AESJ Holds Annual Spring Meeting at University of Tokyo: First In-person Meeting in Four Years

During the three days of the Spring Meeting, there were approximately 150 sessions, at which AESJ’s research committees, networks, and others reported the results of their activities and exchanged opinions and views, including discussions with general visitors.

On March 13, the first day of the meeting, a joint session was held of the Research Committee on Social Science Issues related to Nuclear Power, and the Social and Environmental Division, at which participants discussed the issue of damage caused by unfounded fears and rumors. The research committee was established in April 2022 to consider the problem of damage caused by the rumors about nuclear power that had become manifest over the handling of ALPS-treated water^[1]Water purified of radioactive substances other than tritium to levels below the regulatory standards for release to the environment. from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs), and the necessity of utilizing interdisciplinary “collective intelligence” to resolve societal issues.

Presenters at the session were Professor TSUCHIDA Shoji of Kansai University’s Safety Science Department, who served as chair of the session, SATA Tsutomu of JAEA’s PR Division, Professor JURAKU Kohta of Tokyo Denki University’s School of Engineering, and Associate Professor SEKIYA Naoya of the Center for Integrated Disaster Information Research (CIDIR), who gave the keynote address. Recapping their findings up to now, they also had several discussions, including some with general visitors.

CIDIR’s Sekiya has been involved, from the viewpoint of psychosociology, in the issue of damage caused by unfounded fears and rumors ever since the JCO criticality accident of 1999. He divided “uwasa-banashi” (rumors) into groundless rumors, urban legends, gossip, demagogy, stigma (discrimination and prejudice), and panic. Based on analyses of past cases, he defined “fuhyo higai” (damage caused by fears and rumors) as economic damage caused by people who regard “food, products, land, companies and the like, previously considered safe, to now be dangerous, and who avoid purchases or visits.”

According to Sekiya, uwasa-banashi (rumors) tend to spread among people who are keenly interested in or concerned about something, while fuhyo higai (damage caused by fears and rumors) happen with those who have not much interest. He said that the two must be considered separately.

When it comes to damage to marine products—a type of fuhyo higai—he related the cases of the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru, contaminated by radioactive fallout (1954), the radiation accident on the nuclear-powered ship Mutsu (1974), and the leakage of radioactive materials at the Tsuruga-1 NPP (1981). He also explained the history of compensation and actions for damages.

Referring to how people reacted to reference values set for radioactive materials in food in the wake of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi, Sekiya talked about problems related to media reports and product distribution as causes of the damage, and about dealing with them. He said, “We had to squarely confront the reality of invisible physical truth (safety) versus people’s psychological acceptance or rejection.”

In the session for general discussion, regarding product distribution, Tokyo Denki University’s Juraku, who is also engaged in research on the sociological aspects of geological disposal, said, “It was quite difficult to stop people from buying alternative products from other areas, rather than from the affected area.”

Responding to a general visitor who was concerned about fuhyo higai in light of the case of Tokorozawa Dioxin Pollution^[2]In the latter half of the 1990s, reporting by some media led to the misunderstanding that high concentrations of dioxin had been detected, which caused a slump in vegetable prices, primarily in … Continue reading, JAEA’s Sata, who has years of experience dealing with the media in the field of nuclear power, referred to the issue of information diffusion via the Internet. He also pointed out that the scale for assessing safety and danger differs for each person, and that there is underlying distrust in politics.

The annual spring meeting also featured sessions on gender balance in nuclear fields and the role of academia in achieving green transformation (GX).

The fall annual meeting will be held from September 6 to 8 at Nagoya University.