Franck Guarnieri

Engineering thinking in emergency situations: A new nuclear safety concept.

The lessons learned from the Fukushima Daiichi accident have focused on preventive measures designed to protect nuclear reactors, and crisis management plans. Although there is still no end in sight to the accident that occurred on March 11, 2011, how engineers have handled the aftermath offers new insight into the capacity of organizations to adapt in situations that far exceed the scope of safety standards based on probabilistic risk assessment and on the comprehensive identification of disaster scenarios. Ongoing crises in which conventional resources are lacking, but societal expectations are high, call for “engineering thinking in emergency situations.” This is a new concept that emphasizes adaptability and resilience within organizations—such as the ability to create temporary new organizational structures; to quickly switch from a normal state to an innovative mode; and to integrate a social dimension into engineering activities. In the future, nuclear safety oversight authorities should assess the ability of plant operators to create and implement effective engineering strategies on the fly, and should require that operators demonstrate the capability for resilience in the aftermath of an accident.

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident: Entering into Resilience Faced with an Extreme Situation

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.

Industrial Safety and Utopia: Insights from the Fukushima Daiichi Accident

Feedback from industrial accidents is provided by various state or even international, institutions, and lessons learned can be controversial. However, there has been little research into organizational learning at the international level. This article helps to fill the gap through an in-depth review of official reports of the Fukushima Daiichi accident published shortly after the event. We present a new method to analyze the arguments contained in these voluminous documents. Taking an intertextual perspective, the method focuses on the accident narratives, their rationale, and links between facts, causes, and recommendations. The aim is to evaluate how the findings of the various reports are consistent with (or contradict) institutionalized knowledge, and identify the social representations that underpin them. We find that although the scientific controversy surrounding the results of the various inquiries reflects different ethical perspectives, they are integrated into the same utopian ideal. The involvement of multiple actors in this controversy raises questions about the public construction of epistemic authority, and we highlight the special status given to the International Atomic Energy Agency in this regard.

La mise en récit de la sûreté nucléaire post-Fukushima

«xa0Ce dont on ne peut parler, on doit le passer sous silencexa0» (Wittgenstein, 1922, p. Proposition 7, notre traduction) disait Wittgenstein dans son celebre Tractatus Philosophicus. Il formait l’hypothese d’une isomorphie entre le monde reel et le monde des propositions elementaires par l’intermediaire des images, ouvrant la possibilite d’une elucidation des faits par la logique, en opposition au «xa0mysticismexa0». A l’inverse, nous voudrions ici montrer que le «xa0restexa0» de cette entreprise ratio...