Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

A transdisciplinary concept, resilience has emerged from monodisciplinary approaches and finds its foundations in various domains such as materials science, ecology, psychology, sociology, ethology, medicine, etc. Although the concept has been a work in progress in the scientific community for several decades, it was only adopted by the safety studies community in the 2000s. The Fukushima Daiichi accident has accelerated its popularity and led to an abundance of theoretical and methodological references, ideas and concepts, processes and approaches that are more-or-less operational.

This chapter examines the concept of loss and damage and how they are used in a political and moral context. It takes as a starting point the nuclear accident of Fukushima Daiichi and the short, medium and long-term consequences for the human and non-human environment. It also identifies some potential elements for the transformation of the disaster into a catastrophe, and how we can develop different forms and scales of resilience.

In this chapter, the fundamentals of nuclear safety that the Fukushima Daiichi accident did and did not change will be discussed. While the most basic strategy of defense-in-depth principle is still valid, some problems have emerged after Fukushima, preparedness for all-hazards and multiple disasters, and importance of the administration of emergency response. From this observation, enhancing the resilience of nuclear systems is a critical issue after Fukushima. The safety enhancement measures considered in nuclear facilities will be reviewed referring to the elementary characteristics of systems resilience, and a new framework will be proposed for dealing with unsafe events, where unsafe events are classified into three categories.

Major nuclear accidents have generated an abundant literature in the social sciences. They are the source of many key concepts that have led to studies of the organization and its links to system safety. Social psychology and sociology have shown that such bodies have their own modes of organization; while resilience engineering has hypothesized that they have the capacity to learn from the past and anticipate potential causes of serious damage. This paper revisits some major contemporary accidents, notably the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, through an analysis of the resilience capacity of systems in terms of the sociology of organizations and especially, social regulation.

This chapter presents a multiscale data fusion method to estimate the spatial distribution of radiation dose rates at regional scale around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. We integrate various types of radiation measurements, such as ground-based hand-held monitors, car-borne surveys, and airborne surveys, all of which have different resolutions, spatial coverage, and accuracy. This method is based on geostatistics to represent spatial heterogeneous structures, and also on Bayesian hierarchical models to integrate multiscale, multitype datasets in a consistent manner. Although this approach is primarily data-driven, it has great flexibility, enabling it to include mechanistic models for representing radiation transport or other complex processes and correlations. As a first demonstration, we show a simple case study in which we integrate two datasets over Fukushima City, Japan: (1) coarse-resolution airborne survey data covering the entire city and (2) high-resolution ground-based car-borne data along major roads. Results show that the method can successfully integrate two datasets in a consistent manner and generate an integrated map of air dose rates over the domain in high resolution. A further advantage of this method is that it can quantify estimation errors and estimate confidence intervals, which are necessary for modeling and for robust policy planning. In addition, evaluating correlations among different datasets provides us with various insights into the characteristics of each dataset, as well as radionuclide transport and distribution. The resulted maps have started being used by local governments to plan the residents’ return, and they are expected to be used for additional policy decisions in the future such as decontamination planning.

Lessons learned from the Fukushima Daiichi NPP accident and challenges for enhancement of the concept of nuclear safety are summarized from the viewpoint of risk management as well as the concept of defense in depth, for the protection against natural hazards, i.e., design against natural hazards and emergency response combined with regional disaster prevention and mitigation. The concept of resilience is also discussed, as a means for refining the fundamental concept of nuclear safety.

This paper discusses the obstacles that hamper robust estimations of the cost of nuclear accidents. From an economic standpoint, risks of accidents are often quantified by the assessment of an expected cost; that is the product of a monetary loss by its probability of occurrence. In the case of nuclear power, this definition is inadapted. Estimating the probability of a nuclear disaster is subject to high uncertainties, and so is the assessment of its monetary equivalent. This paper first discusses the two specific challenges in estimating the probabilities of nuclear accidents: these accidents are too sparse to identify frequencies of occurrence with probabilities; they are also dreadful, which makes risk-aversion a complex phenomenon. This paper then focuses on the assessment of nuclear damage. The large discrepancies exhibited in the existing literature arise from three sources: the scope of the assessments, the conflict between the use of past data or PSA studies in the assessment of radiation damage, and the methods that are used to quantify non-monetary welfare losses.

After Fukushima nuclear accident, alternative energy sources show a dramatic growth such as natural gas, petroleum and solar photovoltaic to compensate the loss of nuclear energy supply in Japan, and in the latest national energy policy, the government plans to promote renewable energy at a scale larger than the one aimed in the previous policy. Hence, the Fukushima accident can be regarded as the tipping point for the country to pursue alternative energy and environmental policy adjusting into the social circumstance after the Fukushima. So far, energy model has been developed to discuss long-term energy scenario in a consistent way and to analyze the effectiveness of energy policy. However, the most of the model developed until now does not explicitly consider the impact of nuclear accident on the long-term pathway of energy portfolio, in spite of the fact that the Fukushima accident is actually observed to dramatically change the situation of energy demand and supply in Japan. This manuscript aims to overview the transition of energy supply and demand in Japan after the Fukushima and to discuss the possibility of considering nuclear accident in energy modeling analysis by applying stochastic dynamic programming.

On March 11th in 2011, a huge earthquake and tsunami struck Japan and caused severe accidents at the Fukushima first nuclear power plant (NPP). The impact and damages of these triple disasters, called “3.11,” continue to this day. There was a diversity of damages and social conditions among devastated areas. This means that this disaster struck so broad area that it brought many kinds of “realities” to different areas. Therefore, we cannot treat the various regions that were affected uniformly. At the same time, the attention given to the 3.11 based on location has ultimately been covered differently between various media sources. The aim of this paper is to share basic descriptions and media analysis of the 3.11 disasters for future discussions. Through our analysis, it is showed that there is a different framing of the 3.11 between national and local media. The difference implicates that it is deprived of social interest in the national newspaper by the NPP accident, and on the other hand, the local newspaper kept their perspectives reflecting damages from the earthquake and tsunami.

The Nuclear Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department and the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, is proposing to create an open web platform that makes high-quality scientific data on energy sources readily available, assembles those data into metrics more suitable to the general public’s knowledge and interest (e.g. impact on the family’s budget or green house gas emission), and visually renders such information in a straightforward manner.