Challenging epistemic hierarchy: Reincorporating societal risks into nuclear safety goals

Abstract

Despite the absence of observable deaths directly attributable to radiation exposure from the Fukushima disaster, its societal repercussions have been profound. The prevailing nuclear safety framework, focused primarily on radiation dose, fails to fully address the varied and complex realities of nuclear disasters and their societal implications. Drawing on insights from science and technology studies and the study of ignorance, this research examines how nuclear professionals in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan have conceptualized and delimited “societal risks” within the discourse of safety goals. An analysis of these three national contexts reveals that widely accepted practices among nuclear safety practitioners—specifically, the use of mortality risk as a benchmark for risk comparison and envelope thinking in deterministic safety assessments—have contributed to an epistemic hierarchy that systematically marginalizes societal consequences beyond radiation-induced fatalities. To counteract this hierarchy, the study proposes three strategies for integrating societal risks into the formulation of safety goals: broadening the definition of fatalities to include disaster-related deaths, introducing new objectives aimed at safeguarding societal values and functions, and deliberately omitting specific lower-level quantitative goals to trigger a state of chronic unease regarding the imponderable aspects of nuclear risk.