Three Nuclear Disasters and a Hurricane: Some Reflections on Engineering Ethics

This paper began with an invitation from Japan a month after the disaster at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant began on March 11, 2011. The paper was to be presented six months later (October 30) —at a conference where I was already scheduled to present a paper on the use of imaginary cases in ethics (Davis, 2012). The disaster was still very much the province of journalism. Its outlines certainly lacked the stability of history. Of course, even history, though it generally seems stable, is not entirely so, being subject to dispute here and there and to radical revision every now and then. At first, Fukushima’s facts changed almost daily —if by “facts ” we mean those descriptive propositions about which there is general agreement. After a while, the changes were less frequent and more a matter of addition than correction. Today, a year after I began work on the paper, the outline of the disaster seems settled. Dispute now concerns only details, such as how much land, if any, will have to be abandoned for some years, how many pre-mature deaths are to be expected because of radiation released during the disaster, and so on. At some point, I had to stop worrying about the facts and report my reflections. I stopped worrying about the facts on October 15, 2011. Since then, I have changed “a fact ” only when a reader or auditor pointed out that it was no longer fact. I am an oddity in science and technology studies (STS) because I focus not on science and technology but on scientists and technologists. Indeed, I do not write about “scientists ” in general or “technologists” in general but about specific professions, for example, chemists or engineers. While most STS scholars see