Sébastien Travadel

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.

Decision-Making in Extreme Situations Following the Fukushima Daiichi Accident

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.