Week 1 - Lecture 2 - Politics and Energy Culture Flashcards
The Iron Triangle
‘Friendly relationship’ between LDP, lobbies to businesses and interest groups & METI
Regulatory capture
A form of corruption by which regulatory agencies may be dominated by the interests they regulate and not by the public interest
Amakudari
Descent from heaven
Groupism
The tendency to think and act as members of a group
Nuclear Village
The institutional and individual pro-nuclear advocats who compromise the utilities, nuclear vendors, bureaucraty, the Diet, financial sector, media and academia. It describes a powerful interest group with a specific agenda, one that it has effectivly and profitably promoted since the 1950s.
The Diet
Japanese parliament
The seven most important actors in the Nuclear Village
- The Diet
- Electric power companies
- METI
- Prefectural governors
- Nuclear plant vendors
- The Atomic Energy Commission
- BIg businesses, lenders and investors
The Grand Stategy Framework
An all-emcompassing concept which guides a country in its effort to combine its instruments of national power in order to shape the international environment and advance specific national security goals. It is generally considered to have three parts:
1. A vision of a desired outcome or set of objectives (ends);
2. Instruments or tools (ways) by which these goals are pursued;
3. The resources (means) available to apply to the effort.
Good grand strategies offer a unifying vision to leaders, policy-makers, and citizens and help them prioritise inevitably scarce resources.
METI
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
NISA
Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency. NISA had been the nuclear regulatory authority operating within METI
Energy Security
The availability of sufficient supplies at affordable prices. Composed of 4 important dimensions:
1. Physical security;
2. Access to energy;
3. Energy security as a system (composed of national policies and international institutions);
4. Longer-term in nature.
Energy independence
Energy self-sufficiency
The IEA
The International Energy Agency
Safety myth
The widespread adoption of the belief that Japan’s nuclear power plants were absolutely safe
Nuclear safety culture
The core values and behaviours resulting from a collective commitment by leaders and individuals to emphasize safety over competing goals to ensure protection of people and the environment
Risk perception
People’s beliefs, attitudes, judgments, and feelings toward risk
Dual process theory
When the emotional and the cognitive aspects of consciousness (or unconsiousness) are held seperatly
Risk as feelings vs. risk as analysis
Risk as feeling is an aspect of risk that gives rise to the subject of risk perception, while risk as analysis gives rise to the subject of risk assessment and managements
Defense-in-Depth
An approach to designing and operating nuclear facilities that prevents and mitigates accidents that release radiation or hazardous materials. The key is creating multiple independent and redundant layers of defense to compensate for potential human and mechanical failures so that no single layer, no matter how robust, is exclusively relied upon. Defense-in-depth includes the use of access controls, physical barriers, redundant and diverse key safety functions, and emergency response measures.
