neutral,
objective framework, but rather through
the workings of politics—the gnashing and
grinding of interests as they seek to expand
or to curtail the use of a given system, like
nuclear power.

14. LEARNING FROM DISASTER?
“it is important to ask whether some
industrial systems have such huge
catastrophic potential that they should
not be allowed to exist.”
--Charles Perrow, 2011

15. Thank you . . . and I look
forward to the discussion .
. .
Scott Gabriel Knowles, Drexel University
sgk23@drexel.edu

16. “Acknowledging the limits of prediction and
control, technologies of humility confront
‘head-on’ the normative implications of our lack
of perfect foresight.They call for different expert
capabilities and different forms of engagement
between experts, decision-makers, and the public
than were considered needful in the governance
structures of high modernity.They require not
only the formal mechanisms of participation but
also an intellectual environment in which citizens
are encouraged to bring their knowledge and
skills to bear on the resolution of common
problems.”
--Sheila Jasanoff (2003)