The mature versions of the papers presented at the Workshop are included in the proceedings, above. Additional material which does not appear in the proceedings is linked below. On March 11, , the Tohoku earthquake took out the primary power supply for the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant on the east coast of Japan. Less than an hour later, the tsunami caused by the earthquake flooded the plant and the backup generators ceased functioning.
This is called a station blackout. Tertiary power is supplied for a few hours by batteries. An electricity supply is needed in order to keep the cooling systems running; a running reactor or one in cold shutdown requires continual cooling. Thus started the most severe nuclear accident in a quarter century and one of the two most severe ever. From a purely technical point of view, the accident can be characterised by the physical necessity of cooling active and spent nuclear fuel and the difficulty of doing so, caused partly by the inability to do so using foreseen methods and the consequent physical distortions such as core meltdown.
From a broader social point of view, the accident may be characterised by the lack of operational foresight into foreseeable events it is by now uncontroversial that a tsunami event sufficient to top the seawall at Fukushima Dai-ichi was foreseeable , and the extremely severe consequences.
Nuclear accidents are by most measures the most severe peacetime unsafe events. Social questions arise as to how, even whether, nuclear fission power technology can be rendered sufficiently safe; indeed what level of safety is sufficient, why, and how this is decided. The key issues are thus not purely technical. Neither are they purely organisation-theoretical.
The polity plays a role in deciding sufficient safety, at the extremes by giving up the technology, as in Germany and Switzerland, and at the other extreme through public protest, as has been experienced in Japan. At the technical level, the question arises why the clearest and most accessible public statement of the specific hazard which led to the Fukushima accident is to be found on a book by a sociologist of organisations, Charles Perrow, and not, say, in a publically-available Hazard Analysis by the operator or regulator of the accident plant.
