The criticality accident that occurred on September 30, 1999 at a uranium processing plant in Tokai-mura was an unprecedented nuclear accident in Japan, not only because it caused deaths of two workers due to radiation casualty but also because it called for evacuation and sheltering indoors to nearby residents. The accident was not directly caused by failures or malfunctions of hardware but by workers' unsafe action deviated from the approved procedure. It was a typical organizational accident in that several organizational factors worked behind. This article is to analyze various causal factors that lead to the accident, including situational factors of workers' unsafe action that triggered the accident, operational and business management of the company, and nuclear safety regulation by the government. It also discusses problems of emergency response after the accident.
An action research project called dialogue forum has been conducted in this study. The essential constituent of the project is a series of repetitive dialogue sessions carried out by lay citizens, nuclear experts, and a facilitator. One important feature of the project is that the study has been conducted based on the qualitative research methodology. The changes in opinions and attitude of the dialogue participants have been analyzed by an ethno-methodological approach. The observations are summarized as follows. The opinions of the citizen participants showed a signiˆcant shift from emotional to practical representations along with the progression of the dialogue sessions. Meanwhile, their attitude showed a marked tendency from problem-statement-oriented to problem-solving-oriented representation. On the other hand, the statements of the expert participants showed a signiˆcant shift from expert-based to citizen-based risk recognition and description, and their attitude showed a clear tendency from teaching-oriented to colearning-oriented thinking. These changes of opinions and attitude have been interpreted as a coevolving rather than a single process. It can be stressed that this type of change is most important for the reestablishment of mutual trust between the citizens and the nuclear experts. In this regard``The Process Model of Coevolution of Risk Recognition'' has been proposed as a guideline for developing a new scheme of public communication concerning nuclear technology. The proposed process model of coevolution of risk recognition is regarded to be essential for appropriate relationship management between nuclear technology and society in the near future.
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