Ethics, risk, and safety culture: reflections on Fukushima and beyond

Most of the postmortem investigations and published reports concerning the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident have focused on the design, operation, and regulation of the ‘machine’ itself, i.e. the four nuclear power plants. This paper focuses on an aspect of the accident that has received much less attention: ethics, risk, and safety culture with respect to the individuals and organizations responsible for the design, operation, and regulation of the machines, namely the people. More specifically, this paper discusses the relationship between safety culture and societal culture, and how it may have influenced the accident at Fukushima. The paper argues that when safety culture, which is explicit and is ‘designed’ to fulfill a task in present time, and societal culture, which is implicit and evolves ‘organically’ over millennia, are incongruent with each other, the latter can undermine the former. To rectify this situation, the paper concludes that a cultural risk assessment be carried out to help mitigate this situation in the future.