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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
Twenty five years on from Chernobyl, the tragic events in Japan of March 2011 seem to reaffirm the ‘risk society’ perspective which the 1986 nuclear accident in the former Soviet Union did so much to popularise. It was amidst widespread predictions of mass harm – projected both across Europe and into the future – that German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s book of the same name found such a receptive audience. Beck wrote of a new era defined by the greater risk posed by ‘manufactured’, technological risk than natural, ‘external’ ones. The way in which the possible, nuclear threat from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant looms larger than the devastation and the thousands actually killed by the ‘natural’ earthquake and tsunami reminds us of Beck's distinction.
1 Beck, Ulrich, The Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage 1992)Google Scholar.
2 Cited in Mike Hanlon, “Why what's happened in Japan should be an endorsement of nuclear power”, Daily Mail, 19 March 2011, available on the Internet at <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1367289/Japan-earthquake-tsunami-Are-right-worry-nuclear-angle.html#ixzz1J1BigJCh>.
3 See, for example, Slovic, Paul (1987), “Perception of Risk”, 236 Science (1987), pp. 280–285 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
4 Pidgeon, Nick, Kasperson, Roger and Slovic, Paul, The Social Amplification of Risk, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 See Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, “Japan authorities attempt to calm fears over nuclear risk”, BBC Online, available on the Internet at <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12749281)>.
7 Experimenting with various search terms, using ‘Fukushima’ turned out to be the best means of identifying articles that prominently concerned events there, whereas using more abstract terms of ‘radiation’ and ‘risk’ tended to massively skew figures towards UK, US and Irish sources.
8 Note that Lexis Nexis can only state ‘more than 3000’ once above that figure, but that similar searches indicate that the figures are not substantially more than this number.
9 A different case – of the volcanic ash cloud in 2010 – illustrates this point. The ash cloud was not amplified by the media given an ‘act of God’ and no clear institutional target. See Burgess, Adam, “Representing emergency risks: Media, Risk and ‘Acts of God’ in the Volcanic Ash Cloud”, in Alemano, Alberto (ed.), The Challenge of Emergency Regulation – Beyond the European Volcanic Ash Crisis (London: Edward Elgar, 2011 forthcoming)Google Scholar.
11 Allison, Wade, Radiation and Reason (York: York Publishing Services 2009)Google Scholar.
12 George Monbiot, “The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all”, The Guardian, 5 April 2011, available on the Internet at <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world?INTCMP=SRCH>.
13 Mark Henderson, “Science matters”, The Times Eureka magazine, 7 April 2011.
14 See his comments in Hanlon, above citation.