This study sheds new light on nuclear risk governance from a sociological perspective by analyzing cases of post-Fukushima controversies on nuclear safety and nuclear emergency preparedness in Japan. By critically analyzing how the three risk-related concepts and methodologies, namely, probabilistic risk assessment, safety goals, and the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, have been interpreted, implemented, and/or abandoned before and after the Fukushima accident, this study identifies three common features that characterize Japan's nuclear risk governance: avoiding critical conflicts, proclivity toward automated decision making, and strategic overlooking of "uncomfortable knowledge." These features all involve ignorance of the dynamic nature of safety where addressing uncertainties, heterogeneous knowledge, and incommensurable values can be key for continuously reviewing the existing edifice of safety. By elucidating why such ignorance persists in Japan despite the postaccidental drastic reform, the authors both articulate the deep-rooted structure that underlies it and reflects the societal and historical context, and eventually conceptualize this ignorance as "structural ignorance" of expertise in nuclear safety controversies and policy processes. The results also provide direction for further research to solve this structural problem.
This is an STS case study of the social decision-making process on the siting of a nuclear power plant in Japan, from the point of view of a sociological case analysis. Energy technologies are critically important for industrial society but often trigger serious disputes through the R&D phase and the phase involving introduction into society. Nuclear power technology especially has provoked a lot of conflicts all over the world. By focusing on serious trust issues among decision-making processes and stakeholders, we found very interesting consequences and/or results of participatory social decision-making process in nuclear issues. As an example, we take up the case of a local referendum in the siting area (Maki-machi town, Niigata prefecture of Japan) and describe and analyze it to highlight the critical sociological factors involved in the application of participatory methods in social decisionmaking processes regarding technological issues. Through this description and analysis, we would like to emphasize the effects of the complicated and subtle structure of local context on the consequence of local decision-making processes. We then propose a concept, "relevant marginal actor," to clarify which actors play critical roles in the whole local decision-making process in which controversial technological issues are framed, and reframed.
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