Towards Data Democracy Beyond Fukushima - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 103

Mismatches of safety guidelines as was the case of earthquake/tsunami in US
and Japan can be managed ideally by certain individuals with talents of grasping
critical issues and making proactive actions against such problems. However it
was not the case before complicated and complex engineering products as nuclear
reactors, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor accident happened. We need
to develop a way to overcome this kind of issues about experience-based
design anyway.
The next triple-loop learning involves principles, namely, what is nuclear safety,
why we need to use nuclear energy, how to deal with radioactive wastes, how to
mitigate climate changes and so on. The learning goes beyond scientific insight and
patterns and to holistic contexts of economical, social, cultural, ethical and other
aspects. The result creates a shift in understanding our context or point of view. We
produce new commitments by many stakeholders and ways of learning to see how
to decide what is right. This form of learning challenges us to understand how
problems and solutions are related differently by committing stakeholders, even
when separated widely by individuals in terms of value, time and space. It also
challenges us to understand how our previous actions created the conditions that led
to our current problems. The relationship between organizational structure and
behavior is fundamentally changed because the organization learns how to learn.
The results of this learning includes enhancing ways to comprehend and change our
purpose, developing better understanding of how to respond to our environment,
deepening our comprehension of why we chose to do things we do, and refining our
procedure of why we select a procedure of decisions under uncertainties of each
design issue and differences of committing stakeholders. It is an endless procedure
but we need to repeat “How do we decide what is right? Here's why we want to
be doing this”—principles overcoming differences there. After the Fukushima
Accident, engineering guidelines which had worked at the single loop did not
work at the double loop due to the mismatches of safety design standards revealed
by the 2011 T¯hoku earthquake and tsunami. Radioactive materials released by the
Accident have contaminated the land where many people had been living, and make
the issue into the triple loop “How do we decide nuclear reactors are necessary in
Fukushima? Why do we still want nuclear energy in Japan?” Triple loop learning is
about learning how to learn. It has been carried out by different stakeholders
without explicit definitions of design windows at the triple loop, namely, whether
it is a discussion for the world, Japan, Tokyo, Fukushima or peoples who have been
forced to be evaluated. The relation of the three loops are shown in Fig. 8.2 .
From a viewpoint of engineering product, the single loop learning is applied to
each scientific domain, namely, materials engineering, chemical processing, reactor
physics and so on. Integration of such different domains are dealt with at the double
loop learning to reach a holistic design solution. Public discussions used to be
carried out at the triple loop learning where the single and the double loop learning
included. Ironically we are easily thrown into a panic on accidents, disasters and
crisis even if trained well. Additionally we have a limitation to understand a
complex and complicated product perfectly and holistically in general. Therefore
it is important to design engineering products, safety guidelines, regulations as