Classical reports on the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (notably the findings of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, NAIIC) emphasize its "man-made" nature using the language of causes, blame, and institutional failures. In this work, we apply the Phenomenological Reconstruction of Complex Systems PRCS) method to perform an epistemological shift: translating the investigation’s conclusions into the language of dynamic patterns and stable configurational invariants. We show that the accident was not a linear "chain of errors," but a phase transition within a pre-existing field of organizational patterns such as the "regulatory cartel" (R1) and the invariant "reactors will not be stopped" (R6). Through operational markup of the NAIIC’s Executive Summary, we construct a translation dictionary from causal language to pattern centric language. Formalizing the managerial logics of key actors as state tensors 𝑋(𝑙)𝑎𝑘 , we introduce a quantitative measure of the system’s structural risk 𝑅struct ∼ 𝑁eff/𝑑, where 𝑁eff the effective number of distinct managerial ontologies and 𝑑 is the dimensionality of the solution space. Using a mini-example of the management crisis during the decision to vent the containment, we demonstrate a jump in 𝑅struct, corresponding to the system’s transition into "schizophrenic" mode of operation with conflicting management ontologies. This work offers not a new interpretation of Fukushima, but a demonstration platform for the PRCS methodology, showcasing its potential for diagnosing risks in complex safety-critical systems.
Sergey Aleksandrovich Mazein (Thu,) studied this question.