Based on the lessons learnt from the Fukushima accident, Japanese nuclear industry now strives for the active use of probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) for enhancing nuclear safety and re-establishing public trust. Our research concerns lie with cultivating risk communication which is an integral part of risk-informed decision-making along with the technical development of PRA; that is, how to integrate societal concerns into risk management through sincere dialogue with relevant stakeholders and the public for better risk governance from both technical and democratic standpoints.
According to our preliminary survey, however, not a few industrial PRA practitioners have difficulty in communicating risks with the public. We conjecture that such practitioners’ recognition may be based on the fear that disclosing PRA results with uncertainty could lead to negative societal reactions, considering the past official explanation and public mind on nuclear safety that presuppose deterministic concept of safety.
With these ‘realities’ in mind, we did a series of focus group interviews, including people living around Tokyo with taking into account age, gender and family structure, to explore their perception process of numerical results of PRA for sophisticating future communication practice. The experimental procedure is as follows: 1) developing risk messages including an overview of seismic and tsunami PRA as well as the ways of utilizing its insights for safety improvement, 2) Stratifying these messages according to possible information needs and cognitive information process of receivers, and 3) in the focus group interviews, an expositor who has enough expertise of PRA chooses the right messages among the stratified information with looking carefully at the participants’ reactions.
The results from this study suggest a possible shift of participants’ cognitive process concerning nuclear safety from dichotomous thinking, such as to view things as safe or dangerous, to acknowledging risk and forming their attitude by considering risk profiles. Meanwhile, a few participants showed negative reaction because they recognized the provided messages as a careless imposition of the ways of risk thinking on them.
Our presentation will elaborate a detailed description of the results and insights as well as further research plans for risk communication in a post-Fukushima context.