Resilience: A New Paradigm of Nuclear Safety

This chapter examines the concept of loss and damage and how they are used in a political and moral context. It takes as a starting point the nuclear accident of Fukushima Daiichi and the short, medium and long-term consequences for the human and non-human environment. It also identifies some potential elements for the transformation of the disaster into a catastrophe, and how we can develop different forms and scales of resilience.

In this chapter, the fundamentals of nuclear safety that the Fukushima Daiichi accident did and did not change will be discussed. While the most basic strategy of defense-in-depth principle is still valid, some problems have emerged after Fukushima, preparedness for all-hazards and multiple disasters, and importance of the administration of emergency response. From this observation, enhancing the resilience of nuclear systems is a critical issue after Fukushima. The safety enhancement measures considered in nuclear facilities will be reviewed referring to the elementary characteristics of systems resilience, and a new framework will be proposed for dealing with unsafe events, where unsafe events are classified into three categories.

Major nuclear accidents have generated an abundant literature in the social sciences. They are the source of many key concepts that have led to studies of the organization and its links to system safety. Social psychology and sociology have shown that such bodies have their own modes of organization; while resilience engineering has hypothesized that they have the capacity to learn from the past and anticipate potential causes of serious damage. This paper revisits some major contemporary accidents, notably the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, through an analysis of the resilience capacity of systems in terms of the sociology of organizations and especially, social regulation.

This chapter presents a multiscale data fusion method to estimate the spatial distribution of radiation dose rates at regional scale around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. We integrate various types of radiation measurements, such as ground-based hand-held monitors, car-borne surveys, and airborne surveys, all of which have different resolutions, spatial coverage, and accuracy. This method is based on geostatistics to represent spatial heterogeneous structures, and also on Bayesian hierarchical models to integrate multiscale, multitype datasets in a consistent manner. Although this approach is primarily data-driven, it has great flexibility, enabling it to include mechanistic models for representing radiation transport or other complex processes and correlations. As a first demonstration, we show a simple case study in which we integrate two datasets over Fukushima City, Japan: (1) coarse-resolution airborne survey data covering the entire city and (2) high-resolution ground-based car-borne data along major roads. Results show that the method can successfully integrate two datasets in a consistent manner and generate an integrated map of air dose rates over the domain in high resolution. A further advantage of this method is that it can quantify estimation errors and estimate confidence intervals, which are necessary for modeling and for robust policy planning. In addition, evaluating correlations among different datasets provides us with various insights into the characteristics of each dataset, as well as radionuclide transport and distribution. The resulted maps have started being used by local governments to plan the residents’ return, and they are expected to be used for additional policy decisions in the future such as decontamination planning.

Lessons learned from the Fukushima Daiichi NPP accident and challenges for enhancement of the concept of nuclear safety are summarized from the viewpoint of risk management as well as the concept of defense in depth, for the protection against natural hazards, i.e., design against natural hazards and emergency response combined with regional disaster prevention and mitigation. The concept of resilience is also discussed, as a means for refining the fundamental concept of nuclear safety.

This paper discusses the obstacles that hamper robust estimations of the cost of nuclear accidents. From an economic standpoint, risks of accidents are often quantified by the assessment of an expected cost; that is the product of a monetary loss by its probability of occurrence. In the case of nuclear power, this definition is inadapted. Estimating the probability of a nuclear disaster is subject to high uncertainties, and so is the assessment of its monetary equivalent. This paper first discusses the two specific challenges in estimating the probabilities of nuclear accidents: these accidents are too sparse to identify frequencies of occurrence with probabilities; they are also dreadful, which makes risk-aversion a complex phenomenon. This paper then focuses on the assessment of nuclear damage. The large discrepancies exhibited in the existing literature arise from three sources: the scope of the assessments, the conflict between the use of past data or PSA studies in the assessment of radiation damage, and the methods that are used to quantify non-monetary welfare losses.

After Fukushima nuclear accident, alternative energy sources show a dramatic growth such as natural gas, petroleum and solar photovoltaic to compensate the loss of nuclear energy supply in Japan, and in the latest national energy policy, the government plans to promote renewable energy at a scale larger than the one aimed in the previous policy. Hence, the Fukushima accident can be regarded as the tipping point for the country to pursue alternative energy and environmental policy adjusting into the social circumstance after the Fukushima. So far, energy model has been developed to discuss long-term energy scenario in a consistent way and to analyze the effectiveness of energy policy. However, the most of the model developed until now does not explicitly consider the impact of nuclear accident on the long-term pathway of energy portfolio, in spite of the fact that the Fukushima accident is actually observed to dramatically change the situation of energy demand and supply in Japan. This manuscript aims to overview the transition of energy supply and demand in Japan after the Fukushima and to discuss the possibility of considering nuclear accident in energy modeling analysis by applying stochastic dynamic programming.

On March 11th in 2011, a huge earthquake and tsunami struck Japan and caused severe accidents at the Fukushima first nuclear power plant (NPP). The impact and damages of these triple disasters, called “3.11,” continue to this day. There was a diversity of damages and social conditions among devastated areas. This means that this disaster struck so broad area that it brought many kinds of “realities” to different areas. Therefore, we cannot treat the various regions that were affected uniformly. At the same time, the attention given to the 3.11 based on location has ultimately been covered differently between various media sources. The aim of this paper is to share basic descriptions and media analysis of the 3.11 disasters for future discussions. Through our analysis, it is showed that there is a different framing of the 3.11 between national and local media. The difference implicates that it is deprived of social interest in the national newspaper by the NPP accident, and on the other hand, the local newspaper kept their perspectives reflecting damages from the earthquake and tsunami.

The Nuclear Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department and the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, is proposing to create an open web platform that makes high-quality scientific data on energy sources readily available, assembles those data into metrics more suitable to the general public’s knowledge and interest (e.g. impact on the family’s budget or green house gas emission), and visually renders such information in a straightforward manner.

Nuclear accidents have prompted the creation of numerous cultural objects such as novels, films, cartoons, or posters. Here we show what these objects can teach us about the social representations of nuclear power. The object is both a product and a representation. It can influence attitudes and partially contributes to the cognitive context of controversy about atomic power. Consequently, it leads to diverse practices defined by the interests and goals of the groups that own it. French documentaries on Fukushima Daiichi constitute a coherent corpus that makes it possible to identify both ruptures and continuity in the story that is told. These films borrow from the symbols, myths, and analogies provoked by Chernobyl to evoke Fukushima. They also show that the accident ends the myth of ‘Soviet neglect’ and creates a form of social resilience that has changed the way the Japanese population is seen in France.

After the Fukushima nuclear accident, the whole Japanese society swiftly achieved a consensus to have comprehensive accident investigations to identify the root cause of the disaster. The Government and other major actors established several accident investigation commissions to meet this public will. However, the author has to say the lessons have not been learned and absorbed well so far, with deep regret. Because the issues centering on responsibility and social justice have not been dealt with well, the outputs of the investigations transformed into alternative sanction on nuclear industry and poorly articulated regulatory reformation, for example. This trajectory has been considered as a result of the particular and common culture of East Asian societies, but the author would argue that it should become more and more important global problem in the future world with high-reliability and complicated technological systems and their failures. The integration of the concept of risk governance to build prescribed consensus of responsibility distribution is strongly suggested as a key idea of remedy to this problem.

The Fukushima Daiichi accident raises questions about current decision-making models. Faced with an overwhelming situation, which threatened both their own lives and that of the entire population, the plant’s operators were obliged to take action, despite the lack of resources. In these conditions, decision making cannot be reduced to an optimization exercise based on a range of possibilities, or the application of planned operational responses to an emergency situation. The inevitable catastrophe, the social pressure it generates, the moral dilemmas it creates and the psychological drivers for action are characteristic of an extreme situation. The action plan must therefore be reinvented and individuals mobilised to these ends. It is therefore in a broader context of ‘action’ that decision making takes shape, and finds its logical foundations, meaning and temporality. Understanding decision making in extreme situations first requires a grasp of the development of a specific value system (that is mediated by the physical experience of the situation) in which the individual and social representations play a central role.

Extreme situations lead to the collapse of systems together with all existing rules, including symbolic ones. Therefore there are no longer any procedures to comply with, nor any outside guidance to help in making the complex decisions imposed by such situations. The decision-maker has to look elsewhere to find the resources to guide their actions, all the more since they are likely to be held responsible when the situation returns to normal. We argue that ethics, based on practical reason, offer a way out of the dead-end. Practical reason is anchored in individual motivation, as opposed to external rules, and is ultimately guided by solicitude towards other human beings. As it rises from the inner desires, feelings and reasoning of a person it offers a guide for action, even when artefacts collapse. Furthermore ethics could provide common ground on which to build an interdisciplinary approach to resilience in extreme situations, as ethical questions run through all disciplines. Building on Paul Ricoeur’s practical philosophy, we describe what an ethical approach to decision-making in extreme situations could look like, as well as its implications for organizations. We show that such an approach requires that organizations allow their members to use their practical reason and act autonomously not only when accidents occur, but also in normal situations. Such a transformation could lead to building “safe institutions”, i.e. organizations within which people would preserve safety, rather than organizations that manage safety through people.

Two recent insights regarding social imaginaries are of particular relevance in thinking about the Fukushima disaster and its aftermath. First, social imaginaries are consequential for social resilience. Second, imaginaries play a significant role in the way a society addresses science and technology. In light of these insights, the chapter explores nuclear imaginaries in Japan before and after Fukushima, and presents several key historical factors that shaped such imaginaries in the lasting manner. It presents how Japan’s nuclear imaginaries have persistently embraced certain ideals of science and technology, and excluded people subject to radiation risks. The chapter concludes by calling for explicit engagement with our nuclear imaginaries, in terms of social resilience, and also as an arena where we can explore more democratic approaches to science and technology. Such engagement is also consequential to larger visions of society.

Resilience is the key to a prosperous global and modern society; Efforts to mitigate physical damage, economic loss, and to protect social and political infrastructures in response to catastrophic events, such as a nuclear accident or a natural disaster, are essential for communities to survive and thrive in the aftermath of such incidents. The 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident serves as an example of the risks associated with advanced technologies and the need to minimize physical as well as psychological effects on local and global communities. Other examples can be found reflecting the misperception of risks including concerns associated with vaccination or genetically modified organisms. While we have to recognize the risks associated with the development, implementation, and utilization of advanced technologies, we also have to recognize that the impact of not adopting them can have much more detrimental effects to individuals, communities, and even societies. We have established the Institute for Resilient Communities in Berkeley, CA in collaboration with Japanese partners to address the needs for better scientific and technological capabilities to assess, predict, and minimize the impact of disruptive events in the future and to enhance the understanding of associated risks to the public. While the initial focus resides in radiological resilience and is closely related to the events in Fukushima more than 5 years ago, the goal is to establish a broader framework for researchers, educators, and communities to enhance resilience locally and globally together.

Ground motion simulation is one of techniques used to analyze seismic risk due to damage of structure and its effects on society. In this paper, the ground motion simulation using fault plane is used. Recently, ground motion simulation using fault model have been widely applied. Characterized fault model is conveniently used to model the heterogeneous slip distribution on fault plane, which divide the fault into two areas (asperity area and background area). More detailed model is needed to conduct probabilistic seismic risk assessment, which incorporate uncertainty in ground motion prediction. The model, however, is too simplified to model the complex characteristics of slip. In this paper, a stochastic model to simulate the slip distribution of fault plane is proposed for that purpose.

Components, surrounding the core of a magnetic confinement based fusion reactor, will be exposed to significant particle and heat fluxes that will cause severe (in many cases irreversible) damage of the components. In the D-T fusion reaction 80% of the energy is carried away by the 14 MeV neutrons and the rest by the emitted alpha particles. Motion of neutrons is not restricted by the present magnetic field, which is why the damage they cause by interacting with surrounding materials is to a large extent inevitable. The greater the neutron flux to the material the larger the damage, and shorter the lifespan of the reactor component taking the flux. In order to make fusion economically viable it is important to increase the lifespan of the components since they are costly to produce, replace and dispose of. It is the premise of this work that neutron inelastic scattering plays an important role in neutron transport in MCF systems. This reaction mechanism has been overlooked in neutron transport calculations. Planned work entails modeling of inelastic scattering using reaction codes and results compared with experiment where possible. Data obtained will be further used in neutron transport calculations and in damage analysis of various materials in order to establish how significant inelastic scattering is for the viability of fusion energy production.

The concept of “engineering thinking in extreme situations” has been defined to make up for an epistemological lack in the field of Safety Studies. After the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, official reports did not take an interest in analysing the conditions in which the recovery efforts had to be carried out. The description of the accident and its representation in the accident investigation reports convey these shortcomings. The Fukushima Daiichi plant manager Masao Yoshida testimony may allow us address them partly. Actually, the transcription of his hearings contains essential details and information to understand the sequence of events which took place after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. This article intends to show the importance of studying this narrative, in order to highlight the relations between the Fukushima accident management and the concept of “engineering thinking in extreme situations”.

This paper aims to introduce two main concepts regarding safety management which are injunction and order. In a first section, those two kinds of communication for action will be defined and distinguished through responsibility repartition criterion. Indeed, while injunction device involves addressee’s commitment regarding action design, order device is a less complex one in which a specific authority is responsible of order content in a specific frame while the addressee is generally only responsible of the order content execution. To illustrate those concepts potential, injunction and order contribution to face an emergency situation will be demonstrated through local field management and Headquarter relationship analysis during a crisis exercise of major magnitude in a nuclear fuel cycle industry. As a general conclusion regarding safety management, one would note that injunction use ensures decision-making robustness by subjectivity mobilization, as challenging voices multiplication participates to solid evidence emergence thanks to cross-checking practices. Secondly, the specific result of this demonstration remembers one of the Fukushima-Daiichi management lessons, meaning that in a resilient system, Headquarter tends to communicate with Local Management Team through injunction.

Information gathering and dissemination is a crucial aspect of a resilient society during and after a major disruptive event. Neutron detection is particularly important when spontaneously fissioning isotopes are present, such as following a severe nuclear accident. Historically, most neutron detectors have been based on helium-3. Yet because the supply of helium-3 has greatly diminished in the past decade, it is of international interest to develop non-helium-3 based neutron detectors. The Water Neutron Detector (WaND) provides an efficient, non-toxic, and non-flammable alternative detector method. The WaND system is currently under investigation for the nondestructive assay of spent nuclear fuel to quantify plutonium content.

After the Fukushima accident, a new concept of nuclear safety arouse: engineering thinking facing extreme situations. One of the specificity of emergency situations being a rise of social demand on engineering process, safety scientist have to make an anti-dualist move in order to improve collaboration between social scientists and engineers. In this aim, this article studies a case of efficient collaboration: the Swiss Cheese Model (SCM) of accidents. Since the early 1990s, SCM of the psychologist James Reason has established itself as a reference in the etiology, investigation or prevention of accidents. This model happened to be the product of the collaboration between the psychologist and a nuclear engineer (John Wreathall). This article comes back on the journey of the SCM and its fathers. It is based on an exhaustive literature review of Reason’s work and interviews of Reason and Wreathall carried out in 2014. The study suggests that the success of the model is not so much due to appropriation of the work of the psychologist by the industrial community but to a complex process of co-production of knowledge and theories. To conclude, we try to highlight ways that should encourage, in the future, such collaborative ways of working.

This paper summarizes our previous works on neutronics analysis for the disposal of damaged fuels from Fukushima Daiichi reactors. Three major stages have been identified for the criticality safety assessment after disposal. In order to evaluate the criticality safety for certain repository conditions and engineered barriers designs, neutronics models have been defined for different stages, and numerical results have been calculated by a Monte-Carlo code MCNP. For stages when fissile nuclides in the damaged fuels remains in the vicinity of the engineered barriers, the neutron multiplicity (k_eff) for a canister containing fuel debris surrounded by buffer was calculated over the leaching time. For the stage when fissile nuclides originated from multiple packages deposit in far-field host rocks, the critical masses for uranium depositions were studied for various rock types and geometries. The methodology presented in the present paper could be further improved and utilized to assist the repository system design and criticality safety assessment in the future.

When humans make decisions, they tend to rely on the heuristic approaches, instead of considering all available facts. When humans need to make decisions as a group, this tendency also seems true. However, there are some additional mechanisms that can only be observed in the group level, which are influence and conformity. Understanding these mechanisms and their process patterns is necessary to interfere and manipulate a group decision making in order to make a good group decision. This is particularly critical in emergency situations where decision making needs to be done under time and risk pressure. This paper proposes a model of group decision making process using I-P-O model, emphasizing the influence process in the group. Besides, this paper also explains an analysis towards a group decision making experiment in laboratory setting. The discussion process was observed to find the influence pattern among the members.

After Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, resilience engineering has emerged as a new paradigm of risk management, and the design of resilient energy system is getting more and more important. Energy model analysis based on mathematical programming contributes to discussing how to implement resilience into energy system by identifying quantitative suggestions. In this paper, as an example of such analysis, the authors try to derive possible appropriate measures to enhance electricity supply system resilience to successive nuclear power plants’ shut-down risk. The model developed in this paper is a dynamic power generation planning model, which considers nuclear power plants’ shut-down risk stochastically and identifies resilient capacity expansion in Japan from 2012 to 2030 under the uncertainty of the risk from a quantitative perspective. This resilient capacity expansion includes the necessity of alternative power resources and demand response compensating for supply capacity loss due to nuclear power plants’ shut-down, considering economic constraints. Simulation results successfully show the need for these measures in the capacity expansion. Importantly, the suggestion is not like a future prediction but a normative image of the system through the comprehensive incorporation of forecasted future parameters and scenarios. The more detailed the parameters and the scenarios are, the better image can be obtained. Learning from past accidents and updating our scientific knowledge base will detail the parameters and the scenarios and make energy model analysis very effective. It will tell us how to make resilient energy system.

The MPS-FE method, which is a hybrid method for Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) problems adopting the Finite Element method (FEM) for structure computation and Moving Particle Semi-implicit/Simulation (MPS) methods for free surface flow computation, was developed to utilize it in disaster-resilient design of important facilities and structures. In general free-surface flow simulation using the MPS method, wall boundaries are represented as fixed particles (wall particles) set as uniform grids, so the interface of fluid computation does not correspond to the interface structure computation in the conventional MPS-FE method. In this study, we develop an accurate and robust polygon wall boundary model, named Explicitly Represented Polygon (ERP) wall boundary model, in which the wall boundaries in the MPS method can be represented as planes that have same geometries as finite element surfaces.

Bioaccumulation of cesium with increasing trophic position is well known across nearly every ecosystem for most organisms. In the marine environmental, typical (concentration ratios (Bq/kg in tissue: Bq/kg in seawater) range from 50–100 in lower trophic levels to 300–10,000+ for apex predators. Recent surveys of 7 gelatinous organisms off the coast of Oregon ranging in trophic position from 1.0 to 3.0 revealed a concentration ratio maximum of 12.5 and typical concentration ratios no higher than 4.4. The implications on human diets and ecosystem shifts for large radiocesium releases are discussed.

Radioactive backgrounds establish the limit of sensitivity in detection systems for the general search scenario, and set the reasonably unavoidable dose limits for members of the public. Measurement of NORM isotopes in the air provides a unique opportunity to serve the dual goals of capturing temporal/meteorological NORM variations as well as coordinate public outreach/education of NORM exposure. The RadWatch Near-Realtime Air Monitor (RAM) stores meteorological and high resolution spectroscopy data as a function of time from six stories above UC Berkeley Campus. This data is served hourly to the public via radwatch.berkeley.edu/airsampling to demonstrate, not only the existence of NORM, but also the large variations observed in radioisotope air concentration. Clarity and transparency in this education effort are paramount, and complement the urgency of a ‘realtime’ system. In the future RadWatch will expand to interactive, networked devices to broaden the scope and engage the public.

The disposal of high level radioactive waste has fared no better in Japan since its legislation in 2000 than in most countries grappling with the same problem. This research aims to contribute to realizing some form of disposal in Japan, by suggesting ideas for an improved institutional scheme of policy making. This scheme concerns value judgments in decisions of technology use. Historically, implementing agencies have allowed limited debate on issues of value. What would develop if values previously neglected were given a chance to become a technical option of their own for the disposal of high level radioactive waste? This question has been taken out to the field, in the form of group interviews of young citizens. Here, the details and preliminary discussion of the fieldwork are described, as a temporary result of this study. A final section is dedicated to discuss the possible contributions of this study to the consideration of engineering resilience.

Drawing from in-depth anthropological research in the San Francisco Bay Area, looking at a community of scientists, experts, and other risk-conscious residents who are preparing for the next large earthquake, this article argues for an understanding of resilience as an overarching heuristic concept with the potential to articulate multiple forms of knowledge into a collaborative approach, associating scientists, experts, and residents. Building on the corpus of literature coming from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Geography and risk Disaster Studies, this article discusses the emergence of the concept of resilience and its articulation with the existing literature. Following this exploration, I will look at the implication such concept in the re-definition of knowledge and the categories of expertise as observed during my field research in the Bay Area of San Francisco. I find that resilience can be a useful concept only if the rigid definitions that have separated academic disciplines, as well as the concepts of “science” and “experience,” are recomposed in favor of a more integrated approach taking into account the multiple, and emerging, dimensions of knowledge.