Joonhong Ahn Cathryn Carson Mikael Jensen Kohta Juraku - Reflections on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident

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Cathryn Carson

Mikael Jensen

Joonhong Ahn

Words such as interdisciplinary, collaboration, and social aspects had regularly appeared in various nuclear contexts since long before the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident on March 11, 2011. It had already become common understanding that we need to bring together a wider range of knowledge and expertise to deal more appropriately with the place of nuclear technology in society.

This trend had also come to Japan at least about 10 years before the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Responding to that, the Nuclear Engineering Department of the Graduate School of the University of Tokyo was reformed in 2004, to integrate international, social, and even humanistic factors with conventional science and technology research and education. The new English name of the department was Department of Nuclear Engineering and Management (UTNEM) and its prospectus [ who was well known as one of the most influential advocates of this direction. This laboratory had faculty members who specialized in social scientific fields such as Social Psychology, Communication Studies, Economics, Regulation and Legal System, Risk Studies, Social Studies of Science, and so on, and educated graduate and undergraduate students who worked on research topics closely related to such fields.

However, the integration of humanities and social science aspects was still only partial, strictly speaking. Even after the reformation described above, the group that studied social scientific topics on nuclear technology was somehow separated from the rest of department as conventional engineering research labs were the majority. From the point of view of an observant social scientist, the situation after the 2004 reformation at the UTNEM was just an addition of the social scientific part, appropriately suggested by the prospectus cited above. This addition model was not a totally meaningless change, of course, but it was not sufficient to cope with contemporary difficult issues centering around nuclear utilization in a so-called post-industrial society.

This process of integration seems to require a long-term effort to be accomplished. The Fukushima Daiichi accident clearly exposed the incompleteness of the past efforts at integration, as various chapters of this book discuss in detail; even in 2014, three years after the accident, it seems to be still on going.

The abilities required of leading engineers in this post-industrial era are not just to pursue technological development as prescribed (typically by governmental long-term plans or other national programs), but to grasp multi-dimensional needs for technology, to develop technology in collaboration with different stakeholders under a more open societal process, and to fulfill their social responsibility in compliance with values shared within society.

In 2007, the proposal prepared by UTNEM professors for a brand-new initiative, titled Nuclear Education and Research Initiative (GoNERI),] The UTNEM professors were aware that the faculty and students of UTNEM in many cases did not yet have sufficient command of the fundamentals of the social sciences (their domain, concepts, terminology, methodology, etc.), and that this separated them from social scientific activities even at the time when GoNERI started in 2007 and limited them in collaborating with social scientists and citizens. Consequently, three researchers with different social scientific backgrounds (history of science, risk communication studies, and sociology of science and technology) were invited into GoNERI to pursue this concept, and they began their work to develop an advanced graduate educational program with social scientific literacy.

To this end, in partnership with the Nuclear Engineering Department of the University of California, Berkeley (UCBNE), UTNEM engaged in various efforts. Those included a series of bi-weekly seminars and field work at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), at Carlsbad, New Mexico in January 2009, as well as the Japanese sites of Toyo-Cho and Rokkasho-Mura in July 2008. Of particular importance was a one-day workshop held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, embedded in the field trip to WIPP. Intensive discussions were conducted to clarify the challenges and to explore approaches and solutions toward better integration [ In particular, opening up the decision-making process on socio-technical issues (e.g., introducing participatory methods) calls for more insightful, communicative, and open-minded engineers who can interact with other stakeholders, naturally including ordinary citizens. Engineers should be able to more fully understand various subtle, but critically important, societal contexts regarding technology, explain available technical options to stakeholders and society, and proactively take part in public discussion. In this context, rather than inventing the best solution for problems on behalf of society, engineers are considered to be experts who can offer their formulation of problems, multiple options available to society, and, if possible, proposals of solutions.