Preventing risk and promoting resilience in radiation health

Abstract

Because risk assessment is fundamentally deficient in the face of unknown or unforeseeable events and disasters such as occurred in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, resilience thinking, which focuses on the ability of both natural and human-made systems to prepare for, absorb, and recover from an adverse event and to adapt to new conditions is an important additional consideration in decision making. Radiation contamination is an impediment to most critical functions of a community; resilience planning considers how those critical functions will be maintained in the event that radiation contamination does occur. Therefore, planning should begin with resilience-based thinking and should be complemented with risk assessment-based tools. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2016;12:677-679. Published 2016. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.

Mainstreaming resilience analytics: 10 years after the Fukushima disaster

“…Five years ago, Kurth and Linkov (2016) called for enhancing resilience planning in addition to risk management. But the COVID-19 pandemic has displayed some of the same planning deficiencies, including a lack of imagination for risks and a lack of political will to prepare for system failures and resulting cascades.…”

“…In their 2016 paper, Kurth and Linkov (2016) reflected on two categories of systemic issues revealed by the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011. First, risk assessment techniques are insufficient because they do not capture complexities that can arise due to compounding threats and the potential for cascading failures that could occur in the future.…”

“…The fail‐safe mentality of the managers at Fukushima did not extend beyond the engineering structures (Parks et al, 2011), so when they were breached, there was little to prevent the events that exposed the area to high levels of radioactivity. Kurth and Linkov (2016) argued that engineering overconfidence could be addressed by a greater acceptance that failure can occur despite risk management efforts and should, therefore, be planned for. In practice, this means that managers should continue to evaluate the risks and enact strategies to prevent or mitigate disruptions in a cost‐effective way, but they should also devote resources to preparing for recovery and adaptation following system disruptions like the ones they are striving to avoid.…”