Abstract
On July 5, 2012 the Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) issued a final, damning report. Its conclusions show that the human group – constituted by the employees of TEPCO and the control organism – had partial and imperfect epistemic control on the nuclear power plant and its environment. They also testify to a group inertia in decision-making and action. Could it have been otherwise? Is not a collective of human beings, even prepared in the best way against nuclear risk, de facto prone to epistemic imperfection and a kind of inertia?
In this article, I focus on the group of engineers who, in research and design offices, design nuclear power plants and model possible nuclear accidents in order to calculate the probability of their occurrence, predict their consequences, and determine the appropriate countermeasures against them. I argue that this group is prone to epistemic imperfection, even when it is highly prepared for adverse nuclear events.
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Notes
- 1.
The English version of this report is on the website http://naiic.go.jp/en/. An interim report was delivered on December 26, 2011. See http://icanps.go.jp/eng/interim-report.html.
- 2.
My intention is not to give the impression that nuclear power plants are always unsafe.
- 3.
The different stages during which failures can occur are called the the DEPOSE components (Design, Equipment, Procedures, Operators, Supplies and materials, and Environment) by Perrow (1984, 8).
- 4.
Perrow takes instead the example of a chemical reactor in his book. But the heat process is similar to nuclear power plants, and the conclusions remain the same (1984, 72).
- 5.
Note that Perrow has wrotten an article in reaction to the accident in Fukushima (Perrow 2011).
- 6.
Normal accidents theorists also address these factors (see Sagan p. 36–43 for a summary of their arguments).
- 7.
According to a strong criterion of optimality, the group must prevent any individual errors from propagating. But this criterion is idealistic and many errors have no major impact on the accuracy of the predictions made by the group. A looser criterion can be that the group must stop any individual error that significantly impacts the predictions made by the group. But the importance of an error on the predictions can hardly be assessed a priori. Nevertheless we shall consider the looser criterion in this paper.
References
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Anouk Barberousse, Jacques Dubucs, Ashley Graham Kennedy and Charles Perrow for their helpful comments on the paper. Any remaining shortcomings in the paper are of course mine. I am also in debt to Camille Lancelevée who introduced me to the sociology of organizations.
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Jebeile, J. (2014). The Nuclear Power Plant: Our New “Tower of Babel”?. In: Luetge, C., Jauernig, J. (eds) Business Ethics and Risk Management. Ethical Economy, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7441-4_9
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