American Beef and Nuclear Power Plants: Risk Management of Complex Technological Systems and the Precautionary Principle

Abstract

Man-made disasters, unlike natural disasters such as typhoons, are in principle avoidable. Risk-management in practice however is extremely difficult to do. The difficulty arises not just from the interwoven complexity of technological systems involved, but also from the intrinsic uncertainty of its target, that is the risk itself. I shall examine two cases of risk-management in South Korea, the one related to American beef and the other related tonuclear power plants. The first is a case of dramatically failure, and the other, of continued interactions betweenmultiple interests groups. I shall argue that a successful and democratically justified risk-management of sciencetechnology systems around us should start from their essentially Janus-faced nature. The unpredictability of technological consequences requires us to be even more cautions as regards calculating the ‘expected’ utilities and costs of a complex technological system. The implications of precautionary principle shall also be discussed.