Learning from a Disaster: Improving Nuclear Safety and Security after Fukushima ed. by Edward D. Blandford, Scott D. Sagan

Abstract

Phillip Y. Lipsy, Kenji E. Kushida, and Trevor Incerti (Chapter 7) conclude that in Japan, the largest power companies' nuclear plants were more vulnerable to tsunami and flooding than those of the smaller businesses, implicitly blaming the power industry's regional monopoly system. The social scientists' and engineers' analyses of the Fukushima disaster will give historians precious insight on where they should seek its historical root causes. Besides topics that have been discussed well since the Fukushima nuclear failure, some other issues still remain untouched. Though these may no longer seem to be closely related to the interests in the Fukushima disaster, they can open up new possibilities for historical study of technology in general, which would not have been very obvious to historians but for such contemporary analyses as this book presents.