Citation

Ionescu TB. Technol. Cult. 2021; 62(4): 1285-1287.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Johns Hopkins University Press)

DOI

10.1353/tech.2021.0184

PMID

34690195

Abstract

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...

Language: en