Decision-Making in Extreme Situations Following the Fukushima Daiichi Accident

Abstract

The Fukushima Daiichi accident raises questions about current decision-making models. Faced with an overwhelming situation, which threatened both their own lives and that of the entire population, the plant's operators were obliged to take action, despite the lack of resources. In these conditions, decision making cannot be reduced to an optimization exercise based on a range of possibilities, or the application of planned operational responses to an emergency situation. The inevitable catastrophe, the social pressure it generates, the moral dilemmas it creates and the psychological drivers for action are characteristic of an extreme situation. The action plan must therefore be reinvented and individuals mobilised to these ends. It is therefore in a broader context of 'action' that decision making takes shape, and finds its logical foundations, meaning and temporality. Understanding decision making in extreme situations first requires a grasp of the development of a specific value system (that is mediated by the physical experience of the situation) in which the individual and social representations play a central role.