The Shelf Life of a Socio-Technical Disaster: International Response to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Meltdown

• In Event: 378 - Regular Session. Sociology of Science

Abstract

When do socio-technical disasters have policy impacts beyond the national boundaries within which they occur? To gain some leverage on this question, we analyze how countries with significant nuclear energy production responded to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster of March 11, 2011. Of the major world producers, only Japan and Germany shifted their energy policy away from nuclear power following the meltdown. We ask, then, how and when do complex socio-technical disasters trigger policy change outside of their local environment? We begin with a discursive analysis of the major causal attribution frames that accounted for Fukushima within the mass media and by policymakers immediately following the disaster. We find very little consensus in the understanding of what happened at Fukushima, which resulted in a great deal of interpretive flexibility around what to do to prevent another such accident happening within other nations. Next, we provide a case-based comparison of the responses of the United States, France, and Germany in order to identify several key mechanisms that produced a profound policy change within Germany and a status quo response within the other two nations. We conclude with considerations of our empirical analysis for the transnationalization of risk thesis (Beck 1992; 2005; Giddens 1990; 2002).

Author

• Paul Roman Durlak, State University of New York-Buffalo