The report comes within a much larger book edited by Richard Hindmarsh focused on the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The book as whole explores social, environmental, and political issues in the aftermath of the incident. It appears to be available at multiple collegiate libraries including Boston College, Williams College, Harvard University, MIT, and Cornell University.
"In the interest of sustainable and socially legitimate solutions, arguably decisions to even the technical responses to disasters should not be left to scientists and engineers alone"
This statement is very thought-provoking and is not exactly expected in a research article - that a scientist's or engineer's decision should be influenced or editied by those without such specific education or expertise.
-balancing point between safety and profitability
-disaster did not happen as a chain of events that made it bound to occur at some point, it happened on a system that was in good shape
-over regulation of the industry and workers results in a lack of flexibility and therefore an inability to be creative in emergency situations
-need emergency response team to be skilled professionally and socially, but on a low budget - and very importantly - cooperation from nuclear corporations
Sonja D. Schmid, Ph.D., works as an assistant professor of STS (science and technology studies) at Virginia Tech. Her expertise includes history of technology, social studies of risk, and energy policy with a concentration on nuclear industry and proliferation. Dr. Schmid appears to have an extensive list of publications following the Fukushima incident, including a book on the development of the Soviet Nuclear industry (MIT 2015).
Emergency response is literally the main focus of the entire article. While it seems to be only a short chapter in a much larger collection of similar essays, the report fully analyzes past and present responses to nuclear emergencies. Moreover, Dr. Schmid builds a case for how future emergencies should be handled by an international team built on expertise. This includes expertise of nuclear energy, disaster response, and nuclear policy/regulation. While she refrains from commenting fully on whether the response mounted for Fukushima can be classified as "good" or "bad", her assertions indicates a need to shift focus from preventing emergencies to how nations respond to nuclear emergencies.
The author states a background in STS studies, futher work with organization, disasters, and sociocultural risk studies.
Many other research papers, articles, books, and sources of research were referencd in the article. The author read and studied a lot of research in various areas and covering all of the topics discussed in this paper, then strengthened ideas and concepts with enough support from hard research to write this article.
Much of the data gathered by Dr. Schmid comes from reports occuring in the aftermath of Fukushima. Additionally, Dr. Schmid appears to use multiple reviews of past nuclear emergencies and protocols. She uses these articles, international statements, policies, and current treaties to build her argument.
"The purpose of this essay is to discuss a truly formidable task, the creation of an international nuclear emergency response team"
This quote sets up the rest of the article by showing the reader, regardless of their background or knowledge, that the creation of such a team is going to be difficult. Beyond the standard challenge of creating a unified emergency response team, it is an international one - therefore with language barriers, geographical differences, and large distances to travel in the case of an emergency. And futhermore, it is a team created to deal with the incertainty of nuclear materials in an emergency situation - even more of a challenge.
The references list for this article shows a wide variety of resources that were used to write the paper. They vary in topics, some directly looking at nuclear energy, others at the risks society takes, regulations, and organizational structures.
"The deputy chief of Russia's nuclear operator, Rosatom's Nikolai Spassky, suggested that international law should force countries operation nuclear plants to abide by international safety standards. This proposal amounts to a recognition of the international character of the nuclear energy industry, but it remains unclear as to who would enforce such rules and how-- as of this writing, no international agency has such powers." Schmid, 199
"What knowledge should nuclear safety be based upon, where the science is still contested? And how useful is the notion of transparency in a context where the operation of nuclear power plants is considered an "inalienable right", as the text of probably today's single most important nuclear treaty states (IAEA 1970)? Nuclear specialists around the world are still discussing the existing emergency response organizations and the reasons they ultimately failed." Schmid, 200
"Anthropologists who have studied nuclear workplaces consistently find that the 'culture of control' (that is, attempts to regulate every last action of the operating staff) is too rigid to account for all imaginable situations." Schmid, 201