[en] Recent years have seen increased attention to the development of new nuclear energy technologies. Advanced nuclear reactor technologies are often claimed to provide an extraordinarily safe source of energy. These claims increasingly draw on the concepts of passive and inherent safety. Safety science research has repeatedly argued that safety is never purely a matter of technology or organization, but rather emerges from their interaction. Consequently, safety science research into the safe development and deployment of nuclear reactors remains much needed. Despite sustained efforts to understand safety in the operation of high-risk systems, we argue that safety science has largely overlooked the design process. The nuclear reactor design process is a case in point. This article addresses this gap by bringing social studies of safety into the domain of technology design. Drawing on insights from science and technology studies, we conceptualize design safety as a “collective and distributed competence.” Based on an ethnographic case study of two reactor development programs at a nuclear research centre, we explore how design safety is enacted in early reactor design. We specifically focus on how the competence to design for safety is developed in and through interactions among heterogeneous actors.
Disciplines :
Political science, public administration & international relations
