Technology and Culture

In Safe Enough?, Thomas R. Wellock, the official historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), traces the emergence and establishment of the NRC as an independent regulatory body in the United States, from the beginning of commercial nuclear operations until the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster. In this seventy-year-long internal history, we find that today's NRC started as the regulatory division of the Atomic Energy Commission—an organization that had a contradictory mission: to promote and regulate nuclear energy at the same time. The NRC operates in a constellation of pro and anti-nuclear actors and has always had more enemies than friends, Wellock argues—except for a few moments in its history, when it succeeded in reaching a wider consensus on more effective regulations based on insights from decades of research and practice.

Wellock constructs the narrative around the question of how much safety is enough to protect the public, the industry, and the environment. At the heart of this search lies the development and gradual integration of probabilistic risk analysis (PRA) into regulatory practice. Originating from the aerospace industry, PRA provided a potential alternative and then later a complement to the established safety philosophy of "defense in depth." Defense in depth relies on deterministic principles based on imagined [End Page 1285] worst-case accident scenarios that experts consider credible—and on physical protections against these scenarios. PRA follows a quantitative approach that assesses the failure probability of each component of a nuclear plant and then seeks to infer the likelihood of consequential failures. While the high cost of PRA initially made it unattractive for the industry and most NRC experts, its ability to foresee some sociotechnical aspects of the Three Mile Island partial core meltdown promoted it as a second pillar of regulation next to defense in depth, which became known as risk-informed regulation.

Wellock's focus on regulatory principles and practices is key to understanding what nuclear regulation really means. Whereas the NRC appears to be caught in a political triangle between Congress, the industry, and anti-nuclear organizations that caused it several "near death experiences," regulatory principles and practices are here to stay once they prove their usefulness and are accepted by a critical mass of parties involved (p. 130). This body of principles, practices, and regulations tends to grow continuously, which makes enforcing them difficult. Hence, the quest for "enough" safety entails rendering an ever-growing body of knowledge applicable to diverse reactor designs and other regulated activities. As new insights emerge from sometimes catastrophic ignorance, the NRC is there to take the hits from its critics. Wellock suggests that regulatory principles and practices become stronger with each challenge, and that the utility of the NRC should not be assessed by looking at the history of dissent alone, but also at its success as a model for other national and international regulatory agencies.

What may strike readers about the book is Wellock's detachment when recounting NRC's responses to the three major nuclear accidents that occurred since the agency's founding. Whereas Three Mile Island played an important role in establishing PRA as a second pillar of regulation, Chernobyl led to few lessons for the United States. The "beyond design basis" Fukushima accident, which affected an American boiling water reactor like dozens of other reactors in the United States and worldwide, adds three new failure events to consider in risk assessments, but leaves defense in depth and PRA largely unaffected (p. 209–17). Perhaps this capacity to assimilate and continue accounts for NRC's resilience, which ensured its survival over the decades. With the same kind of detachment, Wellock integrates critical voices from the social sciences into his own argument, notably that of Charles Perrow on the "normality" of nuclear accidents and Ulrich Beck and other sociologists who observe how technological risks are transferred to individuals by the organizations that cause them. The nuclear issue is so complex...