Nuclear Safety: A (Charlie) Brownian Notion

SPAIS Working Paper. Hasn't been through review yet, so no holding it against me.

[The full paper is attached here, but if you click on the link and download it from Bristol instead then some web analytics thing will learn you were interested, and that would probably be good for me in some roundabout sort of way.]

Both the legitimacy and governance of nuclear power plants are premised on formal calculations (probabilistic risk assessments) proving that major accidents will not happen. The 2011 meltdowns at Fukushima suggests that these calculations are untrustworthy. Yet the assessment process has retained its legitimacy: the ‘nuclear renaissance’ continues almost unabated, with policymakers invoking the same assessments to rationalize it. This is possible because – as with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl – public accounts of the accident have framed the disaster in ways that ‘redeem’ the legitimacy of nuclear risk assessment as a practice. This paper looks at how. It outlines four basic ‘rites of redemption’: narratives by which accounts distance the failure to predict Fukushima from the credibility of nuclear risk calculations writ-large. It critiques each of these narratives in turn, and argues that they serve to occlude a wider truth about complex technological systems, with perverse consequences regarding public policy.

'737-Cabriolet’: The Limits of Knowledge and the Sociology of Inevitable Failure

The American Journal of Sociology. 117 (3): 725-762

This paper looks at the fateful 1988 fuselage failure of Aloha Airlines Flight 243 to suggest and illustrate a new perspective on the sociology of technological accidents. Drawing on core insights from the sociology of scientific knowledge, it highlights, and then challenges, a fundamental principle underlying our understanding of technological risk: a realist epistemology that tacitly assumes that technological knowledge is objectively knowable and that ‘failures’ always connote ‘errors’ which are, in principle, foreseeable. From here, it suggests a new conceptual tool by proposing a novel category of man-made calamity: the ‘Epistemic Accident’, grounded in a constructivist understanding of knowledge. It concludes by exploring the implications of Epistemic Accidents and a constructivist approach to failure; sketching their relationship to broader issues concerning technology and society, and reexamining conventional ideas about technology, accountability and governance.

On Audits and Airplanes: Redundancy and Reliability-Assessment in High Technologies

in Accounting Organizations and Society

This paper argues that reliability assessments of complex technologies can usefully be construed as ‘audits’ and understood in relation to the literature on audit practices. It looks at a specific calculative tool -- redundancy -- and explores its role in the assessments of new airframes by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). It explains the importance of redundancy to both design and assessment practices in aviation, but contests redundancy’s ability to accurately translate between them. It suggests that FAA reliability assessments serve a useful regulatory purpose by couching the qualitative work of engineers and regulators in an idiom of calculative objectivity, but cautions that this comes with potentially perverse consequences. For, like many audit practices, reliability calculations are constitutive of their subjects, and their construal of redundancy shapes both airplanes and aviation praxis.

When the Chick Hits the Fan: Representativeness and Reproducibility in Technological Tests

Downer, John 2007 ‘When the Chick Hits the Fan: Representativeness and Reproducibility in Technological Testing’, Social Studies of Science 37 (1): 7-26.

Before a new turbojet engine design is approved, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) must assure themselves that, among many other things, the engine can safely ingest birds. They do this by mandating a series of well-defined - if somewhat Pythonesque - ‘birdstrike tests’ through which the manufacturers can demonstrate the integrity of their engines. In principle, the tests are straightforward: engineers run an engine at high speed, launch birds into it, and watch to see if it explodes. In practice, the tests rest on a complex and contentious logic. In this paper I explore the debate that surrounds these tests, using it to illustrate the now-familiar idea that technological tests - like scientific experiments - unavoidably contain irreducible ambiguities that require judgments to bridge, and to show that these judgments can have real consequences. Having established this, I then explore how the FAA reconciles the unavoidable ambiguities with its need to determine, with a high degree of certainty, that the engines will be as safe as Congress requires. I argue that this reconciliation requires a careful balance between the opposing virtues of reproducibility and representativeness - and that this balance differs significantly from that in most scientific experiments, and from the common perception of what it ought to be.

Risk-Based Policymaking and the Institutional Modulation of Risk

Co-authored with Henry Rothstein.
Forthcoming in Public Administration.

Risk-based policymaking is a form of reflexive policymaking that uses risk analysis to address both the primary objects of policy interventions and their secondary adverse consequences. As such, it has become central to debates about efficiency, control and accountability in UK government. To better understand the factors shaping its emergence, this article studies the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) adoption of risk-based policymaking. In-depth interviews with Defra staff suggest that risk-based policymaking serves conflicting objectives and struggles to perform its ostensive functions. The article concludes that: First, risk understandings can be organizationally filtered in ways that reinforce rather than challenge entrenched policy practices; Second, using risk-based policymaking for audit purposes can undermine policymaking reflexivity; Third, the value of risk ideas in reconciling competing accountability and blame-avoidance pressures leads to risk ‘colonizing’ increasing dimensions of policymaking.

Trust and technology: the social foundations of aviation regulation

Downer, J. (2010) “Trust and Technology: The Social Foundations of Aviation Regulation” in British Journal of Sociology. 61 (1): 87-110

This paper looks at the dilemmas posed by ‘expertise’ in high-technology regulation by examining the US Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) ‘type-certification’ process, through which they evaluate new designs of civil aircraft. It observes that the FAA delegate a large amount of this work to the manufacturers themselves, and discusses why they do this by invoking arguments from the sociology of science and technology. It suggests that – contrary to popular portrayal – regulators of high technologies face an inevitable epistemic barrier when making technological assessments, which forces them to delegate technical questions to people with more tacit knowledge, and hence to ‘regulate’ at a distance by evaluating ‘trust’ rather than ‘technology’. It then unravels some of the implications of this and its relation to our theories of regulation and ‘regulatory capture’.

The Burden of Proof: Regulating Reliability In Civil Aviation

My PhD Thesis.
Available from Cornell's library through interlibrary loan.

Anatomy of a Disaster: Why Some Accidents Are Unavoidable

Early draft of what became the AJS paper.

Casually brutalizes the definition of 'Finitism', for which I apologize to the Strong Programme.

Easily available online but you're much better off with the AJS version.

Risk in Policy-making

A report for Defra, Co-authored with Henry Rothstein.

Epistemological Chicken

Quick thing I wrote for Cabinet magazine (Issue 34, 2009: pp. 100-103) after the "Hudson Miracle".