The socio-technical challenges of nuclear power production and waste management in the post-Fukushima era: editors’ overview

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Ragnar Löfstedt and Jamie Wardman, editors of the Journal of Risk Research, for their encouragement and willingness to facilitate this special issue and all the authors who have contributed to this special issue. Our work on this project was conducted within the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at Delft University of Technology, and at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In addition to thanking these two groups, we also thank the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Ibo van de Poel’s work was funded by an NWO VICI grant on ‘New Technologies as Social Experiments’ (grant number 016-114-625). Behnam Taebi’s work was funded by an NWO VENI grant for ‘Multinational nuclear waste repositories: ethics and acceptability’ (grant number 275-20-040).

Notes

1. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency databases, Japan has only seven reactors that were built in 1975 or before. See http://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=JP (Accessed on 22 September 2014).

2. See the website of the World Nuclear Association: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Others/Emerging-Nuclear-Energy-Countries/ (Update September 2014; Accessed on 17 September 2014).

3. The two authors of this editorial, together with Sabine Roeser are from Delft University.

4. There are a number of other publications that have focused on the socio-ethical issues of nuclear energy, such as a number of commentaries that the journal Ethics, Policy and the Environment published just after the accident (Hale 2011), or a recent special issue of this journal on ‘Nuclear Energy, Law and Decision-making in India’ (Ram Mohan and Babu 2013), and a forthcoming book entitled ‘Reflections on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear accidents’ (Ahn et al. 2015).