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Short abstract:

In contemporary Japanese nuclear risk governance, including the case of radioactive waste geological disposal, scientism, not participatory process, articulates the epistemic authority. It is a public imaginary shared among heterogeneous stakeholders. We scrutinize the social compact behind it.

Long abstract:

Since the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Disaster in 2011, Japanese nuclear risk governance has experienced transformations. Many believe it is now improved in various aspects, such as independence and transparency of the regulatory body, rigorous technical standards and enforcement, better risk-informed process, and so on.

We identified, however, that those “improvements” have been articulated by strong epistemic authority of scientism, not necessarily by wider stakeholder participation on risk trade-offs. Contrary to the standard theory of STS scholarship, tot only top decision-makers, bureaucrats and technical experts, but citizens, residents and even anti-nuclear activists have often called for “use of the best scientific answers,” instead of opening-up the technocratic policy process.

Because of this public imaginary, human agency has always been alienated, and somehow “automated” decisions based only on the “science” have been advocated, instead. Remarkably, it has also been persistently found in the case of the high-level radioactive waste (HLW) disposal program, which has also been reformed after the Fukushima Disaster and is widely considered to be dealt with by participatory and ethics-conscious decision-making process, due to its intrinsic nature of super long-term uncertainty and ambiguity. In the recent development of the Japanese HLW program, especially on the consequence of early stage survey for the HLW geological disposal site in two municipalities in Hokkaido region, we have witnessed a big adverse current against the movement and scholarship of STS.

In this paper, the authors would critically review the tendency and try to scrutinize the social compact (Jasanoff et al. 2021) behind it.