Lessons Learned from Good Practices During the Accident at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Light of Resilience Engineering

The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, which was triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake, has presented significant issues about in which the safety of massive socio-technical systems is structured. We must derive the greatest number of lessons possible from this accident to ensure the safety of systems in the future, but the lessons learned so far have mainly focused on risks and been deduced from an analysis of failures that led to the accident. Meanwhile, with regard to the many actions executed in the field that allowed any “further catastrophe” to be avoided despite such a possibility having been assumed in circumstances where equipment and manuals could not be relied on, there has been almost no analysis, assessment nor lessons gleaned. This paper references the approach of Resilience Engineering which aims to extend successes in a changing environment, and focuses on the actions that prevented “further catastrophe” through an analysis of the Fukushima accident and derives new lessons to improve the capability to handle “unforeseen contingencies.”