Epistemologies of safety : a comparative study of contemporary French and American reactor design practices

What makes for a safe nuclear power reactor? One of school of thought (that has significant traction within the academic nuclear engineering community) calls for using risk as a surrogate for safety. Safety then becomes a measurable quantity and can be specified in probabilistic terms and treated quantitatively. But do reactor designers in fact conceptualize safety in this way? I probe this question empirically through a comparative study of contemporary French and American reactor design practices. I examine the evolution of national nuclear safety regulators' conceptualizations of safety, industry norms, pedagogical context, the manner in which reactor designers make foundational early-stage design decisions, their use of formal models of risk and local heuristics, and finally their response to crisis (in this case the Fukushima Daiichi accident). I find that designers broadly take two different approaches to the early stages of design.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Verma, Aditi.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Richard K. Lester.

• Nuclear Science and Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/121807

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/121807